Empriss D. Bennett-Moreno

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It’s hard to tell whether she was mimicking her own upbringing by birthing nine children into the world. My mom was one of ten after all. Maybe it was the fondness of being amongst a large family that she wanted to recreate. There are of course differences in the life she made for herself and the the one she was born into. She came from a two parent household, where her mother and father both worked. She herself was a single parent. Any single black mother of four children with only a high school education could easily find herself below the poverty line. My mother had more than double that and found herself removed from her own lower middle class upbringing and relegated into impoverished circumstances consequential to her choices. No matter the thinking that led my mother to nine separate pregnancies, two failed marriages, and no choice but to raise her kids alone in the most challenging and dangerous circumstances you could imagine, she never cowered to the arduous journey.