I don’t remember anyone at school ever asking how things were at home. And honestly, I don’t think I would have told them even if they had. Despite everything, they were still my family. That was my normal, and I didn’t really have another option but to keep going.

As I moved through middle school and high school, I carried the label of being a “bad student.” The only classes I did well in were the ones where I could do the work in class like woodworking, media, anything like that.

After my parents’ divorce, my mom and I moved into a studio apartment outside Sacramento. The house I had lived in my whole life got foreclosed, and my parents sold the animals. With all my siblings gone, it felt like my parent’s frustration had zeroed in on me.

My mom was struggling. She was on welfare, partially supported by my grandma, and had been raising kids since she was 19. I’m the youngest of seven, with a 19-year age gap between me and my oldest brother. By the time it was just me left, she was over parenting.

I remember her telling me, more than once, “I wish you graduated high school four years ago so I could go live my life.” I was 12. It was clear to me that I was something she still had to deal with, not someone she wanted to raise.

A lot of things were left up to me to figure out. Pads, deodorant, a hairbrush. Everything became a trade-off, if I went to Taco Bell with friends, that meant I couldn’t afford something I actually needed with the little money I could scrounge up. 

At least I got to go to my older sister Sam’s place once a week, where she did her best to make me feel taken care of. She had been a built-in babysitter for my parents when I was born, and she raised me in a lot of ways. She was a single mom herself, working and going to school full time while taking care of her daughter Destiny, but she always managed to find ways to help me too. She majored in screenwriting, and we often watched all sorts of movies from her classes together.

I liked writing too. My English teachers saw that, but I rarely turned in work, not because I couldn’t do it, but because everything else going on in my life made it hard to keep up. That didn’t matter, a lot of teachers simply shrugged and gave up on me. I was yelled at, told I had no excuses, and once a teacher told the whole class that “In a few years, Calleigh is probably going to end up working at 7/11 with a work ethic like hers.” All because I didn’t turn in 10 pages of notes for the week. Ironically, this happened in an AVID class, a class meant to prepare students for college.

So yeah. “Bad student.”

At that point, I was more focused on being out with my friends, staying away from home as much as possible. My mom had already made it clear what she thought my future looked like. When I brought up college, she told me there was no way I would be able to go. How was I going to pay for it? That idea shut things down quick and fast.

Now, I realize my school followed a rigid 'official script' that simply had no room for my reality back then. Because this script was based on the values of a stable middle-class life, my teachers couldn't see the invisible work I was doing just to survive an unpredictable home. This placed me in a constant double bind (Gutiérrez, 2011), an impossible situation where I had to choose between meeting the school’s narrow demands and managing the basic needs of my own life.

https://www.farizalkamal.com/2025/10/parents-who-raise-monsters-then-blame.html