Family Taught Me, I Encountered

¶ … family taught me, I encountered some difficulties. I am fortunate to have a supportive family that tried its best to give me the skills that I need in life, and I attribute much of my success to what I have learned from them. However, thinking about this assignment, I realize that we learn from people in all different situations, and my most important life lesson was one that I received inadvertently from a casual acquaintance. She taught me not to bluff.

The young woman's name was Adriana. I know that she was 19, pregnant, homeless, and a high-school drop-out when she came to live with my family. I also know that she was a friend of the family before she came to live with us, though I am still a little unclear about the relationship. From what I gather, her mother had been good friends with one of my aunts when they were in high school, and the two had kept in touch over the years. I know that I had met Adriana once or twice in my youth; however, our contacts had been so sporadic that when she came to live with us, I did not recognize her.

I was 12 years old the summer that Adriana came to stay with us. One day, I was wondering where my family would be going for our summer vacation, the next day I was listening to my mom explain that we would be having a semi-permanent houseguest come stay with us. She gave me and my siblings some background on Adriana. She was pregnant by her boyfriend, a young black man. She had dropped out of school several years before and had been living intermittently with her parents and with an aunt since that time. When her father found out that she was pregnant by a black man, he kicked her out of her home. The young man's family was unable to take her in, and she was unable to find a home among her friends and family. Adriana eventually ended up sleeping on the couch in my aunt's one-bedroom apartment. My parents discussed it; we had a guest room with its own private bathroom and were fortunate to have the financial resources where an additional person in the household would not be too great of a burden. They decided to offer Adriana a place to stay until she could get into an apartment. However, they had conditions. The first condition was that she enroll in high school, the second condition was that she get a job, the third condition was that she not have sex in our home, and the fourth condition was that she refrain from drug or alcohol use while living with us.

That summer quickly devolved. Instead of visiting amusement parks, museums, and the neighborhood pool, my siblings and I spent a huge amount of time riding in the car while my mom shuttled Adriana back and forth to health and human services and other government agencies, trying to get her covered by Medicaid so that she could get prenatal care. My parents were very concerned about Adriana's unborn child, a worry which, even as a child, I could see that Adriana did not share. My parents urged her to take prenatal vitamins and eat healthy, but Adriana refused to eat the meals my mom prepared, insisting that Cheetos were the only food that did not make her sick. She did not get any exercise at all, claiming that the baby exhausted her. I had seen my Mom continue to run an entire household and work out every day while she was pregnant, so the exhaustion seemed put upon. We would load up into the car to head to the next appointment with some government agent only to discover when we got there that Adriana had left all of her paperwork at the house. One time, she walked out of a meeting with a woman at the Social Security office because she was offended by the woman's tone. It took us weeks to get her set up on Medicaid, and she never called to set up a prenatal appointment, even though my mother gave her a list of free or sliding-scale clinics to call.

My mother and father dealt with her shenanigans throughout the summer, hoping that providing stability and security for her would give her an example of how she wanted to treat her child. My mother had taken me and my siblings with her to Adriana's parents' home to collect some of her belongings, and we had seen rats scurrying along the floor and heard a horrifying story about her younger brother being attacked by a rat. We all genuinely believed that if she just had enough exposure to a better way of living and saw that people were willing to help her, she would begin to do some things for herself. However, she continued to drag her feet on job interviews, and even lied to my mother and said that Sonic was not hiring, when it was.