Cassandre, 21 – Living In Poverty

She might have appeared on your youtube feed, but what people don’t know is that the creative and funny, Cassandre, did not always have food on the table throughout her childhood.

“I was born in France. My family left France when I was 4, because my dad past away when I was 4. So, my mom decided to pick up everything, take a huge leap of faith over, the Atlantic ocean to Texas. Houston, Texas.”

“I actually surprisingly have very a vivid memory from France, but I don’t remember what I ate yesterday. I don’t understand how that works, but I’m just guessing that God [has] preserved my memory because I do miss it.”

“Because I didn’t have a father figure in my life, at least for my childhood, I think I struggled a lot with my self-esteem. I should blame it all on not having a father, but I think it helps a lot having a mom and dad in a home… My dad would have been helpful in that development, my self-worth.”

Migrating to the States as a young single mother with three kids, Cassandre’s mother struggled financially. Her dad who had always been the breadwinner, was no longer there to provide for the family.

“A big obstacle was living in poverty, most of my childhood. When we moved to Texas my mom never really got an education in France… When we came to the U.S. we struggled a lot financially. My brothers… weren’t really around all the time, all that much, because they didn’t want to be home. I didn’t want to be home, but I  didn’t have a choice cause I was what, 6,7 or 10.”

“Poverty has his interesting thing of destroying families or uniting them, and I think it did the latter… it just destroyed my family honestly. I mean, I saw we are close but, close meaning text and calls once every couple weeks or months.”

“It left me feeling like an orphan even if I have a family.”

“Now that I recognize that I feel this way, I accept it. And, I’m not gonna distract myself from that anymore. It’s there and I need to change my sadness, my confusion, and my brokenness, and turn that into positive eventually. Because I’m sure there’s tons of people that may feel that way too, even when they have a perfectly good family, they may still feel like the black sheep or an orphan, so to speak. ”

“Right now, I’m good. I’m happy. I understand myself a lot more than I did a couple of years ago. I have a loving Father in heaven who’s always keeping an eye on me, even when I don’t want it. Even when I’m like ‘can you leave me alone. I got this,’ and then clearly a couple of days later, I’m just like breaking down crying, sobbing.” “My mom and I both got baptized when I was 8. There were so much drama and instability because of poverty that, I feel like, everybody in our family’s faith was kind of like wavering or destroyed. It was bad.

“One day I saw my mom reading the Book of Mormon in French, I asked her’ what’s so special about that book’ and she didn’t even say a word to me, she just leaned over and picked up an English copy and handed it to me. I was like ‘challenge accepted’, grabbed and went to the back of our one bedroom apartment and just like kneeled. I remember saying, ‘God, like, what’s so special about this book?’ I opened the first chapter and I read it, and immediately  I felt the spirit so strong, and I knew God was aware of me.”

“I just felt like, that was the church that I could strengthen my ties and my understanding of who God really is. I knew who He was, that He was my Heavenly Father. Even though I didn’t have a physical father, I didn’t completely understand what I father figure was, Heavenly Father made it clear who he was in my life.”

“My past self that I can picture talking to is the, I’m assuming, middle schooler-me. I think I was in probably 6th or 7th grade. And I was lying on the couch crying at night. It was a one bedroom apartment, and my brother stole basically the room, and my mom and I slept on the couch. And my mom wasn’t there, she was working the late shift and I’m assuming we didn’t have electricity that night. So I couldn’t focus on school and I couldn’t finish my homework because I had to do homework with a candlelight and I don’t know if I had candlelight that day. So I just remember me just going to bed, going to my couch. I was wide awake, I was holding my hands like this, clenching them and staring up to Heavenly Father saying ‘why? I want to be a part of your life, and I want you to be a part of my life, but I’m struggling to believe that you’re there and that you actually care about me. Because I don’t have enough food to eat and I don’t even have enough light to finish my homework.”

“What I would say to her is, God does love you, look for the light in your life now in the present. My favorite holiday is Christmas. My favorite part of Christmas is the lights around the houses when it’s dark outside and there’s lights. Yes, there is darkness in your life, but so that you can appreciate the lights that in your life right now. Don’t look at the darkness, look at what’s clearly standing out in your life and that’s the light and that God loves you so much.”