Someone Who Has a Major Impact on My Life
Having their parents struggle, to give you a partial good life. Later contracting an incurable disease that brought their life to an early end; being a young teenager with six siblings looking to you for answers. Leaving school having to get a job sweeping making 10 cents an hour. This is the year 1953 there isn’t a CPS to take you away. Could you fathom the thought of having to pursue life like this? Let me tell you why I look at her the way that I do.
She isn’t my real grandmother biologically she is an aunt. I look to her as a grandma because she has always been there for me. She took me in at a young age 24months to be exact into a little green house 19th street. My parents both worked shift work so they needed someone to watch over me while they were away. She volunteered with no hesitation, known all over for taking care of peoples children. She taught me how to be a young lady, and a God fearing individual. We were in church Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday I was in the church choir while my grandma was over the usher board. She was a one of a kind she always made sure that we ate and we were full. It was drilled into her head from her struggling to take care of her siblings.
As I got older in high school I would tell her about things going on whether it be the good, the bad, or the ugly. One day she opened up and told me her life story. She told me after her parents died she was forced down the wrong road. Making 10 cents an hour didn’t cover the bills so went down the road of working in a whore-house. This wasn’t what she wanted to do but she was talked into it by a friend saying that “Jewel you can make so much money that you, your brothers and sister will never go hungry!” Thinking only about her sibling she did it, she told me it was hard at first but then it got easy she had gotten used to it. It wasn’t until one day someone drugged her and tried to beat her to death but failed. That’s when she said that she was done with that business it had been over 3 years and she had enough saved that would have her set. She got out moved and started a new life she turned her life over to Jesus. Never have i cried so hard I hugged her and said, “Nana that’s all over you don’t have to worry about it because I’m going to take care of you now.”
No one ever thinks about what others go through; it may change your life or have a huge impact on you. My nana is a phenomenal woman! Being able to survive what she went through and today be 73 years old without AIDS or HIV is miraculous! She tells her story to many girls and all have the same reactions tears with a expression that can’t be explained by words. She has touched my life in so many ways. I will forever be endowed to her.
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