Chapter 402.
<strong>Chapter 402. A Heart-Pounding Day Together with My Girlfriend: Eating Marshmallows while Telling a Campfire Story. (3/4)</strong>
<span style="font-weight:400">“How much money did your mom end up making?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Well, since everybody would typically go for the three subject limit, using $28 a month per course… over 9 months... with 3 courses per student... and 239 students… factoring in the three teachers she had to pay at a $400 a month sry, I guess it would work out to be somewhere around $160,000 annually. Of course, there were expenses to take into ount.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“That much? Shouldn’t she have been pretty well off in that case?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Well… normally you’d think so. But… she wasn’t even doing that well with all that money. She had a bunch of other expenses. For Christmas, she’d buy a present for all her students and even take them all to a nice restaurant. Many of those students had never even been to a restaurant before in their entire lives. Some of them would break down in tears. She also gave out some freebies. For some students who didn’t perform very well in school, whose parents couldn’t afford to pay due to poverty, she actually taught them for free in secret.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Wow, she sounds like she was a saint.”
<span style="font-weight:400">After Rosa fed me another marshmallow, I responded, “I… don’t know about that, she ended up overworking herself into poor health. Doing all that was extremely draining on her while trying to raise me. She worked tirelessly at it without rest. She was simultaneously fighting a financially draining, expensive legal battle against this country’s government over the course of those three years for wrongfully deporting her.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Not only did she have her teaching and legal fight to worry about, she also undertook a side project.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“She even had the energy for a side project?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah, during the days she wasn’t teaching, grading the work of students she was teaching, or talking towyers, she used the time from Friday to Sunday. She was developing some really crappy underdeveloped backwaternd she received from her grandparents with the intention to sell it. She had to clear out thend herself. Her grandparents hadn’t been able to as they’d been sick and ill since she was young. Her grandmother was actually quite nice to herpared to her own mother.”
<span style="font-weight:400">It’s a shame they died when she was still pretty young.
<span style="font-weight:400">“She went around carrying me with her under the scorching hot sun holding an umbre over her head and cleared out ‘the bush’ on thatnd with her own two hands. She naturally couldn’t do everything alone and she did also have to hire workers to install drainage and roads on thatnd. As she didn’t have much breathing room financially, she had to stand out there keeping a close eye on those workers like a hawk to make sure everything was actually being done and they weren’t cking off.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“That sounds pretty awful.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“It really was for her, she was weak to the heat and passed out easily from it. But if that wasn’t enough, there were also squatters on thend she owned who would break down any progress made. She had to spend money to hire police to keep an eye on it to prevent her hard work from being destroyed.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“It really sounds like a nightmare.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“The worst part of it was how her brothers were handed down the best ofnd which was already perfectly developed. They didn’t have to lift a finger, everything had been handed to them on a silver tter.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Her mother really didn’t care for her at all and it showed in how she was treated.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Doing all these thingsbined essentially ate up all the money she earned and more. Her father even pitched in $60,000, his entire savings, to help with her legal battle. She fought her case all the way up to the Supreme Court where the ruling was finally in her favor.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“So... after those three years of painstaking work she was able toe back here?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah. Three long years. But... for what? I still don’t understand the appeal. What she saw in this country. Was it her idealization of the term first world country? The thought that it would lead to a better future?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Though she was very hardworking, I can’t help but think she was mistaken. She was seeing things through a fence where the grass was greener on the other side. She couldn’t be happy with what she had... and because of that… things didn’t pan out as she wished.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“However, I suppose deep down she just really wanted to run away and escape from her family who treated her as if she wasn’t human. In that regard, I suppose it made sense why she wanted to flee to some far-offnd where their cold heartless gazes could not reach her.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“What happened after she returned with you?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“She lived happily ever after.” She worked herself into her grave.
<span style="font-weight:400">“But you just said-”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Don’t you think we should get to bed? It’s prettyte,” I cut her off to prevent her from questioning further.
<span style="font-weight:400">“I’m not sleepy yet.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Well, I am a bit sleepy.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Already?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah. We can continue this story another day.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“You promise?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah, I promise.”
<span style="font-weight:400">Rosa let out a sigh as she caved, “Haaaaah. Fine… I’ll hold you to that. You better tell me what happened after she came back.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“I will.”
<span style="font-weight:400">Despite my mother’s little sess won through the legal system, the story didn’t have much of a happy ending after all of her bitter struggles. The world wasn’t such an easy ce.
<span style="font-weight:400">In hindsight, she could have probably lived a much happier life if she forgot about this country and saved her money rather than squandering it by fighting that legal battle. My mother really drew the shortest end of the stick in life.
<span style="font-weight:400">That happily ever after bullshit in stories was nothing but a convenient lie adults told children to not crush their innocent little dreams. Going off my mother’s experience, happily ever after does not exist. If more was written after those alleged happy endings, you’d definitely discover that ideal ‘happily ever after’ ending was nonsense.
<span style="font-weight:400">Why do I say that?
<span style="font-weight:400">Well, in the end, after all her fighting to get back to this country, my mother never got another teaching job here. There just weren’t enough teaching jobs avable at that time. When a position opened up at a school, you’d apply through the school division but you needed to know the principal at that school to really have a shot atnding the position. This was because the principal would put in a rmendation on who to fill the position. Without a rmendation, your chances were as good as zero. The same could be said for just about any decent job these days though.
<span style="font-weight:400">My mother who’d gone through high school in her home country naturally didn’t have such convenient connections here.
<span style="font-weight:400">I couldn’t help but think, if she hadn’t gotten married, had me, and been deported so soon after she finished her degree... maybe things would have been different. Maybe... she would have found a teaching job if she had the chance to right after she graduated. But… there was no way to know for certain.
<span style="font-weight:400">I could only specte based on what I’d learned over the years my first time through life. Work experience within the country was valued far more than work experience from a third-world country like my mother’s. My mother naturally was unaware of that back then, she was clueless and had to learn everything the hard way from the ground up. It was one of the major reasons why she wouldn’t be contacted back by many of the employers she applied to upon her return. The gap in rted work experience within this country acted as a shackle that hindered all sorts of potential development opportunities for her.
<span style="font-weight:400">A gap of three years post-graduation looked like an eternity to employers. Whenbined with herck of connections, and being a single mother raising a child, her situation was utterly hopeless. She was considered unemployable for a lot of ces. No matter how much she struggled, nobody would give her a chance here.
<span style="font-weight:400">It was truly pitiful as she may have had a glimmer of hope before her father retired. Unlike her, he’d worked as a teacher in this country for 25 years and retired the same year my mother got married when he was 68 years old, two years before I was born.
<span style="font-weight:400">By the time my mother returned to this country with me, he’d already been retired for 6 years. He’d never been much of a social person and had kept to himself for all those years. He didn’t form deep rtionships with his students or colleagues. My mother often said he lived a lonely life.
<span style="font-weight:400">But that’s beside the point, any sort of connections he may have had in this country that might have proved useful in helping my mother get a job in education was essentially gone after six years into his retirement. If it was closer to when he was still working, he might have been a powerful asset and able to lend her a hand in her job hunt for a teaching position.