Perfect Home

My essay is about the struggles people face with coming to a new country that they may nothing about. It talks about the financial struggles that occur, the emotional problems one may encounter with that financial conflict and speaks of the things left behind who migrate to a different country than their own. I enjoyed being able to tell a story of all of this from my point of view, although it was a bit difficult to have my life written down on paper in as few as 5 pages because all those years felt like they were much more than that. It took me some time to be able to put my feelings  and the process of how my life rolled out on paper because i wasn't sure of how to express everything that had occurred. I wasn’t sure of how to make a sentence or a paragraph about my whole life just my summarizing all of it. It was also difficult to decide what parts of my story were more significant than the rest. While this may have been, I chose to speak of the few things that mattered most. More importantly i decided t speak of the financial struggles we had to go threw and how we managed to get out of them. Yes our story isn't the fairy tale everyone would like to have but to me this story is of all the hardship that we eventually overcame together as a family. As far as the title that was the hardest part to figure out. I wanted it to be something that stood out and didn’t have much to do with the struggles we had. I chose “Perfect Home” not because our home was that, “perfect” but because there really is no such thing is that. Each individual has their own view on what that may be and my own home would definitely not be the white outline of that. While that may be, to me it was a “perfect home” because of it i am the person standing here before you today. It made me mature earlier than others mentally so that further in life I would already be prepared for what life decided to throw at me.

Laura Martinez

Professor Chessman

Lyric Essay

February 6, 2018

Perfect Home

        Can you still remember the first roller coaster you were on? The excitement mixed with fright that you felt just by standing in line as it slowly started moving. The rush you felt as you went through every hill, through every loop, through every little bump in the ride. The loss of balance you had when you were finally able to step off. Life as you know is just like that rollercoaster that you couldn't wait to get on, with the endless ups and downs until you could once again regain your balance at the end.

Visualize yourself in a country where you don’t know anything about anything. That when someone attempts to talk to you in a foreign language you can’t help spacing out to where their words go right over your head. In 2005 my family was brought to a country we knew nothing about, besides the fact that it wasn’t ours. We only knew the home to which we were brought to, the family we were thrown into, a family from which i didn’t recognize more than 5 faces at most. We managed to make our lives in this country that was now “ours” by moving from house to house alongside my aunt, until we came to have our own house. It wasn’t huge, it was just a townhouse, but it was the first time in 11 years that I had a room of my own in a home where only my mom, step dad, sister, and newborn brother lived. Since it was just us, my mom and stepdad were always working since they both had minimum wage jobs and had to work almost daily in order for us to live in a luxurious townhome that was located in a nice neighborhood. Due to this, my older sister Itzel who was no more than 17 at the time was left to care for me and my brother Aiden. We didn’t know much about caring for an infant, we were still children ourselves, forced to grow up fast in order to provide the support our mother needed. I didn’t know any other way of life besides the one I had, i was proud of my little family, we had come so far in just 4 years. I didn’t come to the realization that the way things were around my house wasn’t how the life’s of my friends were until i was around 13, they had a stay at home parent or a babysitter who was 26 or older to care for them, most of them lived in houses that at the time looked like mansions to me. They also had parents who were lawyers, nurses, or even teachers, while I had a mom who since we came to this country worked in a fast food industry. At the time I was young and didn’t understand the difference between my mom and their parents so  I would go around telling everyone where my mom worked without a care in the world.

In his essay “Working at Wendy’s”, Joey Franklin talks of how while he was growing up his father obtained a job delivering pizzas. He speaks of how he would brag to his friends “about the prospect of free pizza” just because of where his father worked. Then he’d later find himself regretting and wishing that he “hadn’t told them anything” about his father’s job. He jumped to the conclusion that people would look at him differently because of his father occupation, because it wasn’t viewed as being an actual profession, but instead looked at as a last resort. A place where people who didn’t “make it” in the real world or who didn’t go to college ended up in. He even speaks of how as he now works at Wendy’s, a man thinks he looks “ like another wasted life, another victim” he believes Franklin is someone who got his girlfriend pregnant who didn’t graduate high school and had not other option besides flipping burgers at 2 in the morning. The man even feels sorry for Franklin’s kids because of the uneducated father he thinks Joey is.

Is it that much different having to hear something like this about yourself versus it being told to your child? It didn’t take more than a minute for just one kids statement to turn my pride of talking about my mom’s job into embarrassment of where she worked. A classmate spoke of how she had gone home and mentioned the free food i had told her about about to her mom who in response stated something along the lines of “her mother must of never gotten an education if she’s working at a place high schoolers work.” After hearing that, I no longer spoke of where my mom worked, I didn’t bring up the free food, I even started to lie and say my mom worked anywhere else besides a fast food restaurant. I remember even having a day at school where our parents could come in and talk about their jobs, all the parents came except mine. Not because my mom couldn't make it, she always did her best to be there for us in school and out, she didn’t go because i preferred to not have a parent than to have another kid say something to my mom about where she worked. It didn’t take me long to get over this phase of embarrassment over my mom, me and my sister were close so not long after “Parents Day” i told her about how I felt and about what someone had said, she in response stated “Mom has worked very hard to get to where we are. Yes our situation isn’t ideal and mom’s job isn’t something you dream of but she’s trying her best with what has been available to her. Just remember to appreciate the fact that mom tries to be there for us no matter how hard the situation.” After this, I never again was embarrassed of where she worked because while she didnt have a fancy job, she provided for us what we needed; support, shelter, and food just as Franklin did for his family. In his essay he states “There is food in the fridge, and I have a job that pays an honest wage” just as my mom would say “Quizás no somos ricos, pero tenemos comida en nuestra mesa, gracias a el trabajo honesto que tengo yo” which translates to “Maybe we are not rich, but we have food on our table, thanks to the honest job that I have.”