As a kid, I always thought home was just the four walls surrounding me as I closed my eyes to go to sleep. It was the leaky pipes under the sink and the creaky doors leading to average rooms. The large yard with the cute rose bushes and bleeding hearts. The basketball hoop out front where my older brother never let me win. There was no stress other than losing my favorite stuffed animal or running out of my snacks. Everything seemed so easy and simple. That was until that home was taken from me.
I was leaving for school one morning and there was a strange man standing on my property taking pictures of my home. He said not a single word to me and I was slightly frightened so I just brushed by him and proceeded to head to the bus stop. A few weeks later, a foreclosure notice turned up on the door. My heart shattered. I was losing not only my house, but my home. It was my entire childhood and it was being ripped out of my hands. My mother and I were forced to move into a small apartment since my father was no longer in our lives and my older brother had fled the nest. We received the keys on my sixteenth birthday and I spent the day standing in my new room, weeping. My mom did all she could to make this transition as easy as possible, but I wasn’t taking it well. I hated it. All of it. It was my new reality though and I had to face it.
As the weeks went by, things weren’t getting any easier and the hatred for my new home was still at large. It began drawing a wedge between my mother and I with my unacceptable behavior. It wasn’t her fault we were put in that situation, but I treated her as if it was. I was spiraling down a never ending hole and landed myself in an inpatient program in the city. My first night there, I stood there motionless, staring out the barred windows with absolutely no tears left to cry. All that was running through my mind was the look on my mothers face when she had to leave me there. She could not bring me home with her and I know it killed her inside. It began killing me to see that I was killing her.
Everyday my mom came and visited me twice which was all that was allowed. Every time I seen her walk through those doors, my face lit up like a Christmas tree. I felt comfortable and at peace within myself. Like clock work, I’d tell her about my day, the groups I had attended, the progress I was making towards getting better and coming home, and the cheesy crafts I was forced to make. I longed to get better, not only for me, but for my mom. She needed me and I wasn’t there for her, I couldn’t be, not in the state I was in.
I worked so hard to be released, but they didn’t think I was ready to leave. It really started to sink it at this point… I needed my mother. With each day, being there was becoming easier, I was making friends and actually have a few good memories till this day from in there. Still, none of what they could offer me made me feel at peace or happy. As a sixteen year old girl, I just needed my mother, every minute I was locked in that unit. She was the drive behind my behavioral changes that had finally lead to my release!
I walked through the door with my bags in my hand and my mother behind me. I instantly teared up when I had walked in because it felt beyond amazing to be back. I ran to my room and it was just the way I had left it, an organized mess. I was thrilled and thought I’d want to see my friends since they weren’t allowed to visit me while I was away, but all I wanted was my mother. I wanted to hug her and be in her presence. I wanted to apologize for the way I was behaving prior to my time away. I wanted to see her smile after all the pain I had brought to her. I wanted to feel the comfort she brought to me. You see, it didn’t matter what four walls I fell asleep between. It didn’t matter what sink I washed my hands in. It didn’t matter what table I ate dinner at. That didn’t make any house I’ve ever lived in or stayed at, a home. My home is and always will be my mother, my best friend.
Hello,
I think you first draft was great! It flowed nicely. I was right there with every word with tears filling my eyes, about the feeling of missing your mom, I too grasp for the relationship at that age with my own mom. I think you could expand about what good memories you had in there because the sentence was a little vague. “I was making friends and actually have a few good memories til this day from in there” i think you should add one example. Also the sentence “Everyday my mom came and visited me twice which is all that was allowed.” I thought the wording was a little off it if you could just rephrase or add a common to pause after me. I understood what it was saying just the flow of the sentence. Im glad you rekindle your relationship and realized how much family means to you. In the long run family is your real best friend. Thank you for sharing.
A good choice of topic! Overall here your message is clear, your growing appreciation for your mother as key component of your sense of home, and you’ve developed this well with details (particularly strong in para. 1). Writng is clear and engaging throughout.
You do take on quite a long time span here for a short essay. At the beginning I was expecting to see an entire essay developed out of foreclosure day (it could easily have been a whole essay), but instead the traumatic experience of the foreclosure is there it seems as the precipitating factor in your deteriorating relationship to your mother and the behavior that lands you in in-patient program.
What I notice is that most of this takes place “in your head”–that is, you tell us your response, but we don’t see the action directly. I think this essay could be strengthened by doing more showing and less telling. What that would mean is selecting just a few key scenes that demonstrate several phases in your transition–this could be a memory from the day you moved out, a memory of conflict with your mother, a conversation with your mother in the facility showing your growing realization of ties to her, and maybe your return home. It would be a lot to fully describe all four of those–any of them could work as a stand-alone piece, but I think you would want to focus on a scene that captures how your attitude changed. Note that memoir writers are free to combine memory with imagination, with the goal of creating scenes that are true to the emotions of the situation, even if not true on literal level. That is, to make an experience vivid, you may want to include dialogue–you can;t remember exactly what someone else or even yourself said, so you will need to recreate dialogue based on your memory of the experience and your knowledge of the ways the people involved speak. I think of the process like replaying an experience of the past inside my head, watching it as if I’m looking at a movie screen in my brain, and then trying to capture what I saw in words. What I saw is both memory and imagination.
For revision assignment, look at page on development, particularly the pages on Show don’t tell and Summary vs scene: http://writingaboutplace.edublogs.org/development/