My Inspiration When It Comes To My Education by Fayth

My Inspiration When It Comes To My Education by Fayth - March 2023 Scholarship Essay

Growing up, school was always my escape from home. I never really stayed at one school for longer than a year. Bouncing around from school to school was very hard. I loved all of my teachers and classmates throughout every single year of school. Though once I got to middle school, school got a bit more challenging. Not just because of the advancement in the criteria but also because I had just lost my mother. This was one of the most traumatic things to go through, while also converting from elementary school to middle school. Starting at a young age my mother was always my inspiration. Unfortunately it was not because I wanted to be her, but because I wanted to provide myself with a life she could not give me and my siblings.
My mother was a single parent of six children varying from the ages 1 to 13, only at the age of 32. She had her first child, my brother, at age 19. She was a senior in high school when she was first pregnant, this resulted in her dropping out of high school. She was not stable enough financially to take care of a child on her own, so she then made the decision to give my brother away to our grandmother. Although after giving up one child, even with the struggles she knew were to come, she kept the rest of her children.
From the time I can remember growing up, I watched my mother be physically and verbally abused all the way up to the year she passed. It was hard as a child to watch your own mother be beaten in front of your own eyes, and not be able to defend her. Yet, through all that she went through she still had us up and ready every morning for school. On top of trying to get her education she also had to work so there would be nights she wouldn't get home until very late, sometimes not even until morning. This caused me and my siblings to learn to do a lot on our own after school, things like feeding ourselves, bathing ourselves, learning things on our own, and taking care of each other.
My mom not being available to give the guidance, and attention a child needs at a young age made me dive deep in my education. I was the child that never liked having bad grades or getting in trouble, so learning was one of my favorite things to do. I was never afraid to ask questions, and always willing to help a classmate with their work. Although I envy the way my mother lived, it has inspired me to push myself to be the young woman and future adult she could not be. I am now near the end of my senior year, and because of my attachment to school, I want to be a teacher when I grow up. Not just because I loved school, but because I want to be able to teach the young children like my younger self that did not have the extra help or support at home.