Migrated to the US at 3 yrs old. Raised with wise guys but kept my Latino roots. Joined the USMC at 17 Travel the world. I love Latin music and it became part of my survival. I have been fortunate to have met and performed with legendary musician. Dealt with drug abuse and betrayal. Honored my mother and love my children but the system took my life away due to my divorce. Now I begin life again and many doors open on my way to a Grammy! I thank God Everyday and Believe!
Posts Tagged family
Believe………
Jan 20
Waiting for me
Dec 15
On February 19, 2002 my father called me to discuss my mother’s declining health. He told me that the nurses had informed him that she would pass away in the next few months. I felt so bad about this, and all the pain she had been put through because of Alzheimer’s and breast cancer, I started praying at 9:30pm that she be freed and allowed to go home.
Later on that evening, around 3 in the morning, the telephone started ringing. I was in a deep sleep in which I was dreaming that I was sitting in a red convertible next to my mother who was driving. She had long flowing hair, and was smiling as she drove. We kept driving to try and find the right place she had to go to die.
I finally heard the telephone and awoke to answer it. It was my father who called to say my mother was dying and that I needed to come from Washington DC to Minnesota as soon as possible.
I made my travel arrangements and drove to work to take care of a few things on the way to the airport. During that time, the care facility called me to see what time I would be arriving and to let me know, not much time was left. I asked them to put the telephone to my mother’s head so she could hear. Once that was done, I told her that I was her daughter, and that I was coming to see her and I asked her to wait.
While on the airplane, I went to the flight attendant to ask if my seat could be moved closer to the door because of the situation. After she checked with the captain, I was moved by the door, and the airplane crew had other folks wait until I got off the plane. For some reason, the plane also ended up at the closest gate to the rental cars.
The rental facility got me through their process in under 10 minutes which allowed me to drive quickly to the care facility. When I arrived, I did not know what I would find, my mother still alive, or that she had passed away.
As I approached her room, the nursing staff saw me and escorted me down. They told me for some reason the dying process stopped, that they had never seen anything like it, and that for a time, she was holding her own. My mother had waited for me before passing away.
I am still struck to this day with the fact that my mother heard me, and waited for me. What a great gift.
My name is Chantel and I one of 12 adopted children in a family of 15.
When I was playing high school basketball, the only college I wanted to go to was Temple University. I had set three goals in my life…graduate from college, play professional basketball, and win an Oscar.
One of my final high school games, the Temple Assistant Coach came to watch me play. What he didn’t know is that early in the morning that day, when I was working at Hardees to get a few more hours, my birth mother showed up at my job. I had never met her. By the way…5 days earlier, she called me on the phone out of the blue and told me she was my mother. I never told her where I worked and she knew I did not want to meet her. Nevertheless, she showed up at my job at 8 in the morning with my step sisters and half sister. This meeting shook me to the core. I played a horrible game because of it. The next day, the Temple Coach called me and said they were going in another direction. The signing period was almost over and I now had nowhere to go.
My adopted mother spoke to another adoptive parent who happened to know the Head Coach at Auburn University. He sent the Coach my tape and the Coach came to watch me play in an all-star game. He offered me a scholarship which I accepted. It turned out that during my four years at Auburn, we played in 3 NCAA National Championships and had very successful seasons.
Playing in those games afforded me the opportunity to call and be noticed by the WNBA Director of Player Personnel who then offered me the chance to try out for the new league where only 80 women from around the world were going to be drafted.
There is a lot more to this story, but suffice to say, if my birthmother had not shown up at my job that day, I would have probably ended up at Temple and not had the type of college career I had. (We ended up playing Temple in the NCAA Tournament my freshman year and won…by a lot) I would have never ended up in the WNBA. What I thought was the worst day of my life turned out to probably be the biggest turning point in my life. I LOVE BEING ADOPTED!!!!!
Coming to Terms with it all…
Oct 16
Two years ago I left the state of New Jersey and moved to Miami. The reason for the move was to gain life experience somewhere outside of the place I was born. I drilled into my head over and over that a person simply should not be born, raised, married, and put to rest ALL in the same town…so I left. I lived on my own for the first time, got into debt, got out of debt, found love, and then was broken by it. There were good things that came out of it though…I finished school and began doing stand-up comedy. Something I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time and I finally grew a pair to just get up there and do. Next thing I knew my life became a statistic of this economy and things were getting tight. I came to a fork in the road and wondered about Frost…which is the road less traveled. It took me a while to come to terms with all of it but here I am. Back in New Jersey living with my parents all because I thought that coming home would be the best bet for my career. Thing is my career wasn’t the only thing that I was looking forward to…everything and everyone has changed here but some say that maybe it’s just me who’s changed. I’m at a clean slate now and New York City is there for the taking. The was a reason I lost my job, there was a reason I’ve been running into non-stop signs telling me…go be the comic, director, writer, and actor that you know you HAVE to be…because there isn’t anything else your really good at. So I start again now, start fresh and new…keeping my hopeless romantic side out of play, my need for socializing out of play…the only thing that matters now is placing myself where I need to be and it is going to be a road with bumps, hills, slopes, and sometimes even pits…but I WILL get to the end and maybe somebody should watch…for one mans struggles and dreams can be another mans answers.
