Catch Me Narrative

From the moment of my conception, life always managed to catch me by surprise. I was a happy child, or at least as happy a child as I could be raised in a household of two West Indian parents straight from the islands. Their pressure on me could rival a boa constrictor. But I had a large home, two cars, and was well fed so I couldn’t complain, right? None of us ever planned on losing that house or that prestige. Yet 2008’s financial hardships hit us harder than most. Forced to everything behind we flew into uncharted territory 900 miles from Hiram, Georgia And I also never planned on having to choose which parent I’d rather live with only a week after arrival to our newly-crammed apartment. I picked my mother, and I couldn’t know, either that that would one of the last times I ever saw my father …show more content…
I never could foresee that I was the type of girl that some would bully, that I would attack those tormentors like a magnet, from elementary school through my freshman year of high school. I didn’t anticipate being woken up to the sound of my mother’s screaming, to the sight of my older sister, wedged between her bed and the wall adjacent, convulsing so violently she was left with bruises. I never knew I would have to accompany her to what felt like hundreds of doctors visits, all trying to figure out what was wrong. And after she finally received a reliable diagnosis, I never planned on having to help her recoup from intensive brain surgery. We didn’t plan on barely getting by, of the pile of bills that would overtake our kitchen table, of our electricity cutting off every other week, of the feelings of helplessness that there was just never enough money in our pockets for