Undergraduate /
"Perseverance...sacrifice...selflessness..." - COMMON APP MAIN ESSAY [7]
Well, i really like it, but there is always room for improvement, particuraly in writing, so here it goes:
Prompt - Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.
The Essay:
July 28th, 1992. A struggling, battered, young woman is ready to attend college in the fall. Today, she has given birth. A promising Division 1 basketball prospect, her dreams, her route out of poverty and her ticket to the world of the educated is lost because of the burdens of the premature motherhood. She will not attend college; enduring poverty for years. My mother chose to give me life, despite the predicament it presented. What could have been scoffed at as a mistake or a failure flourished into a new beginning only by the audacity of a single mother who has made four children the focus of her life, 24 hours a day.
"STOP!" she begged, as tears of anguish rolled down her cheeks. Her assailant made his approach, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING! LOOK AT YOUR CHILDREN!" It's not common to get to watch your father lunge after your mother with a kitchen knife during the innocence of your youth. I didn't enjoy it too much, but neither did she. Bravely... foolishly, she tried to make an abusive marriage work. My mother tried for years to cure him. A drug-addict, narcissist, liar and felon, but she was trying to cure more than a drug, she put her life on the line to cure a person, for my sake, so that her child would have a relationship with her father. A half -dozen years later, I don't know where he lives, but never will I forget the traumatic pain she endures.
When I was an infant, my mom was always a hard worker. For years, she spent her spare time on odd jobs; she took care of one particular elderly woman. She bathed her, fed her, cared for her. Evelyn was a kind woman. While my mother took her into care, she let us live in the upstairs apartment of her house. My mother broke her back everyday, a waitress, and a taxi driver; if there was a way that she could put food on the table, she would. But she was breaking her back for more than food on the table. After working thousands of hours, she was bought a house. The wallpaper design must have been from the 50's. The house was pretty ugly, in a cramped city with a 10 x 10 backyard. It was the product of her blood, sweat and tears. It wasn't immaculate and she had to put hundreds hours more of labor into it to make it hospitable, but without a college education - even with a college education - it was a feat in itself; particularly for a young mother of four in her twenties. It wasn't to last though. After a victim's advocate advised her to go into hiding, our family was uprooted from the brick and mortar that we called home. She had no idea where she would go, but putting her children above her self, she brought us a small town in NH called Moultonborough. Why? She wanted to give us an education. She knew no one in the area; she had never lived more than 10 miles from Boston, butt she left her past for her children.
She gets mad, cusses, yells. I would say she has a short fuse. She smokes. She is not invincible; a struggling, single parent of four with no family support, on either side. There is a nasty Staph infection in her bloodstream (non-contagious), the byproduct of a surgery that was supposed to replace her shoulder, a process six years overdue. She has no kneecap. She's a cancer survivor... her ulcers bleed. But she volunteers for the Town Rec. Dept. as a basketball coach. Perhaps what is most amazing is her age: 35 years.
Sometimes, she even does my chores before I get home, knowing that the next day she will suffer the entire morning because she scrubbed dishes without the amenity of a functioning shoulder. When she tells me, through all of the college search, that she will be satisfied with whatever career or path I chose to embark on, so long as I do my best, I know: that's my mom.
Despite the financial hardship that we have endured together, my mother has always made sure to put my education above anything else: from the simple late night escapades of mathematics times-tables to a trip to Hawaii to study Marine Biology. She has endured pain and suffering beyond belief, but in the process she has instilled in me ideals that are otherwise hard to truly come across in a person.
Perseverance...sacrifice...selflessness... most importantly though, if there is anything great that I can do with my life, it is to give opportunity to those who would never had had it before. Opportunity is a renewable resource, and I plan on doing my part to recycle the opportunity that my mother has created for me, that which she was never so generously given.
