And all these years later, it’s still hard for Bullard to talk about. She was robbed of her childhood and her innocence, and she explained that focusing on that fact upsets her too much. So instead, she tries to emphasize the good in her life instead: her son, and her own incredible strength of character.
“It could’ve been worse. I could’ve been on drugs, I could’ve been an alcoholic, I could’ve been a lot of things,” she said. “But he [O’Neil] is a blessing, not only to me and my family immediately, but so many around the world that see where he’s come from, and that, if he could do it, we can too.”
Both Daria Bullard and O’Neil acknowledged that their life together was difficult in many ways; they disagreed and butted heads a lot, with Daria Bullard explaining that as a child herself, she didn’t really know how to properly discipline a child. O’Neil struggled with having a lack of a father figure or male role model in the home for him. He also got into trouble, falling in with the wrong crowd so he could avoid getting bullied. “I used to get picked on a lot, because I didn’t have the best clothes, shoes weren’t always the greatest,” he said. “I used to wear broken glasses. My nickname was ‘Eyes.’ And so I used to either fight, or cause a disturbance, in order to try to keep from being the ‘not cool’ guy.”
O’Neil and Daria Bullard.
Daria Bullard was able to turn things around by sending O’Neil to the Florida Sheriff’s Boys Ranch, in Live Oak, Florida. He originally hated his mother for sending him, but after three years, it made a huge change in his life. “That moment, of going there, 12 years old, and feeling like I was thrown away, with already having a strained relationship with my mom… I felt like she had given up on me,” O’Neil said. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized just how much my mom had to sacrifice. My mom didn’t graduate from high school until after I graduated high school. So I try to do my best to give her those moments now, realizing and understanding that like, my mom is still a kid, really.”
