Undergraduate /
"I met my father for the first time" - a significant experience and its impact [7]
This is my essay for the common app essay question #1 : Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
It's a bit rushed but I would appreciate any tips or suggestions. Be as mean as you want. I'm hoping to major in Creative Writing or at least English so hopefully this will help showcase my skills. Thank you !On July 25, 2007 I met my father for the first time. For the past few days I had been visiting an aunt in England, chaperoned by an older cousin. I was excited about the trip several weeks before and when I finally arrived, the country was everything that I dreamt it to be. England was cold but beautiful and so filled with history that I could feel it oozing out of the pavements as we drove to my aunts house. Nothing could make me happier than I was at that moment.
My auntie was something of a reckless spirit. She'd always get it into her head that she knew what was best for people and while I was staying with her she thought it would be best for me to meet my father. In fact, auntie had come in contact with him and even set up a day for the two of us to meet. I know the process could not have been hard. Throughout my childhood I had been repeatedly told that my father lived in England. This information never meant much to me. If my father wasn't strong enough to accept that he had daughter than I wouldn't be weak enough to care. My mother and all her unconditional love was more than enough for me.
The feelings that had ignited inside me because of her phone call were nauseating. For someone to want me to speak to a man that had abandoned me the very moment I was born perplexed and angered me. I was already shaking my head before she could finish her sentence but my aunt was determined as well as reckless.
"You need to see him Aisha," I remember her saying. "Closure."
Closure? I was only turning 14 in a couple of days, what did closure matter to me? I didn't want to see him and that was final. But a talk from my cousin and a late call to my mother eventually changed my mind. I felt a little betrayed but I knew that in the long-run they were trying to do what was best for me.
I met him the next week, on my birthday. The irony wasn't lost on me. The day I meet my father was also the day I was born but only fourteen years later. I stared at him from my position behind my aunt, eyes a bit wide and knees trembling. He wasn't as thin as he was in the pictures we had of him at home. Across his face were regular glass instead of sunshades and he looked a bit more mature, less cocky. I wasn't impressed. The meeting was short, filled mostly with him staring at me as if I wasn't real and me studiously ignoring him. Before he left he invited my cousins and I for a day to be better acquainted. My aunt accepted for me. We saw him again a couple of days later. I was frightened that this would be another disappointment made by a careless father. Usually his absence didn't bother me, but I did have those nights where I would cry myself to sleep, wishing I was like my friends with a dad that loved them , and cared for them, and were actually there...
The day had gone better then I expected. My father was easy to talk to and we found a common interest: Reading! In my family, I was the primary reader and it was hard for my mother to follow my rapid speech and excited flutterings when it came to a book I liked. It was nice to finally speak with someone who understood need for words and who didn't automatically deem me awkward and bookwormish. At the end of the day he bought me a few books which was the quickest way to my heart. I left that day glowing.
By January I had resigned myself to the fact that he wasn't going to call. I was angry for awhile. Angry at my aunt, at my mom, at myself. The littlest things could get me upset and I spent most days wondering why I cared in the first place. I had thought I prepared myself for his rejection but I, instead, opened myself up for the hurt it would cause. Until I met my father, I hadn't realized that there was an empty place somewhere inside that ached needed someone other then my mother.
I met my father and for the little time I spent with him I loved him. The experience I had with my father taught me that everyone has to make decisions and live with those consequences. I could have told my aunt that I didn't want to see my father, that I could live without meeting him. I didn't though, and in making that decision I learned that he was exactly what I always knew him to be: someone I didn't need.
I've matured in thinking because of this experience. When I was fourteen I was bitter and angry and told my self that I didn't care a lot. Now, I can honestly say that I do care, even if only a little. I've continued a life without a father which does prove that I don't need him but I do still want him there. I've learned that to be able to grow, you have to learn to be open and I have become open to a love for a father I barely know. In what I once called weakness I have found strength.
