How My Mom Impacted My Life Essay

As a child raised by a single mother it was difficult for me to say that anyone else could have possibly made a greater impact on my life than she did. Regardless the guilt it may cause if I write the truth I have to say that it was not my mother who made the greatest impact on my life. It wasn’t my mother the woman who was there for me through everything, who made sure I had all the things I needed growing up, and gave me her unconditional love and support. The person who impacted my life greatest was not the person it should have been. Instead of it being someone who was there everyday in my life. It was someone who left my side at an early age. Since when I was around four years old I have thought my father passed from having a bad heart from what my mother

had told me. I remember the last day I saw him like remembering a dream from the night before. There are moments of that day that are so clear to me as if I were watching them all over again but other moments of that day are so much more harder for me to remember. I do remember hiding in the corner behind a door thinking that if my mom could not find me then she could not take me away from my father. What I will absolutely remember is the sound of my mother crying and yelling and the feeling of her hands around me tightly feeling her pain while she yelled to my dad “why” in spanish. It's funny to me how something as small as a child's memory can affect a person's decisions in life so strangely without ever realizing it. I kept the image of my father that day locked away in my head. That was the only way I could remember what he looked like. Every time I thought of him I could only think of him in sadness and blaming myself. To most people that will probably sound weak or even irrational, and maybe it was. Perhaps I was only using my father as an excuse so that I could make bad decisions and feel like I had some sort of justification. Whether that’s true or false it doesn't change the fact that I formed my future choices punishing myself. In my mind I was the one that was hurting because my mother had kept the truth from me. I gave my mother a rough time raising me from that point forward. At the time I didn't take her feelings into consideration and looking back I would change it all if I could. I did my absolute best to be my absolute worst.

I had few friends and I assumed the ones that I did have must have been going through something similar to me in order for them to be acting the way that we did. I remember that I used to bad things intentionally. For example I would skip classes, avoid doing work, and doing things I regretted with my so called friends. Later on realizing that I didn’t enjoy having my mom disappointed in me. It hurt me more than anything to know I had let her down. I was really hurting myself like I deserved to be and that was all that mattered. It became obvious at the end that none of it actually mattered at all because unlike most people I had a turning point that changed the way my life was heading. What was unexpected is that both my downwards and my turning point were caused by the same person my father. I was a sophmore in highschool when I found out what my father had done. I wasn't really able to think of anything other than the fact that my father had been such a coward and be so selfish. I had a new image of him. It was in that second that I had the realization I should have had many years earlier. He was not the kind man I had in my head and I could finally see

that. I had let him impact my life in a negatively way. Nowadays I do things not to be destrucking to my success but rather to benefit myself. Now I make decisions so that i'll be happy instead of hurting. In such of short amout of time i’ve made many friends who I truly bonded with and I’ve improved the relationships between my family and I. It seems that both negatively and positively my father the man who choose not to be able to be in my life impacted it more than any other person who has been a part of my life from the day I was born.