Chris (DH), Trinity, Charlotte at the circus

When Trinity came to live with us, Ill be honest, I had visions of grandeur. I thought..ok, live in babysitter, someone to help me make dinner, Ill get her her GED and off to college and everyone will be proud that I was the one that helped her make it. It didn’t quite work like that. I did make her quit smoking cold turkey immediately. For one, I am a no smoker kinda girl and wont even let it around my house, second, you have to be 19 to smoke in my state, so she was pretty screwed anyway. I know it was hard for her to quit cold turkey after smoking since she was 13, but she did it. Whether she did it because she had to or wanted to, it happened. I took her shopping, got her her first new shoes in years, new clothes, and took her to her first sit down restaurant that was not fast food, in her life. She grew up too poor to experience some things we take for granted.

A week after she moved in, she found out she was pregnant, so now my 18 year old cousin I was going to peer pressure into changing her life, now had her life changed without me.

Instead of getting her away from her 24 year old boyfriend that no one agrees with in the family (he has no GED, lives w/ his sister, etc) and sending her to college, I was faced with having to let him call here at all hours of the day and her slipping back into a teenage girl lovesick depression for home and the life she left there.

It was a battle. Us on one end lecturing her on the harsh realities of life, trying to get her away from the laptop and her chat rooms to participate in the family functions, being the sole reliability to get her to her GED classes and feeling completely responsible for her not having a job or local friends.

Then, somewhere about 4 weeks in, the laptop cord broke from 12 hours a day usage and she was left….disconnected. Literally. And she jumped into the family with both feet. She began helping around the house, volunteering with charlotte, and really became a 2nd daughter, and a friend.

She took her GED test and we don’t know the results yet (although very confident on her passing), but for the first time in her life, she actually got to the finish line. Trinity had been beaten down in her life, quite a bit. Her father abused her, she moved in with a boyfriend at 15 years old and dropped out of school and has been wandering around, lost, for years. Its hard. I know we all have our stories. She found out that her dad, wasn’t really her dad and after enduring abuse that many years, I am sure it was hard to know even that. I can clearly remember spending time with my Aunt (her mom) when I was just a child myself and seeing this jerk hit her. I remember my dad busting in with my Uncle and slamming him against the wall and threatening him to touch anyone again. I was telling her and she said she wished she had seen that in life.

I am so hard to live with. I know that. I am one of those “Put out or shut up” kind of people. I dont believe life has excuses. We make choices, those choices leave us with our paths, the end. You dont like your path, you change it. If you wallow in it, thats your choice. So I know that i drove into her while she was here that this is now her path and she can CHOOSE which direction she goes. To raise up her child with love and with responsibility. To get a trade or an education and not to rely on a man for the things we can rely on ourselves for. She was probably talked to so much while she was here, it became part of the scenery.

Today she left for home. When I dropped her off, I did with sort of a sad regret. Sad that we didn’t get more time. Sad that now she goes on, without the college I so badly wanted her to be in. I am unfortunately one of only two college educated grandchildren in my entire family and I just wanted her to break the cycle. I truly hope that she goes on to do so and know she has the strength and character and smarts to do so. IN fact, I would say that she is smarter then I am, she just has to learn to accept that she is worth so much more then the experiences she has been through.

But onward she goes. To what, I don’t know. To what future her baby holds, I do not know. I just hope that she leaves her with a perspective that she can achieve, she is so worth it,  her future has just begun, and it was I that was blessed to have been a part of it.

~trisha