Personal Narrative

I was eight years old in pigtails when my mother began to work out of town. It began as late nights away and progressed into weekends and, later, weeks at a time. My foot would tap impatiently as I sat at the kitchen table or on the stairs for her return; more than often, I was disappointed at the delay in her arrival. I was ten years old with loose, messy braids when I learned of my mother’s affair. It was my mistake to rummage through her car seeking a journal to write my jumbled thoughts in and I found her spiral-bound pink diary instead. Years passed and I refused to speak a word of it; it was as if a zipper were placed on my lips that only she could unzip. As I grew older, and acquired the courage to confront her, the only words she could muster were that she did not love me, nor the rest of my family--not the way she loved this man--and, that I was a failure.

As I reached the age of a pubescent teen, she refused to subject herself to my abiding desire that she be my mother. When she returned from her protracted escapades, she would sleep for hours and microwave Salisbury steak meals for dinner. She would lash out with sheer animosity and I often found myself lying on the ground beneath the weight of her ring-fingered hand. I was no longer one of her children. If she and my father quarreled, she would scurry off with my sisters to get ice cream, leaving my brother and I to sit in our own constitutional