I was still a child myself when life asked me to become someone’s mother. While other girls were picking prom dresses and completing college applications, I was learning how to soothe a crying baby and silence my own fears.
As a young woman raising a child, I faced many hardships. I had dreams for myself. I wanted to go to college.
The spring of my senior year, I gathered the courage to speak with our school’s guidance counselor about college, financial aid, and my future. She chuckled. Then she told me I would not go to college — that I would spend my life barefoot and pregnant.
That statement crushed me.A trusted school authority looked at a seventeen-year-old girl and decided she was only good enough to have babies.
And I believed her.I wasn’t good enough.The trauma from that encounter echoed through me for years. My self-esteem crumbled. I pushed forward with no thoughts of college. I raised my daughter, took a job at Wal-Mart, made friends, dated, and simply lived the life I thought I was destined for.
At twenty-one, I became pregnant with my second child, my son. I wanted things to be different, but dysfunction followed where healing had not yet happened.
Through it all, I had incredible family support while I worked and raised my children. My oldest brother was the one who breathed life back into a dream I had buried.
At the time, he was in college himself. After an accident at work at forty, he was forced to change his career path. Instead of giving up, he chose to start over. Watching him step into the unknown planted something in me.
One day, he simply said, “Just apply. It won’t hurt anything.”No long speech. No grand motivation. Just belief.
So I did. I filled out the application with guarded hope, telling myself that if the answer was no, nothing would change. I would keep working. Keep raising my babies. Keep surviving.
Then the letter came.I remember holding the envelope in my trembling hands, my heart pounding. When I opened it and read the words of acceptance, I was stunned.
I was worthy enough to go to college?
For the first time in years, I felt seen — not as a statistic or stereotype, but as a student.
As someone capable. As someone with potential.
I was ecstatic.
I began choosing my courses, declaring my major and minor.
History had always been my favorite subject — stories of resilience, revolutions, and people who refused to be defined by their circumstances. Earning a degree in history felt poetic.
Without realizing it, I was becoming the very story I loved to study.
College was not easy. I raised children, worked long hours, studied late into the night, and slowly learned how to believe in myself again. Every paper I wrote felt like reclaiming a piece of confidence that had once been taken from me.
But intertwined with my accomplishments was grief.Grief for the seventeen-year-old girl who believed she wasn’t good enough.
Grief for the years lost to self-doubt.Grief for the version of me who needed someone to say, “You can,” and instead heard, “You won’t.”
There is a quiet mourning that comes with becoming who you were always meant to be. You celebrate the woman you are while grieving the girl who had to fight so hard to get there.
When I finally stood on the other side of that degree, it wasn’t just a diploma in my hands. It was proof that words spoken over you do not have to become your destiny. Proof that detours are not dead ends. Proof that resilience can grow in the most unlikely soil.
I did become a teacher.But more than that, I became a lesson — for my children, for my students, and for myself.
The story isn’t over just because someone else tries to write the ending for you.
You can always pick up the pen.
Ebbs & Flows 