humanity
Humanity begins at home.
When She Made Me Promise
Growing up, I had spent many weekends sleeping in the childhood bedroom of a woman I never met. Everything stood where she had left it. The white canopy bed with baby blue accent flowers was accompanied by a small nightstand. On this table was a small book called “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, and a tiny lamp that I would leave on all night due to my fear of the dark. On this particular night, I stared at my shadow on the wall. My great-grandmother had been ill for a while. As I stared deeper into my shadow I began to think about her journey into death. All of a sudden it felt as if the Victorian walls of the home where my great-grandmother raised the grandmother I never knew were closing in on me and the floor was swallowing me whole. My breath had become shallow. My sight clouded with tears. It was in that moment that I had come to the realization that I was of this world, and because of it, I too would one day meet death. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was an eight-year-old having my first of many existential crises. My great-grandmother would succumb to her complications with diabetes March 11, 1995, The morning after my 10th Birthday. I am ashamed to admit how annoyed I was that my great-grandmother’s slow descent into death was overshadowing my birthday. Especially after the year I had. I was barely 10 years old, and I had already grown tired of talking and “living” in death. I wanted to focus on life. I wanted to focus on life because it was the only thing that distracted me from my nearly debilitating fear of death.
By Racine Lancaster7 years ago in Families
Left Behind In Cuba
My family is from Cuba. On my dad's side there are 14 brothers and sisters, all raised on a farm. On my mom's side, there are 5 siblings, all raised apart by relatives since my maternal grandmother passed away when my mother was just 18 months old.
By Chris McLennan7 years ago in Families
I'm Dreaming...
As a little girl in the 1980's, I spent my Christmases either in California with my mother or in New York with her parents. She tried to always be in New York for the Holidays, but it was rare. I was usually in New York without her. Both her parents birthdays fell in December with my grandfather's birthday falling on Christmas Day.
By Lady Sunday7 years ago in Families
I Won't Back Down
I'm pretty positive that inthis life, most of us have heard at least once, if not over and over, the phrase, "life is hard". The truth behind that simple 3 word phrase can be seering, and very hard to accept. Especially if you were just born dealt a hard hand to play to begin with. It is nice to be able to open your heart to inspirational events or even songs that come your way, and keep you going. This is my story:
By Rebecka Lamb7 years ago in Families
Have a good day, live life to the fullest.
Reguarding Were We Live (Raise): As we walk around our city everyday and we also take the community transit sometimes, we get the same feeling's over and over again. Feeling like they are watching us and there putting us down, is it because we don't dress like them, is it because we can't afford a nice apartment like them. As the feeling of them talking and staring at us, we begin to get affended. We become so insecure about our self and about where we come from because of so many judgemental people in our community. Yes we understand that some of us may be living in a rundown area were we have to watch out for everything around us. It is scary for us to live in this kind of environment and for us to be worried about what is going to happen and when it is going to happen. Not only that but we also worry so much for our family's coming back and forth form the apartment to school or from anywhere at that. But at this moment in time it is hard for us because we cant afford a decent apartment in a good area. The reason we live were we live is because of the struggles and complication that we have had to deal with in our life. We may be in this perdicument due to our family paying for our medical bills, could be because we lost everything in a fire, or it could also be because we use when ever bit of money to put food in our place to feed our family. There are plenty of possibility's and reasons why we all live were we live. We all should be thinking about each others possible reasons for were they are living weather its in a rundown home in a bad area or living in a well maintained building in a nice quiet area because that shouldn't describe who we are as human beings.
By SmilingSams. 7 years ago in Families
How Eminem Saved My Life
I remember when I listened to Eminem aka Marshall Mathers for the first time. I was ten years old. I found a cassette tape buried in the back of the medicine cabinet when I was bored one night. I decided to look through the cabinet that had old prescriptions, new prescriptions and various random items. I picked Eminem's cassette out from a pile of about 6 of them and got lucky that the whole Marshall Mathers LP was recorded onto the back and the front of the cassette; I had to switch sides by track 8.
By Natalie Way7 years ago in Families
Now and Forever
Who is this, you may wonder? Well, this man is a son and a father. An Army veteran and someone's fiance. These are things a person could more easily guess. What might be a little harder to imagine would be that he is a Traumatic Brain Injury Survivor, or better yet, a miracle. Every face has a story behind it. Sometimes a person is easy to read or figure out, and other times, we challenge ourselves to understand.
By Eslieann Lefler7 years ago in Families
A Gift of Wisdom: Journey of an Awakening Soul
I was born in December in the late 80's on the cusp of dawn in a suite at a small hospital off the coast of a mid-California beach city. The doctors all thought I would be a boy. So convinced were they that my parents had already decided on a boy's name and were caught without a baby girl's name when I surprised everyone.
By Amber J Lash7 years ago in Families
Surviving Childhood Trauma
As a survivor of extreme sexual, physical and emotional abuse as a child, I allowed what was happening to me to affect me as a teenager and then as an adult. I developed low self-esteem, anger issues and anorexia that almost killed me. I had no one advocate for me after I told my mother what was happening at the hands of her own brother. Her response was I must have been a child abuser in a previous life and I was getting my karma paid back to me for doing that. She did NOTHING to her brother. She actually embraced him. She forced me to endure family get-together's with her brother, I was not allowed to have a voice or an opinion or a childhood. He was sexually abusing my sister and my cousin too but I received the worst from him because I was the fighter. I would kick him and punch him when he touched me. He threatened to kill me several times if I told. He even went so far as to put dead animals in my lunch box to "show me" what he would do to me if I told. He would chase me with running chainsaws like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre character. To this day, hearing a chainsaw gives me anxiety. I finally got away from the sexual abuse when one of the twelve husbands my mother had was transferred out of the country for a government job when I was 13 years old. I had endured torturous abuse from the age of 4 to 13. I could not get over what happened to me and I could not forgive my mother for allowing it to go on as long as it did and doing nothing and not protecting me.
By Tamara Echols7 years ago in Families
