Hi everyone :) I am really nervous about this essay and I know it is a little rough. I am in DESPERATE need of any and all help, even if it's just a quick read over.
Thank you so so much!
Tell us about a person who has influenced you in a significant way.
Maybe it's resentment. After all, I weighed nine and a half pounds at the moment of my expulsion from the womb. Maybe it's embarrassment. At the tender age of four, the "s-word" escaped my red Kool-Aid stained lips, a result of overhearing my dad's Pulp Fiction movie. Of course, the embarrassment was all the more exacerbated as I chose to utter this vulgarity in the presence of mother's Catholic retreat group. Regardless of the reason, she remained adamant on the fact we weren't friends.
Eight-year-old eyes, staring up at the woman towering before me, embodying all the innocence in the world, filled with tears. Two years later, ten-year-old eyes, staring a little less up, embodying a little less innocence, arrived at the same fate. "No, we're not friends." As naïve purity drained from my aging psyche, an inchoate sense of hopelessness took its place. If my inability to institute a simple friendship with my own mother was any indication of future relationships with other human beings, I was prepared to become a self-proclaimed recluse, shying away from human interaction. My mother is not some sadist, thriving off the tears of the weak (no, that title is proudly claimed by my siblings). Rather, she formed this outlandish theory that, as a teenager, I was not permitted to identify my mother as my friend. Until my face flushed in front of eighteen glowing candles and my ears were subject to tone-deaf friends stammering over "Happy Birthday" lyrics, my mother would maintain her position as my mother and nothing more. At eighteen, if luck allowed, I might find myself fortunate and privileged enough to craft something more than a mother-daughter relationship. So my quest for friendship before my eighteenth birthday commenced.
I labored for years, suffered through blood, sweat, and tears, craving those three words: "We are friends." Nightmares in flashback-style assaulted my once pleasant dreams and embedded themselves between the neural tissues of my cerebral cortex. These nightmares transported me to preschool, when Ryan Johnson refused to be my friend. I thirsted for his friendship. Primarily because I managed to develop a crush on this boy and I, being the intellectually curious person that I am, wanted to assess his motivation for kicking sand in my face at the playground. I was a preschooler for years while my mother ruled over me, a "Ryan" in my high school world.
Summer of 2010 slipped away and I landed back in classes among cornfields. The end of September crawled devilishly around the corner, bearing its notorious horns reminding me of my upcoming birthday. Seventeen, hardly a concern, no longer "sweet" at sixteen and still illegal, I sighed in remembrance of the 365 days that gawked at me with a sardonic tone. I returned home to a slightly more civil town (that is, one where people willingly and independently choose their wardrobe and one devoid of sickening amounts of corn) a few months after my birthday. My mother welcomed me at the door, bringing me into an embrace that seemed to linger. I remember she wore her hair in a loose bun, her navy blue, polka-dot dress hugging the delicate frost of her skin. The two of us spoke in a soft manner in her bedroom, catching up and reminiscing in our awkward, dysfunctional family moments. Hours later, the peppered night sky surrendered to the brilliance of a breaking dawn. We reallocated our bantering to the chill of a November morning outdoors. Enveloped in a sea of blankets, my mother held my hand as I allowed my seventeen-year-old eyes to get lost in the ocean of orange and pink comprising the heavens.
Maybe it was my inveterate condition. Maybe it was my ignorance to her seemingly indelible nature. Maybe it was some simplistic remark I whispered on our driveway that November dawn. But that day, my mother gazed at me with her forty-three-year-old eyes, clutched my hand with her own, and spoke of our friendship. She articulated these words to me so poised and structured, as if she had arranged this confession prior to our impromptu conversation. Abandoning her obdurate temperament, my mother admitted the denial of her theory, which previously seemed so flawless in its accuracy.
Friends are not the preschool boys stomping on the mud pies I worked so diligently to craft with my bare hands. They are not the middle school girls I once let cheat off of me in hopes of "upping my cool." Friends are not the eighteen-year-olds gathered around my glowing cake, sounding like dying cattle in their rendition of "Happy Birthday." A friend is the mother that refused to make my life easy, the mother that rejected my whining for attention, the mother that brought my tears to life by repudiation of a superficial friendship. A friend is the mother that theorized I would not be worthy of friendship until she knew I embodied all the qualities she sought in a friend and in herself. Until I proved trustworthy, respectful, and dependable, I would remain a juvenile, solely a daughter, in my mother's eyes. Nine years after I had discovered our lack of a comradeship, I not only disproved a dignified theory, but also acquired a friendship I would not trade for the world. She will always be my mother, my favorite person, and I am grateful to say, my best friend.
