Growing Up Poor

So my dad was in the US Navy and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. Until I turned 8, then they got divorced and my mom won custody. She had no means to support us, she was working on her GED right around the time they got divorced.

After some drifting she settled on being a nurses aid, totally admirable career. But not very lucrative. I remember even in high school I had one pair of pants and 2-3 shirts. My mom and I did laundry in the kitchen sink and hung the clothes out the dry.

I used to look at my middle-class friends and wish I had what they had. When I was a a junior in high school I made a promise to myself; whatever it took I would do to never have to worry about money, ever. Part of that promise was to buy an insanely nice house.

Well, little did I know that even when you make quite a bit of money, you still have money problems. But last year I started building a house I designed. And it's just about done. Some fixtures need putting up and some small details need to be taken care of but here it is. Certainly it's not insanely nice, MTV will never show up to film it. But it's nice and it's mine.