A Blessing In Disguise

This is my assignment for the first day of AP lang, the instructions are "Write about a event which significantly impacted your life" I want to make a good first writing impression, so feedback?

Our lives are one massive collaboration of separate moments, different events. These events, and what we make of them, are the things that make our lives unique, whether they seem monumental or completely insignificant at the time. It's never certain how these steps along the way will impact you in the long run. In my case, one of these major, life-changing chain of incidents came completely out of the blue, completely blindsiding my family and me.

My childhood had always been completely normal. We were an average, middle class family, and our life was pretty comfortable. My parents worked hard and in turn were able to provide us with a pretty house and food on the table every night, and gladly bought my sister and me the toys that we so badly wanted. My personal favorite was the Barbie Jeep that I could drive. As a little kid I couldn't exactly understand extreme poverty. I never knew how a person could be homeless, or why some households couldn't afford the basic necessities, because I was fortunate enough to have parents who could supply me with all the things I needed and then some.

However, one year, circumstances started to shift in the less favorable direction. A new company had bought out our mortgage company that we had purchased our house through and convinced my parents to refinance, which seemed like a great idea at the time. This company, though, was shady and fed off of innocent families. Not so slowly, the monthly payment on our house was creeping up. At first my mom and dad, as unhappy as they were, thought that they could swing it. But the payment just kept rising. Every conversation we had somehow got tied back around to money, and I just saw the pure sadness and shame in my parents eyes, and even as a kid, i understood how bad the situation had gotten, I finally got how some families couldn't afford any extra luxuries, i was one of those families.

The extent to which the amount of money due was rising seemed infinite. It was deteriorating us inside, eating our hopes away like a disease that everyone dreaded and tried their hardest to defeat but ultimately knew was incurable.

To make matters worse, when bills and immense debt were still piling up and the mortgage company was still bumping up the rates, my dad had received the news that his job "no longer required his assistance," in other words, he was layed off. All of our hearts were broken and it felt like their was no possible way we could pull this off. My dad's unemployment left us as a single paycheck family trying to fulfill a bill pool fit for a triple paycheck family.

It was humiliating being one of the poor kids at school. I was no long one of the students who had some of the latest toys, or the nice clothes. I was just a kid with a home life that was crumbling all around me. While my friends were going on vacations to Florida over Christmas break, I was stuck at home while my parents had their minds racing about how they could possibly fix this. I could see this crisis driving a wedge between them with how they were constantly bickering about the littlest of issues because it was constantly lurking in the back of their minds. As was it in mine, always there to remind me that this situation was getting worse, not better.

I'll never forget the day we hit rock bottom. It was the day the house was taken from us, our house, the house that we lived in for almost my whole life. It was a house filled with so many memories that was just being pried from our grip no matter how hard we tried to hold on. We just had to accept it.

We were forced to move in with my grandma for a year to get back on our feet. Even though the debt that it had left us in and how it had completely obliterated my parents' credit would take so much time to reverse. The next few years were hard still. We learned quickly not to get too used to a place because right when we did, it was time to move again, because my dad was switching back and forth from employed to unemployed, so we never knew what we could afford. And when things seemed to be looking up, we were finally buying a house that we could actually call ours and not rent it, another mortgage company messed with the process, once again compelling us to move in with my grandma.

It took many, many stressful, tear jerking years for us to push through that fiasco, but here it is, years later and I am proud to say that we own our own house now and are doing much better. This series of events, in some way, has been a blessing in a very tricky disguise to me. Now, even though maybe we can afford to do some things that in those days would have been impossible, many times we refrain from it. It has given my family and I a sense of will power and responsibility. We also value hard work much more now. I strive for perfection in everything I do and try my hardest because I know now how hard it is to get by sometimes and I hope to insure nothing like that happens to me again. Another unpredicted gift of this mess was how close it brought my family. We have been through the hardest times together and now how important it is to keep reinforcing bond that even money can't buy.

This is one chapter of my life that I am overjoyed is over, however I'm grateful that it happened because I now contain these vital traits that will, without a doubt, benefit me immensely later in life. This was just one piece of the puzzle and I'm excited to see how the rest will fall into place.