Trivia Night,

Sara Chandler

When I was a kid, I had 2 parents who loved me unconditionally and did everything in their power for me, I had a roof over my head, great education, food on my plate and a way to get places... What people don’t know is that sometimes the roof may have been someone else's other than my parents, the education may have been because I had used someone's address that wasn’t mine because I didn’t have a permanent address at the time.  The food on my plate might not have been what a normal 12-year-old would need to eat for dinner. 

My parents got help from the Grace of other people and of course from GOD. They did what they could to take care of me and be self-sufficient, but there were hard times that came and most out of their control. My parents were not drug users, they weren’t in and out of jail or any other stigmas/stereotypes people use. . My father worked in factories all of his life and there were a lot of times that they laid them off because of production situations, once the plant shut down because of a mold problem, and then when Chrysler shut down in St. Louis that was just the end.  My mother suffers from mental illness and there are not a lot of businesses that cater to those needs, not back in the 90’s anyways. We didn’t have insurance for her to get the help she needed because then people didn’t offer insurance if they didn’t have too. 

As I became a teenager and my parents did have a house of their own, I realized that I wasn’t the only kid going through this and there were other parents just like mine who worked so hard for everything they had and just could not make it.  I had friends who would stay at my house for weeks and weeks just because we all knew how to help each other with food and shelter. We did this all on our own but there wasn’t much that teenagers could do because we just didn’t know where the resources were and neither did our parents. Sometimes that led to evictions, forcing some of us to live in our cars, on strangers' couches, maybe taking that extra apple from the fruit cart because well we may not like it but it’s food. That is why the Grace period is important.

The Grace Period is for the parents like mine that just need a little help to get through those hard times, who needed someone there for them who could help them get the resources they needed and make them more self-sufficient in an economy that doesn’t always understand that sometimes people go through hard times because of things out of their control not dealing with drugs, jails or domestic violence. The Grace Period could have helped my parents get us to the place where we deserved to be and where we were able to stay stable. It could have helped with getting the right food for us to grow strong and healthy and clothes and shelter for us to keep a stable life.