My Grandmother

As the sun rose and 7am arrived everyone in my house would be up, preparing to head off to our various destinations. For my sister, cousins, and I that destination was school while for my grandmother and mother that destination was work. I can always remember such a busy house growing up. Within my household was my grandmother , mother , 2 cousins , my sister , and myself. My grandmother would be downstairs in the kitchen cooking pancakes, bacon and eggs, she never sent us off without a hot cooked breakfast. While my grandmother cooked, my mother would be upstairs combing hair, ironing uniforms, and monitoring bathing schedules. After all of this was said and done, each of us walked down the staircase one by one now fully dressed to eat breakfast while my mother and grandmother would have to go and get themselves ready for a long day’s work. My grandmother was and still is a restaurant hostess and manger at the OMNI Royal Hotel in New Orleans,Louisiana. My mother was a manager and sales rep at two local clothing stores that go by the names of Rainbow and The Avenue. My grandmother and mother earned enough to keep our bills paid and provide my family with the very best possible. Now looking back I understand that my family and I would fall under what today’s society considers to be lower middle class. Growing up in today’s society based solely upon appearance it was beyond easy for your peers to determine what economic status they felt you were a part of. What I found to be odd about that was that just because you have acquired nice things or wore nice things doesn’t necessarily make you rich or put you in the category of upper class. Every time I left the house starting from birth I was very well put together, even now in present day my hair , clothes , nails , and all included within self-presentation is up to par but that doesn’t at all mean that the things I have acquired were given to me or I just had money to blow to go and get them. Everything that comes my way was worked extremely hard for and this is why I feel my family and I fall under the middle class category because we have to work for a living. I grew up in New Orleans East, New Orleans East was a pretty standard suburban area filled with many colorful houses and townhomes. This area was not the “hood” but there was no Mercedes Benz parked in my driveway either. My grandmother and mother worked hard to give our family everything we could ever dream of. As a little girl I was given Barbie four wheelers, bikes, and a pool in my backyard, the biggest bratz doll house Walmart sold and so much more. Although my mother and grandmother stopped at nothing to provide for me I knew going to work was an everyday consistency that they knew must happen in order to keep our family afloat. My family wasn’t privileged enough to grow up and not have to work for what we wanted , not having to go day to day knowing , that we must never stop because in order to live you have to keep a job. If my grandmother or mother was to lose their job at any moment it would have been all BAD for us. Till this very day I still consider my family and I to be a part of the working middle class. There will never ever be a day in life where we won’t have to work for the things we want. Later on in my life, sometime down the line once I have graduated college I would like to have a career where I feel secure in the fact that I can provide for my family and myself but to one day feel like I won’t ever have to work again for the things that I want and need while continuing to maintain a certain lifestyle is very unrealistic.

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