My parents had three kids by the time that they were 23 years old. This put a lot of emotional, mental, physical, and financial strain on them. They had no idea how to be parents, or even adults for that matter.
Throughout my childhood, Mom went from working at the Wal-Mart (pre-supercenter) to joining a large amount of my family and friends at Roper, a GE plant that builds stoves. She eventually left the mill sometime in my early teens to try going back to school for a teaching degree, and even became a substitute teacher for a while, before financial troubles caused her to go back. It wasn’t until recently that she went to work at a Wal-Mart a county away for better hours and pay. She originally wanted to be a nurse in the Air Force, but a shady recruiter caused her to second guess herself and decide against it.
Dad worked at the Denim Mill that our town was built around in the mid-1800’s, along with another large portion of our family and friends. It was, and still is, a horrible place to work due to near constant fires, backbreaking labor, low pay, roaches and rats locally referred to as “thousand year rats/roaches” due to their enormous size, and an unhealthy amount of nepotism, insuring that unless you have the right last name, you aren’t moving up in the ranks. Dad eventually escaped and went to Roper with Mom, with his own short attempt at business management school mixed in, and now works at a Volkswagen Plant while attending Kennesaw State University. He grew up wanting to go to Berklee in Boston for a music production degree before I came along.
My parents had their own ideas of what their American Dream was. Ideas that drastically changed once I was in the picture. In-between my conception and my youngest sister moving out, their revised dream was to create the best opportunities possible for the three of us kids, no matter what they had to go through. I’m forever grateful for their sacrifices, and I hope that now that they don’t have to worry about us, they can spend the rest of their time on this earth making their own dreams come true.