Thank you so so much!
Tell us about a person who has influenced you in a significant way.
Maybe it's resentment. After all, I weighed nine and a half pounds at the moment of my expulsion from the womb. Maybe it's embarrassment. At the tender age of four, the "s-word" escaped my red Kool-Aid stained lips, a result of overhearing my dad's Pulp Fiction movie. Of course, the embarrassment was all the more exacerbated as I chose to utter this vulgarity in the presence of mother's Catholic retreat group. Regardless of the reason, she remained adamant on the fact we weren't friends.
Eight-year-old eyes, staring up at the woman towering before me, embodying all the innocence in the world, filled with tears. Two years later, ten-year-old eyes, staring a little less up, embodying a little less innocence, arrived at the same fate. "No, we're not friends." As naïve purity drained from my aging psyche, an inchoate sense of hopelessness took its place. If my inability to institute a simple friendship with my own mother was any indication of future relationships with other human beings, I was prepared to become a self-proclaimed recluse, shying away from human interaction. My mother is not some sadist, thriving off the tears of the weak (no, that title is proudly claimed by my siblings). Rather, she formed this outlandish theory that, as a teenager, I was not permitted to identify my mother as my friend. Until my face flushed in front of eighteen glowing candles and my ears were subject to tone-deaf friends stammering over "Happy Birthday" lyrics, my mother would maintain her position as my mother and nothing more. At eighteen, if luck allowed, I might find myself fortunate and privileged enough to craft something more than a mother-daughter relationship. So my quest for friendship before my eighteenth birthday commenced.
I labored for years, suffered through blood, sweat, and tears, craving those three words: "We are friends." Nightmares in flashback-style assaulted my once pleasant dreams and embedded themselves between the neural tissues of my cerebral cortex. These nightmares transported me to preschool, when Ryan Johnson refused to be my friend. I thirsted for his friendship. Primarily because I managed to develop a crush on this boy and I, being the intellectually curious person that I am, wanted to assess his motivation for kicking sand in my face at the playground. I was a preschooler for years while my mother ruled over me, a "Ryan" in my high school world.
Summer of 2010 slipped away and I landed back in classes among cornfields. The end of September crawled devilishly around the corner, bearing its notorious horns reminding me of my upcoming birthday. Seventeen, hardly a concern, no longer "sweet" at sixteen and still illegal, I sighed in remembrance of the 365 days that gawked at me with a sardonic tone. I returned home to a slightly more civil town (that is, one where people willingly and independently choose their wardrobe and one devoid of sickening amounts of corn) a few months after my birthday. My mother welcomed me at the door, bringing me into an embrace that seemed to linger. I remember she wore her hair in a loose bun, her navy blue, polka-dot dress hugging the delicate frost of her skin. The two of us spoke in a soft manner in her bedroom, catching up and reminiscing in our awkward, dysfunctional family moments. Hours later, the peppered night sky surrendered to the brilliance of a breaking dawn. We reallocated our bantering to the chill of a November morning outdoors. Enveloped in a sea of blankets, my mother held my hand as I allowed my seventeen-year-old eyes to get lost in the ocean of orange and pink comprising the heavens.
Maybe it was my inveterate condition. Maybe it was my ignorance to her seemingly indelible nature. Maybe it was some simplistic remark I whispered on our driveway that November dawn. But that day, my mother gazed at me with her forty-three-year-old eyes, clutched my hand with her own, and spoke of our friendship. She articulated these words to me so poised and structured, as if she had arranged this confession prior to our impromptu conversation. Abandoning her obdurate temperament, my mother admitted the denial of her theory, which previously seemed so flawless in its accuracy.
Friends are not the preschool boys stomping on the mud pies I worked so diligently to craft with my bare hands. They are not the middle school girls I once let cheat off of me in hopes of "upping my cool." Friends are not the eighteen-year-olds gathered around my glowing cake, sounding like dying cattle in their rendition of "Happy Birthday." A friend is the mother that refused to make my life easy, the mother that rejected my whining for attention, the mother that brought my tears to life by repudiation of a superficial friendship. A friend is the mother that theorized I would not be worthy of friendship until she knew I embodied all the qualities she sought in a friend and in herself. Until I proved trustworthy, respectful, and dependable, I would remain a juvenile, solely a daughter, in my mother's eyes. Nine years after I had discovered our lack of a comradeship, I not only disproved a dignified theory, but also acquired a friendship I would not trade for the world. She will always be my mother, my favorite person, and I am grateful to say, my best friend.
