Personal Narrative: Single Parent Home

I have experienced numerous changes in my life within the last several years. During my earlier teen years, my daily life was one filled with sadness. Believing much of my unhappiness was attributed to being the oldest of three children in a single parent home and having an expectation that I should readily embrace responsibility of care for my siblings made me quite despondent. Unhappy with my circumstances made me become somewhat rebellious towards those people directly linked to my personal and home life. I inherited this responsibility by way of my father’s absence from the family home.
Notably, while little more than a toddler, my Father permitted a negative pull of the “streets” pressure him into a number of profound mistakes. The mistakes resulted in my Father being incarcerated, where he remains even today. Prior to this life altering incident, I was a content, yet a coy child enjoying a home with two loving parents. My Father’s criminal activities quickly distorted both me and my home life. Accordingly, now the child of an incarcerated parent, society saddled me with a new identity. Now deemed to be “just another statistic”, a young black male being reared by a single parent, and therefore destine not amount to anything. The loss of my father to the criminal justice system was not just difficult but a life-altering event; statistic or not, I experienced first-hand, the adverse impact it is for a child to be raised

My own father, brought about a feeling of guilt. Surely, I must have played a part in this? It was an intensely tough situation, but my losing my father to the prison system became a teaching and learning experience for us both. Ultimately, upon acquiring a comprehensive understanding of his situation, I became truly heartbroken and despaired that things would never