Have you ever woken up and found your life changing before your eyes? Moving from New York to Georgia was probably one of my biggest struggles to this day. It all happened so suddenly and for a long time I had a lot of anger built up towards my mother for deciding to pick us up and drop us off in a totally different environment and culture. As time passed and I got older, I slowly began to understand more and more. Maybe moving down there was the best thing for us at that time, maybe it was the best thing for me. Throughout this essay, I will take you on a trip down memory lane, and hopefully show you a slight view of my life and the struggles that came with it early on. Struggles including, the questions I had formed over the move, life before the move, the different hotels that housed us then eventually our permanent home.
This small town in Georgia was going to be my new home and the only things I knew about the place was its name, how hot it was, and the fact that most of my family lived there. It wasn’t something I was used to at all. When I was younger my grandmother and I used to take trips down there, and I like it, but it just wasn’t home. We all know the feeling of home, and I didn’t have an ounce of that feeling in my body. I was always ready to leave and return back to New York. It was too hot, there wasn’t anything to do but run around outside, and sadly the people were too friendly. I know the last part sounds strange, but partially growing up in New York molds you differently. It’s not like Augusta. I learned that the hard way. You can’t walk down the street here and smile and speak to people without having someone think you’re either insane or trying to con them out of their money. That’s why to this day, I appreciate and claim that I was raised in my small town, Augusta Georgia. It made me the person I am today.
I moved down to Augusta at the age of nine. Life as I knew it was pretty simple as far as I could tell. I took karate lessons, learned how to swim, and played many sports. It was the good life for me, but it wasn’t for my mother. She did her best to hide and protect me from certain things. I guess she figured that I was too young to know everything. We moved because the price of living in New York was too demanding and moving down south was cheaper and eventually will be better for us.
Well that wasn’t something I knew when we moved. From my perspective, everything was different. We went from having our own apartment in which I had my own room to my mother and I basically sleeping in one of our cousin’s living room. I slept on the floor, which wasn’t the best. I hated it. I hated everything. As a couple of weeks passed by, my mother and cousin got into a disagreement, and she basically kicked us out.
We spent the good part of a month or two jumping from hotel to hotel, until this nice lady from church decided to help us and take us in. During that time, everything was weird. And by weird I mean totally foreign for me. My mother walked me to school every morning, luckily the school wasn’t too far from the house. So the walk wasn’t that bad. Then after that, she’d pick me up, and we’d have to spend the rest of the night in church. That wasn’t something I was used to doing, spending basically every night or so in church. I was around eleven or twelve, I didn’t want to be there, but I figured that this nice lady was doing us a favor so the least we could do was do this for her, and who knows, maybe all this church stuff would actually work out. We were never heavy church goers before that, it seemed like the only time we seen the inside of a church was at a funeral.
All the praying we did, all the praying my mom did, we were hoping it would pay off for us. It wasn’t that bad now that I look back on it. It was definitely better than living in a hotel and having to hear the pain in my mother’s voice and see it on her face. Anything was better than that. At least now she had more faith and had good people around her to lift her spirts and just to let her know that everything would be alright.
As a couple of weeks passed by, my mom found a job working at this hotel bar. We moved in with another one of our cousins and finally everything seemed on the up and up. The apartment we all lived in wasn’t that much, as a matter of fact it was only a two bedroom and it was a total seven of us. We struggled, my cousin didn’t have a job and didn’t have a steady source of income and my mother was working extremely hard, trying to save enough for our own apartment plus give my cousin money from time to time. As bad as that might sound and as bad as I wanted to complain, I just couldn’t. I learned a lot during that time and got much closer to my family. I learned that it wasn’t just me struggling and having a bad time, it was all of us, including my family and most of the families in the project.
Everyone there basically lived off of government assistance and didn’t have a real source of income. Some nights we would go to sleep without eating anything, and when we did it was either ramen noodles or church’s chicken. As I look back on it now, I know it’s something that I will never forget. I remember this time when one of my cousins tried to make me cook hamburgers, be mindful that this was my first legit time cooking. I had no clue what to do. So being the inexperienced idiot I was, I grabbed a big butcher knife and tried to separate the frozen patties by sticking the knife through them. Turns out that doing that wasn’t the right move, the knife went through the frozen patties and halfway into the palm of my hand. All I can remember is seeing the blood on the counter and running around the house. Even though that memory was painful, it is something I will never forget.
My cousins are the family that I would literally do anything for. I would give my last dollar to them, without any hesitation or thought whatsoever. As a couple of months passed by, my mom and I handed on our feet and found our own place. Things were finally back to normal and slowly starting to get better and better. As I entered my seventh grade in middle school, we moved to the same project as my cousin and her family and everything equaled out for me and my mother.
My experience wasn’t always the best, but it’s my experience. I can say that I did these things and that I know about some stuff other people might not know about. Some people didn’t grow up in the ghetto. Some people will never know the effort of striving for something better for you and your family and struggling until you finally get what you want. Hopefully you get a peek into my world as I intended you to. I hope you gain some insight of what it’s like and understand a little better of those difficult challenges.