{"id":3426,"date":"2021-05-19T21:52:36","date_gmt":"2021-05-19T21:52:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/s37407.p1377.sites.pressdns.com\/resources\/behind-the-scenes-of-a-single-mom-in-college\/"},"modified":"2021-05-19T21:52:36","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T21:52:36","slug":"behind-the-scenes-of-a-single-mom-in-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/behind-the-scenes-of-a-single-mom-in-college\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Scenes of a Single Mom in College"},"content":{"rendered":"

About Me:<\/strong><\/p>

I’ve been called a lot of things over the past year. Yes, I am<\/em> a single mother. Yes, I am<\/em> a college student. Yes, I am that waitress who brought out your steak dinners and scrubbed down the table when you left. (How was that $60 bottle of wine?)<\/p>

But there are a few labels floating around that do not qualify. I am not<\/em> selfish for taking my 5-month old son away from family to finish school. I am not <\/em>a soap box rallier dramatizing this situation.<\/p>

I’m twenty-two years old with a baby, about 500 miles from family and support systems, tens of thousands of dollars from becoming a lawyer, weeks away from paying bills and rent. I’m a mother with a million ways to fail, or fall behind, or not quite make it, but only one way to succeed. After all, if I cannot reach the stars, there should be several branches I might grasp onto on the way back down to earth. I’ll still be closer than if I hadn’t leaped at all.<\/p>

I am doing this because I don’t know what else to do. I believe getting the best education I can get is best for my son — even if it means being away from my circle of free caregivers. I believe I should still continue to become the lawyer I’ve always dreamed of being — even though I “mistakenly” got pregnant. I believe I’m still giving my son everything I have to offer.<\/p>

I know this life won’t be glamorous. I’m not even sure it will all work out.<\/p>

I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid of the numbers on my student loan applications. I get out of bed each morning (and several times throughout the night) knowing only that to stop is to surrender, and I cannot do that. I cannot surrender my five-month-old angel to a life bound by the socio-economic restrictions of a career-waitress mother and a factory-working father. As hard as each of us, or either of us, or even in a best case scenario, both of us work together for him. . . this economy just is not gracious to either.<\/p>

The following contains explicit content-honesty, grueling truths-about the real life of a single, working, college-student Mom.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About Me: I’ve been called a lot of things over the past year. Yes, I am a single mother. Yes, I am a college student. Yes, I am that waitress who brought out your steak dinners and scrubbed down the table when you left. (How was that $60 bottle of wine?) But there are a Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":975,"featured_media":68297,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"enable_toc":false,"care_reviewed_by":0,"care_post_updated_flag":false,"care_updated_date":"","last_update":"2021-05-19","view_count":3728,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"member-type":[3],"vertical":[6,17,15],"platform":[2],"class_list":["post-3426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","member-type-seeker","vertical-children","vertical-child-care-advice","vertical-money-work","platform-resources"],"acf":[],"created":"2011-09-14","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/975"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3426"},{"taxonomy":"member-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/member-type?post=3426"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=3426"},{"taxonomy":"platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/platform?post=3426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}