If you love your kids you will raise them lower middle class

As many of you know i grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood just a few minutes north or Hartford. For most of the years i remember it was just me and my mom living in the smallest house in town. Our kitchen table was an oversized electrical spool. Most of our furnature was lime green or orange and brown because its expensive to escape the 70's. No bedset, just a matress on the floor to comfort me at night. I could go on for pages about all the make-shift arrangements that we had in our house but im not going to. What made it even tougher for our small family was that we lived just within the school district of simsbury, CT. One of the richest school systems in one of the richest states. Im not a rare case. All the kids in my small town had the displeasure of being bussed into a school system that was based on something we didn't have.....money. Our parents weren't lawyers and doctors. They were babysitters, fry cooks, garbage men, and even janitors. This is the point of my story. We represented the heart and soul of the infrastructure of Simsbury and they didn't even appreciate it. My mom babysat their kids and was a dental assistant. The same dental assistant that helped the dentist put braces on rich kids but couldn't afford them for her own son. I guess when i look at it i wouldn't have it any other way because i learned to apreciate everything i did have, not what i didn't have. I didn't lust for more. I just wanted to see more of my mom. I remember i walked in on her once and she was just crying because she couldn't provide the life that she wanted for me. That my friends is why i am here. For my mom. I could have easily failed out of life but i stuck with it. I want to show my mom that she did provide for me, more than she could ever imagine. I didn't care that i showed up to swimming lessons with 2 empty milk jugs as swimmies cause we couldn't afford the inflateable orange ones. None of that matters now. I took every experience for what it was worth. So this May when i get my diploma it will be for my mom, im not getting it for me...im sorry but im just not. This diploma will be more my moms than mine. It will be the diploma that she wasn't able to get. It will be the same diploma that all those rich kids that picked on me and my mom would get. The difference is that i really earned it and i've been through more in my life than you could even imagine. You may have had a head start in the race but i came from behind and won it. So consider this story when you have kids of your own. If you give them everything they will have no sense of achievement. If you give them love, you will give them the support and confidence that they can achieve anything.