Jayson Tatum in 2016: “Way before high school, I’d already been to college. My mom had me when she was 19 years old. She was just a college freshman. But she was determined not to become another statistic, not to end up on welfare, not to drop out of school.

So she brought me to class with her.From the time I was a baby until I was about eight years old, when my mom went to school, I went to school with her. I remember sitting in the back of her classes, eating snacks or immersing myself in books or video games. I kept quiet, listening in here and there — to me, most of her professors seemed boring and talked a lot. But I had my things to focus on, she had hers. It felt normal. So that’s what we did. When my mom couldn’t afford a babysitter and Grandma was working, we’d go to class together.And by the time I got to sixth grade, my mom had gotten her bachelor’s and law degrees from St.

Louis University.I’ll never forget her law school graduation. All my cousins and grandparents showed up. When they called my mom’s name, I stood up in my button-down and slacks and screamed, ‘I love you! I’m proud of you!’She did it, I told her her after the ceremony, but she corrected me. ‘We did it.’Those nights when she was still in school, we’d sit at the dining room table together. We were each doing our homework. She’d be walking back and forth from the kitchen, cooking dinner while I asked her questions about my math assignments. (Mom was the best with math, she always found a way to break things down in terms that I could understand.) And when it was my bedtime she’d tuck me in and then return to the dining room table, staying up for hours, studying, reading, making sure she was keeping up with her own schoolwork.She’d often say to me, ‘Jay, don’t let anyone tell you what you can or can’t be. No matter what.’”(via The Players’ Tribune)