Jonathan’S House: A Mother’S Survival Through Faith

By Central Jennings and Misslady

This book is about a single mothers journey of survival, raising six children on her own and moving from a house to home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524617233

Central Jennings

Misslady was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lived in Baltimore, Maryland, and now resides in Utah.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

RESIDENCE #1

I lived in four different houses where I grew up, that I knew of. The neighborhoods were pretty nice. We had nice neighbors who treated us kids really nice. When my mom had to work, they would feed and read to us. I always wanted my own room, though and didn’t like sharing a room with my sister because I was neat and she was messy. Having had two sisters and two brothers….we had three bedrooms so having my own room was out of the question. I used to lay in my bed at night making up imaginary rooms and how it would be decorated. (Sometimes, our mission and visions in life starts when we are very young.) I believe when I was around age twelve or so, I used to decorate and change our living room and bedroom all the time. Every six or seven months my mom came home, the living room was changed around and she even told me, one time, to stop changing it around but I kept doing it…not out of disobedience…it was just something I loved to do. Didn’t know at that time I was suffering from depression at such an early age because of things that had happened to me or things I’ve seen happened. That was my way of relieving the stress. Our house had a lot of mice and one day, my brother and I were doing dishes, I saw a mouse and I started screaming. My dad came downstairs to investigate. I was very afraid of mice. Another time, my mom worked for a school so back then, in the 70’s, the workers got to divide the left over cakes and other goodies then take them home. I remember waking up to mice eating cakes next to my bed cause mom put it in our room so mice wouldn’t get to it…they got to it, lol. I was combing mom’s hair and a rat was near the piano. I was so scared, my mom wasn’t. We used to see rats as big as cats in the alley behind our house. It was horrible!

At age fifteen, our house caught on fire and was completely destroyed. Thank God, no one was in the house. We all were at school and our parents at work. We stayed in a hotel downtown and it was nice. We kids had a ball and our parents were very lenient on us and we soaked in the attention.

RESIDENCE #2

About a month later, we moved in our aunt and uncle house on their third floor. This was a huge house and the party house, lol. I know my mom hated it there cause she was super religious. She didn’t like listening to rock and roll and all that mess, as she would say. My dad, siblings and I had a ball there. We did not want to leave their house. That was one of the saddest days my siblings and I encountered. We received a lot of attention from everyone because we were the youngest set of cousins, being that my dad was the youngest of 10 children. We were being spoiled to the max

RESIDENCE #3

Our family moved to an apartment on the 2nd floor around the corner from our burnt down house and I hated it. My mom made up for all the times we got away with murder at my aunt and uncle’s house. I don’t know why but around this time, I was starting to express anger issues and I ran away a couple of times. I didn’t know at the time it was anger issues, I just knew I was someone I didn’t want to be. I kept getting beatings for just being me or a teenager. No one took the time to ask me questions or talk to me. My life was in turmoil, my family life was hard and I was often misunderstood. The only thing that would brighten up my days were hanging with my youngest aunt, going over another aunt’s house, to church, talking to my best friends and the crush I had on the guy up the street, who would later be my first love. Also at this time I was having mood swings and stayed a lot myself reading. I often felt lonely and unloved. I also was smart and got really good grades and even that started to fall apart. My grades were slipping and I start to skipping school. If your children start changing, dont get mad, talk to them in a soft voice. If we control our anger when we get mad, it makes a huge different, teaches them to control their own anger and a soft answer turns away