Personal Narrative: Entering Survival Mode '

Entering Survival Mode

My mom prioritized my education. I now find this very admirable, that a woman so young who barely graduated high school and married a mechanic found it to be essential their daughter should be reading, calculating multiplication and square roots, and helping to change oil all before entering kindergarten. Upon entering school, my parents were told I would be held back due to being anti-social. I don’t remember being anti-social; I just remember reading all the time because I was done with my work and I was taught not to disrupt others. I was not held back that year; the school later asked my parents to allow me to skip the second and fourth grades due to my achievement level. They refused and convinced me being

I went to school and worked diligently to keep my grades up so my parents wouldn’t need to worry about my future. My father’s health declined. He became explosively angry, lost part of his hearing, speech, and sense of touch and couldn’t remember everyday things. I remember being yelled at when we were working on the old blue Chevy truck together and I put a wrench in his left hand. He thought I was being slow to get it from the toolbox, but he couldn’t feel it resting in his palm. When things became increasingly serious with my father’s situation, my mother informed the school and I strongly remember their support in and out of the classroom from my peers and teachers. I missed the last two weeks of school due to my father’s death. I was 10 and my mother was 29. The school sent flowers and froze my grades.

That summer was particularly difficult as I moved to transition from elementary into middle school. Other than my father just dying, my grandparents took the tragedy especially hard and began accusing my mother of murder. This is insane, undeniably, but grief is a very powerful force. During the two months of summer, they broke into our home, stole photos of him and the big red Snap-on cart with all his mechanic’s tools. That summer was the last time I saw his side of the family or my three older half-sisters until I was over 30 years

The details are vague, but the outcome was memorable. A student had said something to displease the instructor, thought I don’t recall any loud incident, and he picked up a textbook and threw it at her head. She quickly moved and the book missed her.

This was the first time I ever saw a teacher physically try to abuse a student. I had never really seen a teacher who didn’t care about his or her students’ well being. I stood up and yelled at the teacher about his behavior because I was so taken aback. I remember being filled with rage for a student being treated so poorly by a teacher, who coincidentally, was dating the student’s mother at the