Now to talk about me..

Now as you can gather from what I told you about her siblings and parents, my mother didn’t have an easy life. She was pretty much always overweight and she got bullied in school for it as well as at home by the smaller members of her family. At school she would be called names, and be hit by the other kids while the teachers did nothing to help her. The bullying got so bad at school that she left middle school in the 8^th grade and never went back. Not too long after that her mother got sick with cancer and my mother was the one to take care of her. She would cook for her, wash her, take her to her hospital appointments, she was her caregiver and she watched over her until she died. She tells me that is when she decided that she wanted children and to be the kind of mother her mother was to her. And she was for 15 years of my life but that would change because she would change and things would never be the way they were before. So now that I’ve told you about the 2 people I come from let me get to the heart of this story, me.

I was, despite or maybe because of my upbringing, a caring yet timid child and sad to say I would “cry at the drop of a hat” as the saying goes. I was also always an overweight kid just like my mother I was always given hell for it. Even though we were on welfare and there were times when we didn’t have much to eat, the times we did have food it was very unhealthy things like candy, chips, and other foods high in saturated fat. Now I was what a person might call a picky eater because the only things I would eat would be breakfast cereals, Doritos, tons of different candies, and different assortments of cookies. The strange thing is it was honestly all I could eat; meaning nothing else I tried to eat would stay down. I would try chicken, eggs, spaghetti, hamburgers, and all I would do was throw it back up. It just wouldn’t go down so I ate what I could eat and I ate far too much of it at one time so as you can imagine I was a very overweight child. My mother would try to lose weight and even get us to exercise because she didn’t want us to get big like her but it just didn’t work because even though she exercised she still never ate right (plus she had a thyroid problem) so none of use in the house were losing any weight anytime soon. My weight problems made me a prime target for the children in school. I remember being in my elementary school P.S 76 in Queens and I was basically tortured in school. I was picked on every single day being called names like “fatty mic fat fat” and “fat ass” and other worse things that I don’t wish to mention. That may seem silly to an adult but to a kid those words cut like a knife, all we want to do is be accepted and liked not ridiculed and harassed. I was also physically attacked with random kids pushing me down on the ground in the playground, smacking me in the back of the head, or throwing basketballs at me with the intent of hurting me. Sometimes they would do all 3 of these things at the same time and I’m sure there are more incidents that I can’t even remember because they were so traumatizing. There was this one kid in school that would always bother me no matter what I was doing and his name was Julio. He started off just messing with me on his own but then he started getting the other kids on the playground to do it too until there was a gang of kids picking on me every day, he even took my so called friend away from me and he started bullying me too. In about 2^nd or 3^rd grade I had thought I had finally made a friend, I mean I would even bring him brownies all the time as I guess a sign of our friendship (or maybe bribery, who knows, I was a kid) so one day I go to say hi to him and he says nothing and walks away over to Julio and his friends, then he starts to call me names. The one friend I had just turned on me. I was devastated and of course went to my mother for comfort. She would always come up to the school and demand for things to change, for the teachers or the principal to doing something to stop the bullying but they did nothing and my torment continued, getting worse and worse the more I asked for help. It got so bad that my mother started keeping me home from school just so I would have some relief from all the bullying.