Personal Statement: Growing Up In A Single Parent Home

Personal Statement Assignment Growing up in a single parent home isn’t exactly what you would call easy. It was difficult, but it shaped me into the person I am today, a hardworking independent student with big dreams. My mom went through a lot to raise me and my older sister the “right” way. Her strong influence made her my top role model, the one person I aspire to be like in the future. My father was gone most of my life. From the stories that I’ve heard, he’s not a nice person. My mom never goes much into any topic concerning my father, for the fear that it could damage any possible future relationship between me and him, although I never really felt any connection. When I was six, he was put in jail for armed robbery. I still remember the weekly 15 minute phone calls that would just end if we didn’t say goodbye in time, no extensions. That was before I knew all the things he did.
He abused drugs and alcohol, left regularly, and took my mother’s money, then came back begging my mother for forgiveness, saying that he will change. He wrecked our car, took me and my sister to bad places, and pretended to forget the bad things has done because he was under the influence. My mom, who believed we needed a father figure, constantly let him back in, struggling so we could live the “perfect life,” that she wished for us.
There was a lot building up to when she actually left him. The day he pulled the keys out of a moving car on the highway with us in it was my mom’s tipping point. She went to court and gained custody of us. When he went to jail my mom decided we needed to start a new life so she took us with her across the country from New Jersey to California. This decision was the best decision my mother had ever made and I praise her every day for her courage to start a completely new