Mallory OConnor

Now I sit here in the early spring, windows open, stuck in the house on quarantine, aside from two days ago when I took the hour and a half drive to Bear Mountain to see his house for the first time in my life.. , I’ve always known I was a lot like my father without really knowing him.. it was just a feeling I got from family, family that I’m still to afraid to ask about my absent father When I returned to Connecticut about 7 years later,  I again reached out to my father while going through hard times, just as he did every-time I called him, he came, we went out for Italian food or seafood, and had our usual awkward meeting, through strained conversation. in the end it’s not my fault, I know that it was his job to forge a bond, it was his job to prove he wasn’t the person he was made out to be.

I didn’t intend on becoming a single mom, I don’t The fact that a lot of America, including people who thought I had learned compassion from, thinks that me and my kids should be standing in lines at food pantries, and unvaccinated from a coronavirus… scares me. Please don’t try to explain how everyone is equal when its legal for my employer to pay me $6.38 an hour, but cut them just below full-time so they can avoid providing me health insurance… I’m grateful that there are some Americans who don’t want to see me and my kids starve, or die from a preventable illness. Because my job will only give me enough hours to put me under full time so that they don’t have to give me insurance, a job that I can’t call out of without a doctors note.