My life started in Jackson, CA with my mother, father, and one sister. At the age of two, my parents got a divorce, causing my mother to disappear out of my childhood and most of my adult life, leaving me with my mentally unstable father. My father struggled with mental illnesses for all his life, including when raising my sister and I. When I was younger (about 2-10 years old), he really just struggled with depression and Bi-Polar disorder. When I turned 11, and went into middle school, my father started showing signs of schizophrenia and his Bi-Polar disorder was getting worse and worse. Because of this my father would mentally and sometimes physically abuse me. My father was never able to keep down a stable job and would use his disability and unemployment checks for things other than what he needed to and would therefore cause us to be homeless and without shelter for days at a time. This would be my life until I went into high school, where CPS would get involved and send me into foster care.
My sister and I went into foster care at the same time and went from each home together. We were lucky enough to only have to go to two different homes and end up with a loving and caring family, whom are now my guardians and I consider my parents. The time in foster care was long and tedious and made me very confused about the world. When first entering foster care, the courts are required to make sure that none of the other family members, including the other parent whom the child has never even met, might be able to take care of the children. This happened to me when I first entered into foster care. The courts found my mother and made my sister and me stay with her every other weekend until they deemed it reasonable that she wasn’t fit to have custody. Along with seeing our mother, who I didn’t really even know, I was required to go to counseling as well as see my dad in supervised visitations. This was all very overwhelming but after all that and finally being able to settle in at my final foster parents home I was able to graduate high school with honors!
After graduating from high school, I transferred straight to a four year, private university in Redding, CA where I believed I knew what I wanted and where my path was leading me. I could not have been more wrong. After being in the university for just one year, I started making friends with the wrong people and doing things that I shouldn’t have been doing (ie.. drugs, alcohol, etc..). After being stuck in that lifestyle for about 3 years and dropping out of college, I knew I needed to get out of that area. I moved back home to Sacramento and started working and going to school at Sacramento State University. I still believed I knew what I wanted to do and where my path was heading…again. Unfortunately, I started doing the same things I had ran away from up in Redding. So, I left school, started a new job and just worked for about a year. I met my now current husband and he explained to me that school would be the best thing for me and that it wasn’t school that had been the problem all along, but in fact just me not knowing what I actually wanted from life.
So now, here I am, working at Starbucks full time as a supervisor, going to school full time at Sacramento City College, and trying to be the best wife I can be. I am still figuring out what all I want from life but as each day goes on, I get closer and closer to those answers.
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