About Me:
I’ve been called a lot of things over the past year. Yes, I am a single mother. Yes, I am a college student. Yes, I am that waitress who brought out your steak dinners and scrubbed down the table when you left. (How was that $60 bottle of wine?)
But there are a few labels floating around that do not qualify. I am not selfish for taking my 5-month old son away from family to finish school. I am not a soap box rallier dramatizing this situation.
I’m twenty-two years old with a baby, about 500 miles from family and support systems, tens of thousands of dollars from becoming a lawyer, weeks away from paying bills and rent. I’m a mother with a million ways to fail, or fall behind, or not quite make it, but only one way to succeed. After all, if I cannot reach the stars, there should be several branches I might grasp onto on the way back down to earth. I’ll still be closer than if I hadn’t leaped at all.
I am doing this because I don’t know what else to do. I believe getting the best education I can get is best for my son — even if it means being away from my circle of free caregivers. I believe I should still continue to become the lawyer I’ve always dreamed of being — even though I “mistakenly” got pregnant. I believe I’m still giving my son everything I have to offer.
I know this life won’t be glamorous. I’m not even sure it will all work out.
I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid of the numbers on my student loan applications. I get out of bed each morning (and several times throughout the night) knowing only that to stop is to surrender, and I cannot do that. I cannot surrender my five-month-old angel to a life bound by the socio-economic restrictions of a career-waitress mother and a factory-working father. As hard as each of us, or either of us, or even in a best case scenario, both of us work together for him. . . this economy just is not gracious to either.
The following contains explicit content-honesty, grueling truths-about the real life of a single, working, college-student Mom.
