DALTON, mitchell aaron

Truthfully, Mitchell would like to think that his personality can be summed up into really three words: kind, understanding and accessible. However there is so much more to the professor than meets the eye. Yes, he is a very kind and understanding person. He’s devoted his life to making sure that people are understood and that his students are given the best chance that they have. He’ll spend hours with a student doing one-on-one work just to help them understand the course just a little better. In his mind, if they do well then he does well.

While he is all of that, Mitchell also has a side to them that mirrors his mother’s personality. Growing up he was exposed to a woman who was impulsive and fearful of everything that moved. While he isn’t near as bad as she was, he has the worst habit of getting overly involved in peoples’ lives and then getting scared that something bad is going to happen. He pretty much lives in fear that every person he loves is going to fall apart.


When Denae Dalton was only seventeen she became pregnant with the son of then boyfriend Kyle Walters. Although she’d never tell anyone about it, this was the first time that she had ever had one of her emotional and mental breakdowns. When she told Kyle that she was pregnant, he ran for it leaving her alone and three months along with the child that would later become Mitchell Dalton. She would later be diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was hospitalized by her parents before she could do anything too serious to her and her unborn child.

Life for Mitchell as a child was pretty difficult with Denae as his mother. She was constantly in and out of hospitals and on and off of her medication whenever she got out. Truthfully, Denae had little to do with Mitchell’s life except to make it worse. She’d be loving and overly affectionate, caring and sweet to him when she was medicated and the opposite when she was off. His grandmother and grandfather practically raised him.

He was only eight years old when his mother went off of her medication again and vanished into thin air. For a few weeks, both he and his grandparents spent every waking hour that they possibly could looking for her. When they finally found her, she was pregnant once again and addicted to yet another type of drugs. Another rehab and hospital stay and Mithell’s younger sister, Lena was born. Both children were pretty much raised by Marcus and Catherine Dalton, their grandparents, instead of Denae.

Though it was difficult to stay focused on school and everything with Denae’s mental illness, Mitchell somehow managed to be highly involved and a really good student. In high school, he was highly involved on the basketball team and found himself as the lead in high school plays multiple times. Though he’d pretty much say that he wasn’t all that good in them, people who actually saw him would say that he was really good at acting. He graduated in the top twenty of his high school class with a pretty nice scholarship package to a college out of state.

When he was still a freshman Marcus Dalton died of a heart attack while dealing with another one of Denae’s episodes. A year later, he was getting a phone call from Lena that she’d found their mother and that things did not look good. Denae Dalton had committed suicide. While he was trying to focus on college and getting his degree, his grandmother was trying to deal with settling everything with his mother’s suicide and Lena becoming her daughter. He was only twenty-one when he took Lena in and became her legal guardian.

He’s only a few months out of grad school and has recently been hired by Modesto Junior College to be one of their professors of psychology. He’s still trying to get everything together and even worse, his sister is showing signs of being bipolar just like their mother.