Write A Narrative Essay About Moving Away From High School

Emma’s parents were in the midst of a nasty divorce. Her father had left her mother, and her mother wasn’t taking the news well. Each morning, Emma’s alarm clock would go off at 6:30, and she would get up and get dressed, brush her teeth, and eat her breakfast without saying so much as a good morning to her mother, who typically stayed in bed with the shutters closed all day. When Emma came home from school, she knocked quietly on the door, then opened a window and sat on the bed and asked her mother how she was doing. Her mother would mumble a response, look up at Emma, and smile as she stroked her cheek. Every time Emma entered her mother’s room, it was dark and smelled stale. She wasn’t entirely sure how long her mom had cooped herself up in there; it didn’t look like she ever left the room, but sometimes Emma found empty cartons of Chinese take-out food or half-eaten pieces of fruit in the small wastebasket next to the door.

She would stand in the harsh light of the kitchen’s fluorescent bulbs and say, to nobody in particular, “I might be down, but I can still make my own daughter dinner.”

Emma heard the pronouncement each night from her bedroom, which was right off the kitchen. She didn’t understand how preparing one meal a day kept intact her mother’s sense of motherhood. When she tried to discuss it with her dad, he just told her to be patient with her mother; that she was going through something tough.

“This isn’t easy for anyone,” her dad said on the other line,