Teresa Amara had just returned from Whitewater about 30 minutes before I arrived at her Golden Leaf Trail’s residence on the east side of Madison. She had gone there to drop off some food items for her youngest son, Ibrahim, who is studying for a master’s degree at UW–Whitewater.
After she ushered me into her four-bedroom house, she offered me a bowl of grapes that had been sitting on top of a dining counter. She sat at the edge of a seven-seat brown velvet sectional couch and switched off her television in preparation for our interview.
The cream-painted walls of her sitting room were mostly decorated with elementary and high school photos of her boys and their graduation certificates.
Amara, 64, is a single parent of three who first came to the U.S. from Sierra Leone in 1984 as an international student. Her effort to educate all her kids to university level has earned her immense admiration from many in the African community, considering the challenges that she faced after her divorce.
A 2022 publication by Annie E. Casey Foundation found that the more than 23 million children in the U.S. who live in a single-parent family have the potential to drop out of school and engage in high-risk behaviors. However, Amara is one of the single parents who has made a difference to educate all her kids to university level and impart positive behaviors in them. She is using her experience to mentor other single parents who are struggling to raise their kids.
Amara is an academic and career advisor at Madison Area Technical College. She is a UW–Madison alumna with master’s degrees in political science and adult education.
When she got divorced in 2005, her eldest son was in high school, while the other two were in middle school. She was not only faced with the burden of raising three kids while working full-time, but she was also shocked to find out she needed to pay a debt of $43,000.
Her ex-husband had taken out credit cards in both of their names without her knowledge, and he did not pay for the mortgage on their home for three months. This resulted in a lawsuit against the former couple, and by then, her ex-husband had traveled back to Africa.
“I cried the day I received the court letter, because he withdrew money from our account with the pretense that he was going to pay the mortgage,” she said.
Because of that, Amara’s account was garnished $700 every pay period until the debt was repaid.
“I would get broke anytime they deducted that money from my account,” she said.
She ended up losing the house, and she moved her family to a smaller apartment.
This was like a restart for Amara. Her marriage had broken, her savings had depleted, her credit score was below the federal minimum and her hope of being a homeowner was shattered.
As a single parent with three kids and a full-time employee, her daily routine included preparing breakfast for the kids and getting them ready for school before she could go to work, and then picking them back up after work.
She enrolled them into various sports so that they could stay longer in school until she was off from work.
“I paid for them to do all of that stuff just to keep them busy and they don’t get into trouble. So that by the time we all came home, sometimes I don’t even cook, I’ll just go buy McDonald’s on our way,” she said.
She regularly checked on her kids in school, and she was very selective about their friendships. She would always check the background of the parents of her kids’ friends before she could allow them to hang out.
“I would rather have them in my house where I can watch them than leave them to people who can have negative influences on them,” she said.
When the kids were ready for college, she was lucky to have grants and low-interest loans for them. Also, the sporting disciplines that she had enlisted them into later reduced some of her financial burdens, as two of them had partial funding for playing football for their universities.
While she was settling all those bills, she was still saving some money and rebuilding her credit. That qualified her in 2012 to get a mortgage for the house where she currently lives.
Today, all of her three boys are university graduates. Abu, the eldest, has a master of science degree in public policy from the University of Minnesota and he is a lawyer. Driss, her middle son, has a master’s degree in social work and another one in business administration, which he earned in the last graduation ceremony held by UW-Madison in May of this year.
And Ebrahim will graduate in December from UW–Whitewater with a master of science in education-professional development with an emphasis in health, physical education and coaching.
Cecilia Blibo has been a close friend and confidante of Amara’s for about 30 years. She admires Amara’s determination to educate her kids amid the challenges she went through after her divorce.
“She is a woman who is very bold in saying her mind to her kids and she was very determined to see that her kids were educated,” Blibo said.
Amara seemed very fulfilled about the progress her boys have made, looking back from how far she has brought them as a single mother. “My goal was to ensure that they would not be liabilities to me forever, and they should not be at the mercy of the police,” she said.
Most single parents in the African community tap from Amara’s experience to manage their homes. She will retire in three years. The house is getting lonely for her because the boys are now living to lead their own lives.
“I will miss them, but I thank God that they can stand on their own even if I were to die today,” Amara said.
