Going Back by Marry

Going Back by Marry - August 2023 Scholarship Essay

To discuss my biggest educational accomplishment, I must go back to my childhood, which is difficult due to trauma I experienced. I was born to teenage parents who had traumatic childhoods of their own, desperate to be loved. Unfortunately, my parent's relationship would not last another year after I was born. My father would send my mother to live with his own mother in another town.

While we lived with my grandmother, she had 8 teenagers living with us. The teenagers were often left to care for me, which was helpful for my educational development, and not so beneficial for my emotional development. With their attentiveness, I was reading chapter books by age 3 and had the reading comprehension of a middle school student. With this, I was expected to excel when I got into elementary school. However, I did not excel, I struggled. My teachers could not explain this to my mother. I would fail almost every grade, being passed along to the next because teachers found it too difficult to teach me. They knew that I was intelligent but could not figure out why my work did not reflect that.

When I arrived in middle school, I barely passed my classes with D-letter grades, doing just enough work to get me by. The only exception to this was band class. I loved music and everything about it. I pushed myself to be the best saxophone player and was. In 7th grade, I was failing every class except band, I was being bullied by boys in school and was miserable. My former stepdad had a new fiancé who offered to homeschool me for the year. During the time I was homeschooled, she was strict with me. My day began at 5 AM with a mile run, then came home for math/science, adding in home economics, language arts, creative writing, typing, and history, and then I would end the day with being able to go to my former school for band. She provided the consistency I needed and was able to see where I truly struggled. She sought out one-on-one tutoring with my former math and science teachers and helped me to thrive in these subjects.

By the time I returned for 8th grade, I was almost a straight-A student. That November, my mother had triplets. My family was struggling financially and were barely keeping our heads above water. My mom's younger brother had lived with us since I was 9 years old. He was more like my older brother than he was an uncle, I loved him dearly. In February of 2002, he was working construction when he fell off a roof. While in the hospital, he would be diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. They told us his blood was as thick as peanut butter and would need to begin treatment as soon as possible. Four days later, my uncle would die because of a brain bleed that his doctors had missed. This would derail the rest of my 8th grade year and I would only be passed along to high school because my teachers “understood what I was going through.”

During my freshman year of high school, I was very depressed. I would fail 3 classes that first semester before moving across the state to a much smaller school. My grades would start to get better at my new school. During my sophomore year, my stepdad made a deal with me, he would pay me to get good grades and play sports. During this time, my math teacher diagnosed me with Dyscalculia, often referred to as “math dyslexia.”. Even with this challenge, I turned into an A/B student almost overnight after this, began to play softball, and joined cheerleading and several school clubs.

When senior year rolled around, I was struggling again, this time with crippling anxiety over the idea of leaving for college. I wasn’t comfortable leaving my 4-year-old sisters with my mom. She was a shell of who she had used to be, and they relied on me heavily for their everyday care and getting to school. Even with acceptance letters to 4 colleges out and 2 full-ride scholarship offers, I couldn’t bring myself to accept any of these offers. Instead, I stayed home after graduation and babysat my sisters for my parents while they worked.

At 21 years old, I found myself pregnant with my son. After he was born, I was crippled by postpartum depression. I enrolled in college the following year and made a lot of new friends. Unfortunately, I would also become a victim of sexual assault by a classmate. This person would be the reason for my dropping out of college.

I would not attempt to return to college until I was 34 years old. This was the hardest thing I have ever done in my academic life. At this point in my life, I was a full-time worker for my tribe, a parent to two children under the age of 10, and now a college student, who had also been recently diagnosed with ADHD. It hasn’t been easy, but it will be well worth it when my children can see their mom graduate from college as a first-generation college student, accomplish her lifelong dreams, and be someone they can look up to.