I am an immigrant but I came to America at a young age. When my family first came everything was great. Back home my parents owned their own business and they were doing pretty well. They had built a house from scratch with land they bought and I was daddy’s little girl. I got whatever I wanted and my closets were decorated with dresses of all sorts of colors in the rainbow. My sister and I went to a private school and we had our own taxi take us back and forth. Needless to say, I was living in a fairy tale, so I thought America would be no different.

At first everything was fine, then suddenly my life around me started to turn into a nightmare. My father became more and more distant and soon very scarce in my life. The man I had seen every day of my life was now a stranger to me. My parents divorced and my mom had to start from rock bottom. There were moments where we slept in her car, and had no home. My mother would scrape up everything she had just to get us food and sometimes there wouldn’t be enough for herself. She worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant and that took such a toll on her body that she ended up having to go into surgery to remove masses from her stomach. She worked at this job for 10+ years and made less than 25,000 dollars a year. But during all this, she made sure my sister and I had a good life.

When I started college, she went back to college and got her Nursing Degree. About 5 months before Covid hit she officially became licensed as a Registered Nurse. She called me on the phone so proud of herself saying how we were going to finally be able to do the things other families get to do like go on vacation. All her dreams had turn to reality, and again, like before her life suddenly turned into nightmare. Her job failed to give her PPD, leaving her at the mercy of covid, and unfortunately she caught it. Immediately we knew something was wrong. Her symptoms became more severe over time and she was not able to work anymore. The woman I had seen go through so much was defeated by a virus that no one was taking seriously. As I went to sleep I could hear her cry in her room because of all the pain.

During that time she talked about very bad things and it worried my sister and I for her safety. No matter which doctor she went to everyone would say it was all in her head. Or that she is old. She went through more than 8 doctors during quarantine and none of them would listen to her. As a black woman she felt betrayed by the health care system. I thought about this when we had discussed in class the issues with the health care system.

My family is back at square one. My mother had plans that she may never be able to fulfill, and I now have no motivation or hope for the world. I find it hard now to take school seriously because seeing everything my mother went through, will any of this ever be worth it? The stress, the anxiety, the late nights, not knowing what kind of job you will get when graduate college, the debt all seems like such a high price to pay when you might just end up exactly where you began.