Beating the odds?

Woman who fought through poverty and beat odds now questions if fight was worth the effort; she doesn't see payoff

 

 

By John Veauthier

Youngstown State University

 

 “We fight to beat the odds, and then we beat the odds and we’re still in the same place that we were in the beginning. It’s like, college I didn’t know my only reward would be internal.”

 

Emily’s face is kissed with freckles from her high cheekbones to the bridge of her small nose. Her face is only masked by a slight hint of iridescent eye shadow which brings out her cat-like green eyes lurking inquisitively behind her brand new oval, brown and turquoise glasses.

There is no flash of bright color in her clothing or personal style. At 35, a slight touch of grey mingles on her the crest of her hairline against her sun-bleached, strawberry blonde hair which she likes to keep off her face into a messy ponytail that lays gently on her light caramel skin.

With her daughter Mikalya or “Kay” as she likes to call her, Emily has the ability to comfortably blend into any crowd.
 
She looks like a mild unassuming young mother who you would see at Target or T.J. Maxx and unless you stopped to look at her extremely close, you might not even noticed that she is multi-racial. She carries herself with an air of confidence, which comes from years and years of walking through strife.

 

Her face is not marred with the lines of a hard life though she clearly has had one and her smile, is large and full-faced. When she laughs, she does it with her whole body as though joy is boiling out of her. 

 While in the Psychology undergraduate program at YSU, Emily Stanley personified many of the hardworking students who attend Youngstown State University. Balancing the challenges of day-to-day life and the constant struggle to meet deadlines to get a degree. “I believe that in socio-economic status what you have makes you who you are,” she said.

 This is Emily’s story.

 
“When I was born, my mother never touched me and she told them to take me out of the room immediately,” she said.

Emily’s adoptive mother told her this story about her birth mother, when she was very young. Although Emily’s adoptive mother was not in the room when Emily’s biological mother allegedly asked the nurses to take Emily away, Emily believes that her biological mother never held her, and that fact shapes her earliest memory.

In the 1980’s, a child who was born multi-racial, with green eyes and red hair, and up for adoption, posed a cultural dilemma to social workers. Emily was one of those children, considered to be a special needs child because of her multi-racial background.   They did not want to give her to an African American family because her skin tone is a bright caramel, a color that is referred to as “high yellow” with a cultural negative connotation, fearful that she may become ostracized. However they did not want to give her to a Caucasian family either, fearing that Emily may be passed off as “white” and never be exposed to her African-American heritage.

With this racial predicament, the female social worker who was in charge of Emily’s case decided that the next person to walk in the door would be the adoptive parents. Emily’s future was decided by little more than a coin toss.
 
After briefly living with a foster family, she was adopted when she was 6 months old. A Caucasian family, the Stanley’s,  who already had two biological children, a son who was 5 and a daughter who was 4, opened their home and hearts to Emily. Until the age of 7, Emily had a pretty normal life, though a bit unorthodox as she fondly describes her parents as “ex-hippies” and remembers summers at an  Ohio nudist camp from the time she was 4 through 7.

Emily knew from an early age that she was adopted, then when she was 7 years old, The Stanley family decided to adopt three more bi-racial children who were all siblings, aged 3, 5, and 7,.

 
Emily feels that she was grouped in with the adopted children. In her opinion, she went from the baby of the family to the middle child. However she puts a positive spin on it when she said “we became like the fantastic four, so it was like us against the two other kids.”  Emily said the two biological children were never in trouble and the fantastic four were always grouped together when it came time for punishment, even if Emily was not part of the bad behavior.

Emily’s parents eventually divorced due to differing opinions on recreational activity and child rearing. Although Emily was given opportunities to be part of events for the African -American community, she never felt as though she fit in, because she was visibly different.

At the age of 12, Emily was already consuming alcohol; she remembers one evening when she arrived home after a night out at Wick Park. When she returned home, her angry mother greeted her, which led a to physical altercation between Emily, her mother and a can of Libby’s pumpkin puree. Emily threw the large can across the room, instead of at her mother’s head. Emily ran into the kitchen and with a carving knife, pointed it at her wrist and stared into her mother’s eyes. This suicide threat landed Emily in North Side Hospital for 30 days.

