Help Saving My Mom's House

Dear friends, family, and loved ones,

This GoFundMe is for my beautiful mother, Teresa, who is at risk of losing her home in Orlando, Florida.

To tell the story of my mother is to tell you about someone who has worked tirelessly to keep our family afloat. Since she immigrated to the US from Nicaragua in the 80s, she has had health issues, which were at their worst when I was 12 and she had a stroke from the stress of raising her kids and trying to survive as a barista at the airport Starbucks on less than $23,000 a year.

After recovering, my mom kept working through her multiple illnesses, including cancer, steadily paying down the mortgage on her home as best she could. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Florida and traveling halted, Starbucks let her go. At the time I was grateful. She is 59 years old, high-risk, and waking up at 3AM every day to open her Starbucks location at the airport was not good for her health. I myself lost the multiple service industry jobs I had. I tried telling myself money didn’t matter, as long as we both came out of the pandemic alive and together. I was lucky enough to qualify for food stamps and sent her half of everything I received. Any money that I made, I put some aside for her. I really tried convincing myself we’d be okay.

A few months later, she called me on Facetime. Her Bell’s Palsy—a side-effect of the stroke she had when I was younger, which made her cheeks and eyes droop like they were melting—returned. I was devastated and afraid for her. It took me back to when I was 12 and we brought her home from the hospital, barely able to walk. Without my mother, it’s hard to see the point in anything. That call was a bleak reminder of how precarious our situation truly was. Fortunately, a new medication helped relieve the Bell’s Palsy and her illness is mostly invisible again, though she lives with chronic pain and is on several medicines that keep her in a dull fog.

Since then, I’ve done everything I could to get us back on our feet. If you know me, you know that I have tried, saying yes to as many jobs as possible, sending money, but it’s hard to do when I struggle to pay my own bills. Still I’ve remained hopeful, because she taught me to be. It is important that you know our lives aren’t all suffering. My mom is so funny. She cooks her a** off. She shares the fruit from her plantain and avocado trees with the neighborhood. But hope can only get you so far. She needs a place to live. I’m asking the community for help.

Recently she’s been receiving letters from the bank threatening to take her home away. During the early days of the pandemic, when our focus was just on surviving, she’d been putting everything on credit cards and a situation that was already bad became much worse. The reality is that she is on disability, unable to work, in $30,000 of credit card debt, and all the payments she’d worked hard to make on the house growing up were for nothing: because of a bankruptcy, the mortgage has remained at the same amount since she bought it: About $110,000. It doesn’t seem like an impossible amount, but with her disability it is. Every month, she gets deeper into a hole. I’m scared of what this is doing to her mentally and physically. I already almost lost her once. She’s missing payments. The bank has sent her letters trying to get her to leave. Her insurance keeps getting raised. Interest charges are piling up. It’s too much.

I am not asking for all of that money. What I’m asking is for an opportunity to give her a tiny break while I figure out what to do next. This is not the end for us. I just want to be able to give her a new beginning. I appreciate your generosity and your support. Thank you for reading.