"We found no sign of my mother" - I thought what happened at the night was my allusion

I just started writing my first paragraph of college essay.
Can someone help me to change word choices, find grammatical errors, etc.
There is what I have written:

When a person I loved so much suddenly can no longer recognize me clearly, my life darkened. My mother is a traditional house wife and a down to earth woman. She has always been loving and caring for me and my father. In my mother's mind, my father and I are in the center of her universe. Perhaps, because of the intensive love my mother has for me and my father, she has lost herself. One night when my father and I found my mother was missing, we searched anxiously for her on every corner of the neighborhood and asked everyone on the street. That night, everything in my life had changed for ever. My mother was found, but she stopped talking and eating. At age fifteen, I thought that night was an illusion of mine and everything would be back to normal again sometime. However, life is always filled unpredictabilities and no one can anticipate anything.

Frightened by my mother's bizarre behaviors, my father and I brought my mother to the emergency room. After hours of examination, the doctor hospitalized my mother in the mental health department for three days. Then, the petrified moment of my life had just began. My mother stopped looking and talking to me. She looked at me as stranger sometimes and distanced herself from me. At nights I would hold my mother's hand and watch TV with her, in hope of receive some recognition from my mother. Yet, she did not identify me. I teared in my bed every night thinking about how unfair the world is to me. My feelings toward my mother became ambivalent. On one hand, embarrassed of having a mentally ill mother, I distanced myself from my teachers, classmates, and friends. On the other hand, terrified of loosing my mother, I had the desire of seeing my mother at every moment.

That year, my family bought high deductible health insurance. The amount of bills sent to our house had already piled up like a mini mountain on the cafe table. I noticed stress had replaced smoothness on my father's face. Growing up as the only child in the house, doing house chores was never in my agenda. Nevertheless, my heart was broken when my father's hair had turned from dark black to light gray over days. Almost immediately, I adopted my new role of being a daughter. Cleaning dishes, washing dirty clothes, cooking food, and taking out garbages had became my new jobs. Although at first I did not know how to function washing machine or dish washer, as time past by, I had became an expert on operating them.

As time past by, heavy loads of responsibilities had made me unbreathable. However, the obstacle I faced had shaped me to become an accountable adult at an early age. Taking care a mother who suffers severe depression is a immense responsibility of mine. Even though she is recovering well under ECT treatment, I am still watching constantly after her. Using my experience of taking care of my mother, I often treat the patients in the hospital where I volunteer at as I would treat my mother, entertain them with stories and jokes. I now see obstacles are not barriers but they are lessons for people.

Well it would have been helpful if you provided an essay prompt.
With the limited amount of material in your post, I can tell you that your grammar needs to be worked on. You use too many commas, when in fact, full stops will do. Some sentences are awkwardly expressed.

Your overall flow, partly due to the grammar and expression, is quite poor because it just goes on and on and on and has a somewhat, rambling tone to it.

Also, your first two lines...


^Apart for the obvious grammar errors, you have to say how it was a typical late night 'UNTIL'. You need to signal the contrast with the typicality and the event, because naturally, the event was far from your typical Saturday night.


^Again, the grammar here is very weak.
There are commas in stead of full stops and thinking should be in the past tense.
Also, 'Subsequently; in my opinion, has not been used correctly given the context. It was not a subsequent result of anything.

This has the potential to be a very gripping beginning. Fix up the grammar, as Liebe suggests, and also tell us the reason you are writing the essay and the prompt you were given, if any.

You are using "allusion" when you mean "illusion."

The prompt is

Describe the world you come from - for example, your family, community or school - and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

The paragraph you have now functions well as a hook. You will of course need to add more paragraphs in order to fully answer the prompt. Depending upon what you write about, you intro may seem weaker or stronger after you have finished the rest of your essay.

Even though I had diminished my attention on academics, but I was glad that my mother's illness had gotten better.

: \ It suddenly sounds like an excuse for failing grades.

Even though the intro was interesting to read, it made me wonder what illness she had that made her unable to recognize you, walk out of the house in the middle of the night, etc.. Maybe specifying the mental disorder will clarify her actions...

I think that the story you are using to write about is really deep, and gets down to a personal level - good choice :)

the details are pretty good too.

i think there needs to be more development with the overall message of the essay. you should try to clear up how this event made you the person you are today, as the prompt asks. you write about being an accountable adult at an early age, but maybe you can explain how/why thats important for success or something (probably in the last paragraph)

im really not sure if this helped...

GOOD LUCK!!!! :))

p.s. you can critique mine haha

This story has extreme potential.


I would say that your life was not just darkened. I believe that you can tell your story in a much more moving way.

This is just an idea. Try mixing your new responsibilities with the rest of your essay instead of just cramming it all in the end. I believe that your essay would be greater if you could tell the reader about how realising that you had to become more mature was difficult for you.

Anybody?

Not bad overall. A few comments:


This doesn't quite work. Rephrase.


Identify you? Or respond to you? If she was suffering from depression, as you indicate later on, presumably she knew who you were, even if she did not feel able to communicate with you.


This is a non sequitur. Being an only child would have made you likely to have more chores to do, as there would be no one else to do them. You might not have taken them very seriously until your mother's illness, but your current phrasing needs reworking.