For My Mother Anonymous

Tell us about the world you came from and how this world shaped your dreams and aspirations.

I believe in the woman who was both my mother and my father throughout my life. My father was an alcoholic, violent man with no job, goals, ethics, or sense of being, and contributed nothing to our family but terrorization. He continued to live in our house and my mother could not escape him. She worked as a waitress and used her small earnings to support herself, my brother, and me, and my father made her life even harder. He came home drunk with threats and cuss words until finally my mother decided once and for all to leave this man.

Despite our lack of money, my mother found a way to move out of the house we had lived in for over eleven years, find an apartment, and pay all the moving expenses. I thought I had stayed strong throughout the years of living with my father, but my mother’s intuition (her most notable “superpower”) got the best of me. She knew I could no longer bear life with my father and she made everything easier for me, despite the difficulties of doing so. My mother and I moved into our new apartment in the beginning of my senior year (my brother was already in college and living in an apartment). It was strange at...