My parents wanted to live together. Her parents said no. They said they had to get married to live together. After 3 years of being married to my dad, my mom wanted out. For being Catholic, she tried to make it work for 6 more years.
My dad had a problem giving us money always. After three years of being married, one day my mom found money that he was saving for animals and land in Mexico. My mom got so mad that she used that money to pay bills. At the end, he would not buy groceries. My dad never went out on my mom or hit her. His dream about going back to Mexico was the problem.
After my parents got divorced, my mom went to clean houses to put food on the table. One day a house she was cleaning; the lady came home so happy because she got an A on her collage test. That made my mom want to go back to school.
They were rough eight years for the three of us. My mom started school in the spring of 1990. What was rough was that my mom was always in a bad mood. She was always yelling at Tina. Of course, she was always mad. She was raising us up by herself, going to school and working part time. The good times were when Tina and I got to help my mom with her homework and when she would spend time with us. She would put her homework answers on little pieces of paper, and she would put them where I could see them. We got to learn about the sun and about the stars. Sometimes when we did not have school, my mom would have to take us to the university with her. She worked in the music department and then at the Spanish department where she taught. In 1995, she got her bachelor’s degree in criminology. I still remember that day well. My mom was wearing a blue and green dress with her red grown over. She was one of the ones who got to speak to the other people getting degrees. There, I was proud of my mom. It took another three years for her to get her Master’s in Southwest Hispanic Studies. She wanted to get that degree in the mail, so she did. Life is funny sometimes. During the eight years that she was going to college, we were waiting to get on the DD WAIVER. The same month she took her master’s expansion; we were accepted to be on the waiver. The DD WAIVER is a state program that allows families to keep their family members who have a disability at home instead of putting them in a group home. My mom gets paid for taking care of me. I really love living at home with my mom because she is the best caregiver for me. She raised us up by herself. She always went to my meetings at school. She helped me with my homework when I didn’t have a caregiver. When my sister was 3, every night my mom would sit with us and read to us.