Like any other typical teenage girl, arguments with my parents are very normal. It’s quite normal if it happens most days of the week. The majority of the time, I think they are in the wrong and ask myself why they can’t practice being less cautious, less strict, or less scared of everything. But I think these are normal things when you’re also the eldest daughter, right?

My parents both grew up and were raised in Mexico until their teenage years before they came to the U.S. The one thing my parents love to bring up in an argument is to describe how bad it was to grow up as they did when they were younger. They do this to make me realize how “better off” I am than they were at my age. They tell me to behave better to demonstrate how thankful I am. 

My parents describe how poor and small their town was back in Mexico. They recall having to walk to the nearest (yet distant) well in order to bring back water for dishes, cooking, and showering. They describe the problems that nearby families had with drugs and alcohol. They also share stories about their education and how very few people from their town graduate from high school, let alone graduate from a college or university. In my family, we had these same experiences. Problems with poverty, drugs, alcohol, and lack of education.

For the first 12 years of my life, I lived in my grandmother’s home with eleven family members in a two story, two room apartment. In one little room, divided by a poorly made wall made by a family member, lived both my parents, my dog and eventually my little sister and I. On the other side of the poorly made wall, lived one of my uncles.

I remember having a bunk bed, because we couldn’t fit two separate beds to sleep in. My sister and I would take the top bunk, and my parents would share the bottom bunk. We had a little space, where our closets had to be filled with more than just clothes, to have walking space. My dog had a little bed, but we also had a small balcony where she could sleep and eat outside. The second bedroom was taken by one of my uncles, where he shared it with his two sons. Downstairs, we technically had no living room, because that space also served as a bedroom for my grandma, her son, and a close family friend.

I never had any privacy, and if I needed a table for homework or my creative arts projects, I would sit at the dining table. There was never quiet. Someone was always cooking or sitting at the table with me as there was nowhere else to really go. 

Moving out of that place was one of the many hard financial decisions my parents had to make. How could we live on our own when we were so poor? My parents were both working 3 jobs to provide for me, and eventually my sister. Looking back, I wish the circumstances of why we had to leave my grandma’s house were different. My mother wasn’t ready to leave her family of 7 behind, and so my parents found an apartment within a 2-minute walking distance. 

It didn’t help that the same year we moved out, COVID-19 hit, causing the worldwide pandemic. It was even worse that both my parents were working under their own business for other people’s homes, so even after the quarantine was slowly lifted, people did not want my parents back inside their homes because of the health risk. I was young and didn’t understand that my parents weren’t on some paid vacation. My parents were jobless without pay. Remembering those 3 years of quarantine is always a blur, as my mental health declined at the same time as the pandemic. 

I was attending Davidson Middle School when my 7th-grade year got cut short because of Covid. Doing online classes was horrible. All I did was lie in bed in my pajamas while trying to multitask Roblox and the teacher’s lesson at the same time. But it wasn’t normal anymore when I didn’t want to roll out of bed to eat or get some sun. I no longer had the motivation to do anything, including school or taking care of myself.

This caused many more arguments with my parents. I was projecting laziness and disobedience, but there was a deeper reason behind it all. My parents reconnected me with my therapist, where I was diagnosed with Depression and Anxiety. My behavior was no longer normal, and so, of course, this made my parents more cautious, more strict, and more scared about my whole existence.

I never took the chance of going back to in-person school, so when high school came around, my parents being petrified was an understatement. How was I going to be able to socialize and find any sense of peace in a new environment? No one in my family was able to explain what high school was like because no one in my family had ever attended a high school before. I quickly found out that you probably shouldn’t multitask Roblox and the teacher’s lesson at the same time, because my grades would come to be a representation of just that.

None of my family members or my parents could help me with any of my homework. Everything was in English, or the subjects like math and science were too difficult for them to comprehend. I think that the fact that I couldn’t receive any help and that I didn’t help myself started bad habits that I would have to eventually repay and correct all on my own. And this process continued throughout all 4 years of high school. 

I’ve had many ups and downs, and I am not the happiest about how I’m ending my senior year. But at the same of course, I am happy that high school is finally going to be over. I think that my mind has led me to self-sabotage because I truly find a hard time finding solutions and motivation to escape the doom I’ve set up for myself. My parents always allowed me to have my fun and let me slowly have more freedom as these years have flown by.

I plan on attending Dominican University, a school 20 minutes away from where I live, in the fall. The reason why I stayed so local was because of the fear my parents and I shared. My parents were scared of letting me off to college and even offered to have me find a steady job instead of studying. This made me sad, not because I think that’s what they believe all that I am capable of, but because that’s all they have ever known and what they believe to be the safest option. I know what it’s like to hear my mother rant about going back to school so she can get a better job, but she doesn’t because she thinks it’s too late in her life to do so. And I know what it feels like not to have your parents always at home because they are too busy working 2 jobs.

​I will be the first to graduate from high school from all the generations that have passed before me. But I won’t be the only one gaining this accomplishment of graduating high school; my parents earned it as well because of how they raised me, even if it led to countless disagreements and arguments. This isn’t the only cycle I’ve broken, and I know it won’t be the last. I am ready to do better for myself and the generations after me. So, I guess you could say my parents’ caution, strictness, and fear did play a role in helping me out after all.