Last semester, I took WRIT 118 with Dr. Rylander, and for our final paper, we were tasked with writing a memoir that illuminates a significant memory, experience, turning point, or moment of understanding in our lives and to incorporate research in our paper in some way . The tricky part was trying to find something to write about. I’ve had the idea of writing about families dealing with housing issues because of low income and how it affects the kids for a while. This is due to my own personal issues with housing issues and low income throughout my childhood. A part of why I wrote this is that I feel in the media, we don’t hear enough from the perspective of people who don’t have a childhood bedroom to go home to. The other part was to talk about the effects low income has on the families-mostly the kids-stress, and the ability to keep housing. I have had to move a few times through my childhood, but weirdly enough, I always got to keep nearly the same route to school almost every day in my early education. The one road that would always stay constant was Highway F. In my memoir, I use the road as a sort of way to tell the timeline of different times I’ve moved and how it impacted me. I then used trusted sources and cited quotes that backed up the impact that housing instability and low income have on children. My hope with writing this is to give a deeper perspective to people with low income and teach that life can be as unstable as housing sometimes, but it’s ok because life is always changing, so you should try to stay in the present.
