It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized exactly how hard-working my mom was raising me and my brother by herself. My parents have been divorced since I was a toddler, so I have no memory of anything else and the separation doesn't bother me at all. I lived with my mom and saw my dad every other weekend. He moves around quite a lot between nearby and 300 miles away in Southern California, so he would either drive up or my brother and I would fly down. We kept track how many times we flew until the numbers were well over 200 and I was probably 8 years old.
My mom put herself through college without any help from her parents while I was in elementary school, and she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Kinesiology with the hopes of becoming a physical therapist. Unfortunately, the training program for physical therapy is very competitive and despite her 4.0 GPA she could not get in and could not use her degree for any of her following jobs. She would work early and work late, having to drop us off at our friends' homes so their parents could watch us until we could go to school or back home, and she could never participate in the weekly carpools herself. In the summertime, she bought a season pass for each of us for a water park and we would stay there all day while she was at work/school. This was completely fine because we were great swimmers, there were lifeguards, it was really fun, and she wouldn't have been able to afford a babysitter.
My mom hasn't had very good luck in her lifetime. Unsupported by her own family, every choice she has ever made was to help me and my brother lead better lives than her own. She lost her jobs for various reasons, and never for incompetence. She was just very unlucky. She was a substitute middle school teacher for a while until she trained to become an appraiser. For some time, she managed to earn a large salary and even earned an award and spa vacation for being such a highly efficient worker in the company, but was laid off when the economy tanked in 2008 and caused all home values to plummet.
Then she trained to become a nuclear medicine technologist and held that job for a bit before she was in a bike accident and broke her arm and hip. She was afraid she would lose her job for not being able to work, but lost it instead during that time most likely because she was a whistle blower. She has since been unable to find a job because the place she worked at refused to promote her as the fantastic worker she is. She is overqualified for average jobs and would have to go back into training for new jobs at her education level. No one will accept her for anything. The system sucks. Meanwhile her broken hip turned into a hip replacement, and then she later suffered from appendicitis and a lengthy and stressful divorce from my step dad of 10 years. It's like anything bad that could happen did happen.
Before she lost everything, she managed to help me climb out of the trouble I would have been in if she couldn't have encouraged me through my educational career. Since I was two years ahead in mathematics through middle school and high school, my mom asked our local state university if they would accept me with what units I did have along with taking the Proficiency Exam. They accepted, so instead of moving on to my junior year in high school, I became a freshman in college. It took me 5.5 years to graduate from college, since I was working part-time throughout and it sometimes delayed my progression through earning my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics. I ended up saving just enough to support myself through a year of dosimetry school in Texas before landing a job back home (somehow) and a spot in the high tax bracket.
Now I can take care of my mom for taking care of me. Which is great, like the American Dream, like it really is possible to dig yourself out. But I wouldn't have been able to if I didn't have any help, at least not that young and naive. I wouldn't have had the wisdom or the ambition or the intuition on my own. My mom's the one who suggested I look into dosimetry in the first place. It makes me very sad to think of the millions of people who are stuck where they are because they can't get the help or opportunities I did. I am so very thankful for her. I feel like all the luck she could have had went to me instead.
The issue now though is that, having lost everything, she kind of broke. I'm all she really has left (my brother lives out of town), and I've been forced to move back in with her because she can't afford to live by herself and she doesn't want to move. She's become very difficult to live with and I feel very stuck. I think that's why I wrote all of this up, to remind myself of all that she has done for me so that, even though all I really want to do is move out, I can push myself on to keep supporting her. I'm just afraid that I might become unhappy in the process.
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