On Nov. 3, 1988, I was born in Jefferson Davis Hospital in downtown Houston, Texas. Houston has been, and always will be, my home. I’ve lived in just about every part of the city growing up. I know my city as well as anyone. Since I was roughly a year old, my father has been in prison and I have only seen him in person once. However, this is not the toughest obstacle I have had to overcome in my life. Before anyone is mistaken and feels that the lack of a father was a setback in my life, I must clear things up. For as many times as you will hear me refer to myself in this article, I must say that this is completely unfair because my beautiful mother has been by my side through it all, so as much as this is my story, it is also hers.

My mother and I have been close since the day I was born. From the time I was able to contemplate thoughts, my mother has always been the most important person to me. My mother had my little brother from a different man than my father two and a half years after I was born; at the time, things did not seem all too bad because there was relative peace. However, when my mom was pregnant with my second brother, things went awry in a hurry. One day my mother and I were stranded on the highway and the car ride home from a group of men led to six years of frequent domestic violence and mental strain. I was four years old when it all started, and being a kid was not a very realistic option anymore.

After watching my pregnant mother get beaten and battered and have to be taken to the hospital, the ride in the ambulance was easily the most memorable ride of my life. It was that night that I saw what I thought was true pain, but I was mistaken. While I was crying, my mother could not help but smile at me. She’s definitely crazy, but she was smiling for good reason. She told me a few things that I will never forget. “Mijo, you shouldn’t be so worried because he’ll never be able to hurt me. A real man could never put his hands on a woman or a child, and for that reason alone, he’ll never be able to hurt me. I want you to promise me that you will always love and respect women the best that you can so that mama can be proud of the man you are.” Of course I had no second thoughts about making that promise to her, and to this day I feel I’ve kept it to the best of my ability.

For the next six years, I lived watching my mother get beaten on any given night, and continue to carry out her responsibilities of going to work and taking care of her kids like no other woman could. Other than the insane amount of work she did to change our lifestyle, she did all of the small things that get overlooked by most kids. She packed our lunches everyday, got our clothes ready for school, told us how much she cared, helped with homework, and made it to every football or basketball game she could. It may not sound like much, but when you have nothing to begin with, the little things become so much more appreciated; this is a lesson my mother never failed to convey to me. Finally, my mother decided to move away from my brothers’ dad for good; she was tired of the beatings, our neighborhood, and the schools we attended. This decision started a new era in my life that was very hard and painful.

I had to be separated from my mom. I wanted to break every night I went to bed, but a new value on school was embedded into my head. If my mother felt it was important enough for me to attend a good school that she was willing to be apart from me for a while, it must have been important for me to do well, and that’s what I did. It was bad enough living with a man who disrespected my mother in every way possible, a man who tried to turn my brothers against me, and a man who just was not a good person at all, but to do it without having the only person to ever truly care about me up to that point was the most difficult thing I’ve ever faced.

After struggling to stay happy and motivated, and even being expelled from school in the seventh grade, I continued to keep my head high and strive for the high grades my mother expected from me when she placed me in the good school. After teaching myself seventh grade in home school alone, I went on to make a great comeback in eighth grade and was able to move back with my mother for high school.

Being in the same school for four straight years was like a dream to me, something not only impractical, but highly unrealistic. Somehow though, my mother found a way to make it happen. At 20 minutes before seven in the morning, she would drive me to a bus stop only so that I could go to a better school. This was not something she was supposed to do for me, but for the sake of my future, my mother would break rules, sacrifice time and money, and lose sleep if she had to. Her sacrifice and unconditional love was not new to me; she had done it all my life. I have capitalized on the opportunities that she gave me by becoming the first person in my family to graduate from high school, the first one to go to a major university, and I am working to become the first person to obtain a college degree, and if everything goes as planned, I will pursue a higher degree as well.

My name is Jimi Rodriguez, I am from Houston, Texas, and I am a Business Scholar at The Ohio State University. I am on academic scholarship through the Office of Minority Affairs and am paving the way for a new trend that I hope will someday change the way my entire family views education and success. I hope that my younger brothers and cousins will see my success and make it their own and more. The sky is the limit, and I just happen to be the lucky person to start it with the help of my mother and many others throughout my life. There are no excuses out there for anyone. If I can accomplish what I already have after the life I started with, any of you reading this can do the same and more.