 

When Emily left North Side Hospital, she was diagnosed with clinical depression and given anti-depressants. Twenty three years later, Emily still takes anti-depressants but she makes this point about her disease; “My mother and I have the same diagnosis and we’re not related, so is it nature or nurture?”  Emily did not speak to her mother again until she was 24 and when her daughter was born.
 
Success story

When Emily was asked if she thought she was an example of a “success story” she responded firmly with a devilish grin “No, I don’t think I am a success story.”  When she was 17 years old and after living with her father on the North side for about five years, she decided to drop out of high school due to a break up with a high school basketball player.

Although Emily’s father loved and cared for her, she said he was often busy and she had to parent herself. “It was like living in the ‘Do what you want zone.’” Emily continued living with her father for another year, until he was ready to remarry and at the age of 18, Emily said she was asked to leave her father’s home.  

She was working paycheck to paycheck and longed for a more stable job. She enrolled in a three-week course and became a State Tested Nurses Aid, STNA. She liked the position at first but soon found that it was taking a big toll on her young body.

 With no high school diploma and her only work experience as an STNA, she learned that she would need to finish her high school education if she wanted to stop living paycheck to paycheck . “The way I was raised and where I was raised at, it’s like, I saw what I didn’t want to become.  Without struggle, Emily passed her GED exam the first time and decided to go to college.

Working as a stripper for college tuition

 

 

She also decided to do a little bit of stripping on the side to support herself. She said it was nothing too serious or salacious, just the classic lap dance-for-tuition scenario. For Emily, stripping was a way to gain total control over her life and not depend on a man.

When Emily was 23 and stripping her way through her first couple semesters at YSU, she became intimately involved with a client of the strip club that she was working for. After dating briefly, she got pregnant. Emily quit stripping and proceeded to date her former client and eventually moved in with him. After four years together, he was dragged off to jail leaving Emily to work nights and go to school during the day. She did it, though, and graduated with her bachelors’ degree and went on to graduate school.

After her graduate studies were complete, Emily found herself making less money than she was before she went to college. Only this time she was again living paycheck to paycheck, and trying to pay back student loans. Not to mention doing it all as a single mother, who had serious doubts about her new found career as a licensed counselor.

She was working with under privileged youth, who suffer from addiction issues. Emily thought she would be helping at risk youth, thereby helping the community at large. But in the process of trying to help she realized that she was forced to conform to state-mandated therapeutic treatment ideas that she personally did not believe in. These personal realizations led her to walk away from the psychiatric field.

Reality doesn't meet expectations

After all of the hard work that she put into getting two degrees, she finds herself today hating the industry that she worked so hard to get into and resentful of the education that did not prepare her for the financial hardship that is facing. Today Emily is not using her degrees or license; she is working as a waitress and receiving  government assistance. This is the only way that she can get comparable health care to when she working as a counselor. What does she have to say to the next “Emily” who is walking in the University's doors with dreams of helping others through talk therapy?

 “Unless they are prepared to go get their PHD, I wouldn’t do it” “You can’t even get an office job with a BA in Psychology."

 

 Emily is completely tapped out of financial aid and no longer can go back to school to kill some time while she tries to come up with a plan for her next move. When she was asked “What advice would you give to yourself, if you could go back time before you went to college, now knowing it all?”

“I would have said to myself, get into a company and try to grow. I don’t think that I would have even done it.” Emily’s co-worker has been at the same restaurant for seven years and makes over $45,000 dollars a year as Emily puts it “with nothing, no degree, nothing.” “Part of the problem with our generation is that we are a very expectant generation, we think that we graduate from college with a degree which somehow equals seven years of experience, and it doesn’t.”

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Produced for Journalism as Literature Class at YSU, Fall 2014. For more information or to use this story, contact Professor Alyssa Lenhoff at ajlenhoff@ysu.edu.