Narrative Essay On Homeless Kids

When I was a kid, my parents were generally strict about who I was allowed to stay with. This has always baffled me in a way I was never able to understand. Occasionally, they would allow me the chance to stay with a friend but only because my parents were acquainted with theirs and, even then, they still questioned it. After hours of begging and pleading with them, I would finally be allowed the chance to leave my house and it never felt so good to have that opportunity. Although they allowed it, I was still on what I would say was a “tight leash”, and I would get the occasional call from my parents to check up on me and see how I was doing.
I still question why it was so difficult for my parents to trust me. As I look back on it, I wonder if it may have been to protect me, the long years that my parents had to deal with my brother, or even the years my parents spent raising foster kids and watching them repeatedly make bad choices causing theirs and my parents lives to be much more difficult. The kids that my parents have kept over a few years have had very troubling and difficult lives. The kinds of kids they kept ranged from homeless children that were taken from their parents to kids that had been sexually abused by their own parents. With some of the most unfortunate things that have happened to a few

of these kids, this may have contributed to their poor decision making. Even with my parents helping them every second of every day, it was still too little to make a difference to change their attitudes for the better. My parents have always been the kindest, caring, and most truthful people I know. They have always been straightforward with me about the things I have been told about this very short period in their life.
When I had reached the age of sixteen, the way I had been acting would most definitely had surprised my parents, coaches, and many of my teachers. With only a few knowing at the time, I had become something my parents had feared of me becoming. I had been spending quite a bit of my time with a group of people that really weren’t the best influence on me and this was just the beginning of a very regretful couple of months I have ever had.
Being free from my parents to do as I please was a dream I had at one time. Once I had my license and I was able to drive myself around, my parents surprisingly had begun to put some trust in my hands. They allowed me to do things they had never allowed me to do before such as staying with my friends or being out a little late at night. Although it may seem like something simple and innocent at first, it then started to become something much more.
Going to parties was never something I had thought about doing.

I had only heard about partying from a few friends that I had and they encouraged me to do as they done and join them for a night, and so I did. I’ll never forget that night. The first drink I took, I thought it was the most disgusting thing I had ever tasted, but I didn’t want my friends to think badly about me, so I kept drinking. Although I thought it was the fun and cool thing to do at the time, I still questioned whether or not this was a good idea for me to participate in an activity such as this. I pushed that thought to the back of my head not only on that night, but on other nights as

well.
The partying continued for months and it continued to go farther than drinking, but to smoking marijuana along with this as well. I never really saw anything wrong with it because of some benefits it has, so I continued to do it. Although a few of my friends tried to help me and talk to me about stopping the partying, I ignored them and their reasoning and I refused to let them help me or talk me out of doing it. I saw nothing wrong with what I was doing and tried to use the excuse that I was just a teenager. Then again, I only wanted to have fun.
It was then that the drinking and smoking started to affect me in ways that I never paid much attention to. I was beginning to get behind in my schoolwork and it was even harder to concentrate in my classes. I started to drift away from the only good friends that I had. I was beginning to lose focus on the love of my life and many other important things. I felt lost, but it didn’t stop there.
I was beginning to encounter the consequences I never believed would happen to me. A morning after a party I had went to, I had two missed calls on my phone from my parents. My immediate response was to call them back so I wouldn’t get in trouble, but as I was calling them I had this nervous feeling in my stomach as if they had known about what I done the night before and I was right about my assumption. Not only did my parents know, but my coaches knew as well.
The following couple of weeks were the hardest and roughest I had experienced. I was in trouble with mostly my parents, but my coaches were still upset about what they had heard. At this point, I was scared and didn’t know what to do. I had been living a false life and only cared about myself. My whole world came crashing down on top of me. I had never been involved in such a thing as this. I had always made high grades in all my classes and I had never been in this amount of trouble.
Was it all worth it? The pain I had caused myself and others had caused me to ask this question day after day. I told myself that I was only wanting to have fun, but as I sat there trying to reflect back to when I lost myself and where went wrong, I had only just realized I made one of the single greatest mistakes of my life and I needed to change myself. Day by day, I began to fit the broken pieces of my puzzle back together again. Even as I still have trouble with my past and question it, I am now able to say that with time and choosing the best people to have in my life, I’ve made myself a better person for me, my family, and the few friends that I have now.