Hi all! Thanks for taking the time to read this. This is for a Masters of Forensic Psychology program I am applying to this fall and this is one of the prompts they have for us to write about. This is something I have really roughly wrote but general comments, critiques, and suggestions are SUPER appreciated! Also, the word count is 1500 for both the essays so this is a little longer since I still have editing to do.
Prompt: Describe someone you know who has engaged in behavior of which you disapprove. How has this behavior affected your view of this person? How has your relationship with this person changed? How do you understand your reactions?
understanding my mother
From the time my parents divorced in 2006, I was faced with addiction. The addiction lived vicariously through me as my mother has struggled with alcohol abuse. For as long as I can remember, I disapproved of what felt like her choosing alcohol as a surrogate to her eight-year-old daughter. Over time it developed into a deep seeded disdain, criminalizing her love of booze over school plays, choir concerts, and eighth grade graduations. From middle school to high school our relationship took a role reversal where I gradually accepted responsibilities of the adult. If I didn't know better, I would have thought my life was being rewritten as a Freaky Friday sequel. I would come home right after school or work to clean, cook, and question my rebellious teenage daughter if she was going to have dinner with the whole family or sit in her room. This led to me coming home right after school to clean, cook, and eventually work and constantly choosing between being my own adult and a student.
Constantly choosing being my own adult resulted in resentment brewing below my premature hoary surface. I minimized her turmoil as her own choosing and didn't understand why she couldn't immediately quit or show any remorse for it straining our relationship. Vilifying my mother by referring to her as a "drunk", my "addict mom", and sometimes "crazy mom" didn't help either as her drinking only worsened. I wrote her off as an unreliable, almost child-like person in my life that represented cumbersome responsibility and a dismantled family dynamic. I was angry at the hand I was dealt, but knew that despite her struggles she was constantly trying to get the help she needed.
Deciding to go to college gave me a lot of distance from the culpability that was my mother and enabled me to engage with new perspectives. After my studies started to suffer my freshman year, I chose to seek out a stable support system and subsequently began to see a therapist who suggested that I attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in an attempt to see how addiction can be multi-contextual and complex. After attending the first meeting the greatest lesson was learning how people viewed alcoholism not as a frivolous activity, but as a disease, and it shook the foundation of how I viewed my mother. I thought that it was her choice to spend nearly every night angry and ready to yell at the next person who walked through the living room. I felt that my desperate attempts to rid the bottle from my mother's finger-tips were futile but it was really my codependence that created an ill-informed utopia that I craved. I pushed an image of what it meant to be "perfect" on her that not only possibly discouraged her, but it became my own addiction. Treating her as a standard only hardened the walls we slowly built between us. Attending these meetings helped me learn to empathize with my mother and completely changed the way I understand and interact with her and myself.
It's addicting to see someone else's light on the horizon and I yearned to find the secret recipe for etherizing it so much so that I was trying to find her recipe and not my own. It became a series of pedestrian wreckage from a ship that sailed without my consent. It was watching someone drown under 100 foot waves but all I could do is float. Everything that surrounded us reminded me of the beauty and magnificence of what could be but not what really was. Every once in a while I would find the perfect piece of wreckage and hold onto it as tight as I could. Sometimes it was a memory of my mother taking me to the playground and running up and down the slide with me while other parents simply gazed up from their books. Other times it was a photograph of her and I standing side-by-side in our Old Navy Fourth of July shirts as we lit off sparklers. Sometimes, it was simply her, also floating with me. Over time, you learn to wait for the seconds between the waves and cherish them. You can finally catch your breath. I've learned that those breaths of fresh air is the life in which we must give our all because waves will come whether they're weeks or months apart. Each crashing wave I have come to be determined to emerge despite sometimes being soaking wet and sputtering, still hanging onto the piece of wreckage I found, and each time I will be patiently waiting for my crew to come with me.Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,835 
4783 Caitlin, this is a highly personal essay for you to be writing as part of your application process. It really shows the relationship that you have with the your mother and how it affected you. I just feel that the description section did not fully develop the drunken personality of your mother. The essay does not seem to balance the description of your mother, the development of her addiction, and how it affected you. There is too much reference to "me" in the essay which means you are mostly describing yourself instead of your mother. You need to focus the essay on what is really important and that is, describing who your mother was before her addiction so that you can heighten the sense of disappointment that you developed when the addiction took over her life. Balance the essay by first, showing the good, the in-between, then the bad. That way, we get a clearer picture of who your mother is and how the downward spiral occurred. That can be the "hook" that tells the reviewer that you have an interesting story to tell rather than opening by stating a fact.
Holt,
Thank you so much for the advice, I will take it with me into revision! Making sure I show the before, intermediate, and after makes a lot of sense. Again, thank you!
Caitlin
