On My Own by Gabriella

On My Own by Gabriella - October 2013 Scholarship Essay

There always comes a time in everyone’s life, when they reach a point and realize that something has happened and they have to start doing things alone. These are life lessons and not all of the time are they easy. How would it feel to have your world crashing from under you? To know that the one person who you looked up to the most just changed as quick as the weather changes? My life lesson came at me where I never thought it would come from and it shook my world and everything that I had called my life fell from under me. My life lesson was to never think that people can change, even people that you have known for your whole life.

For 16 years my mom was also my dad, my caregiver and she supported her family mainly on her own. Everything she did was for us, she always put us first and that’s how me and my little sisters became used to things, all she did was make sacrifices for. We always had respect for her and told her that we were always thankful for every single thing she did for us. She was our hero and we always looked up to her. She came to all of our little school functions, gave us money when we needed it, bought us new things if it was needed, and always was here to kiss us goodnight. No one, not even me, realized that this all was about to drastically change.

It started last summer, my mom grew distant from my step-dad and started slowly to pull away from her family. We all believed that this was just a small phase and soon she would come back to being the old mom we knew so well. A few months later she started going out with her friends, seemed to care a little less about our days at school, and became angry over nothing. We started to have to depend more on our step-dad to do things for us, which was a huge change in our lives. I realized soon enough that my mom and my step-dad had changed, he had become more of the parental figure and she had become more out of the picture than we liked. Gradually I started to understand that mom was not the same woman she had been for 16 years and that I had no clue if she would be coming back anytime soon. I had to learn to mainly depend on myself with everyting including school and problems that I faced because I never liked to be a burden to my step dad.

We all have life lessons coming to us sooner or later in life. Not everyone’s life lesson is life changing either. I certainly never planned on having a life changing lesson this early in my life. I also never knew that it would be from my mother and that it would affect me so much as it did.