Name: RenĂĄta MolnĂĄr
Gender: Cis Female, She/Her
Date of Birth: June 16th 1985 / Thirty-Four
Place of Birth: Budapest, Hungary
How long have they lived in Morgan City?: 10 years
Occupation: High school history teacher
Faceclaim: Sophia Bush
PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING TRIGGER WARNINGS: none.Â
RenĂĄta, Ren for short, grew up in a normal, Hungarian, middle class household. She had a sister and they were living on the outskirts of Budapest for the first couple of years of her life and then moved closer to the Austrian border to Sopron, both of her parents going over to Austria to work while the sisters spent a few years in the schools of Sopron and then the parents decided to put them into high schools in Austria in hopes that they would learn German and get a head start like this.
Ren was on the more introverted side while she was growing up, wasnât too into going out or partying partly because her parents didnât approve and partly because she didnât really want to go out into the night, especially not when it ended with going home and her parents still waiting for her with a lecture, no matter when she got home or what state she got home in. She did her own rebelling during the day through skipping class and putting gum onto the chairs of her classrooms and not going home until it was absolutely necessary. She felt like she could do all of this because her parents werenât even in the country, who would be there to stop her?
She went to Szombathely to university to study to become a history teacher.
Once she got to university, which was in a whole different city, away from prying eyes, she opened up to the nightlife a lot more, staying out late, skipping classes the next morning, and having all the fun she could possibly get. Unlike in high school, she felt like she finally fit right in. She met a couple of transfer students, fell madly in love with one of them, Mark, at the end of their semester and impulsively followed him back to America, to New Orleans. It was a whirlwind, all consuming romance and in less than four months the two of them were married and living happily with Markâs parents since they couldnât afford a place of their own. She was twenty at the time.
Ren was working part-time while applying for her visa and Mark was still studying. They had their conflicts but generally speaking things went okay. Mark finished his studies about 1,5 years after their wedding and started working and the two of them moved to a tiny apartment, just the two of them. That is when the problems started working. Mark wanted to work in software engineering, but he couldnât get a job in his field right away, which meant he had to take jobs that he felt like were below him, while Ren finally started feeling like she gave up on her career possibility and like she made a mistake not finishing school. She wanted to teach, not work weird part-time jobs for the rest of her life. The fights and the arguments got bigger and bigger, but for a long while Ren was holding onto the relationship desperately. She moved halfway across the world for Mark, she gave up everything, it couldnât just be over. Eventually they separated after about four years of marriage, but the divorce was ugly and the fighting continued until the very end.
Ren considered moving home. It would have been easy to tuck her tails between her legs, ask her parentsâ help and go home, finish school and figure out where she wanted to move forwards from there. But she felt like she could do better, she felt like she had something to prove and she wanted to turn her situation to the better. So instead of packing up and going home, she packed her bags and moved to Morgan City. It was a lot cheaper, something she desperately needed, she got herself a roommate and started working.
She mostly worked waitressing jobs with babysitting on the side, anything to get herself enough money to get herself a good enough paper to be able to teach. Which was what she wanted to do. She wanted to teach high school because the one teacher who made her fall in love with learning back in high school was her history teacher and she wanted to be like that woman for other kids. Excite them about the past and make them want to know their own history.
It wasnât easy, there were a lot of times when she wanted nothing but to cry her eyes out and give up, just keep her job and push her dream aside, but she always kept going and eventually she managed to finish school and she got hired at the local high school as a history teacher and has been there for the last two years. This is her third school year teaching there.
She had some relationships over the years after Mark, mostly just casual ones, but she didnât really get to the serious part because most people decided they didnât want her because Ren doesnât want to have kids. Of course, most of the people didnât even wait for her to explain, they just heard this one sentence and were already out the door. The truth was, she didnât want her own children, she didnât want to get pregnant, but she felt like she wanted to give a try to fostering. She felt like there were so many kids in the world who got into the system and so many of them didnât get to grow up in a good home because they werenât babies and nobody chose them, that she wanted to help and provide a good home for a few of them at least if she was given a chance.
The process was long with so much waiting (the fact that she was single and an immigrant made the process a lot longer than it normally would have been, needing to get her own place and making sure she was fit to be a foster mother had its ups and downs too), but a couple of days ago she got a call that there was a 12 years old little girl named Lily who would be a good fit for her, so the next 24 hours was insane and crazy and most of it Ren doesnât even remember aside from one big blur. She felt so unprepared, didnât know what to do, what to buy, but she was excited. She was going to be a mom. A foster mom and maybe it wouldnât work out, but she wanted to do her best.
She is terrified of alligators to no end and finds this incredibly ironic
Her first heartbreak was at the age of ten when she was told that she would in fact never be able to be good enough to qualify for the Olympics as a swimmer. She took that to heart and cried over it for a week and her parents were confused and shocked about her reaction because she hasnât been swimming from a very young age, she only started putting more work into it for about a year at that point and they never thought something like this would come as such a shock and devastation for it. Except after a week she picked herself up and never spoke of the incident again in a way that suggested she felt bad about it at all. She still swims, it became something fun she does from time to time, something she finds is a good stress relief for her.
She considered herself heterosexual until around her mid 20s when she went out with friends, had some fun and ended up sloppily going down on a girl in a bathroom. She first thought it was just a drunken adventure, but she slowly realized it was more than that and eventually decided to identify as bisexual with a strong preference for women.
Ren is relatively messy in her life, except when it comes to her work. She wants to do extremely good, so she made a bunch of notes, she made excessive plans for the entire year and keeps everything as organized as you possibly could to eliminate any mistakes that couple possibly come from her being a messy person in general.
She doesnât consider herself a person who holds a grudge easily, but that isnât exactly true, she just doesnât realize she is doing it for the most part. With her divorce it went so far that she egged her husbandâs car one night after a really bad fight after she drank a couple of shots. Those days werenât pretty for her.
She has a tattoo on her left shoulder blade that shows an intricate sun design.
SIBLING OF HER EX: The divorce got explosive, they turned ugly, but somehow she was left with a friend she was close to in the form of the sibling of her ex-husband. It was weird in the beginning, but they got along really well and they kept talking and the friendship developed.
PARENTS/UNCLES/AUNTS OF STUDENTS: Somebody Ren met in the last few years through a teacher-parent conference. It could be a tension filled connection because they donât see eye to eye, or it could have been that they hit it off well and they are on friendly terms.
YOUNGER SISTER: she came to visit Ren from Hungary for the summer, ended up getting a summer job and sticking around. The two of them lived together for a while and now see each other on the regular. What she thinks about Ren fostering is up to discussion.
FRIEND/CONFIDANT: Somebody Ren met relatively early on after she moved to Morgan City and became really close to. The person who helped her through the hardships of the school and who let her rant about the stress of the waiting for her first foster kid, and it goes both ways, Ren being there for your character through thick and thin as well.
RenĂĄta is written by Enci.