Immigrating to America is difficult and is challenging to many families. My family was one of those. When interviewing my mom, she told her story about her experience immigrating to America from Ukraine with my dad. From the start, it was already hard for them, she said, “We’ve never been to the airport so it was very confusing for us and didn’t know what to do. We barely got on the airplane.” Not only did my parents have to go through the very difficult moving progress, my mom was pregnent with me. This was especially hard for her. My parents have never been on an airplane before that. Not knowing how long they were going to be sitting for, and a long 14 hours, they finally landed at O’hare airport.
Still pregnant with me, my mom and dad told me how difficult it was to get settled in America. My dad told me, “It’s not as hard for other people to move to the United States because they either have money or friends and family who can help them. We didn’t have that help. We came to the United States with $50 and have no family or friends here.” When I asked them where they stayed overnight, they told me they ended up finding an old friend on Facebook who lived in Chicago. They talked for a little bit on the phone and were allowed to come over to stay at his friend’s house in the south side of Chicago. Desperately needing money and trying to start our new life in America, my dad found a job at construction with many other Ukrainians and Lithuanians. Of course, it was very hard at first with only my dad working and my mom at home pregnant. Four months after my parents immigrated, I was born in a hospital in Chicago. This allowed my mom to start working. Looking for jobs, my mom got a job as a caretaker. She told me, “I got this job to support the family, but also so I can afford the costs of getting my degree in accounting. My mom was an accountant too so I had past experiences. Getting my degree was very easy and even landed with a pretty good job a couple weeks later.” At this point, I was around one, and my family was financially ready to move out the south side of Chicago. At three years old, we moved from the south side of Chicago to Woodridge. Life started becoming easier, I made more friends, and felt safer going outside everyday.
At five years old, my family moved to Naperville where we still live to this day. It’s fascinating everytime I hear this story. How they were able to overcome such challenges to get where they and the family is now. Not everyone has family members who can tell such a story and I’m glad my parents came from a different country.