MY MOTHER

The strongest person I have ever known is my mother. My earliest memory is waking up early with my parents, Dad leaving for work, and Mom dropping Adam off for school (he was in first grade at the time). When I was younger, I used to question a lot why I had to wake up so early to be like everyone else. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that there were several reasons (that multiplied as I grew older), the primary one being that my mother was reluctant to leave me home alone when I was four years old. Second, Mom wanted me to become accustomed to it. My mom was an intelligent woman. I hated all three from an early age, yet she always found creative methods to make me tidy my room, wash my teeth, or take a bath. However, by the time I was eleven, I frequently found them to be enjoyable and eager to participate. But her intelligence was due to more than this. She was always able to offer sound counsel. When I was seven years old, I used to frequently cry when I got home from school because I was a little overweight, and my friends would mercilessly pick on me. With her arms wrapped around me, my mother would brush my long hair back from my face and wipe away my I told her what had happened, crying. Several times, my mother gave me sound counsel, as though she had been present when it occurred. When I was younger and would complain about my weight, my mother would comfort me by telling me that she had been in my shoes before. I didn't believe it when I was this small, since I didn't resemble her at all. I was small and stubby, with short, nearly black hair and green eyes, while she was tall and skinny, with long, mousy brown hair and blue eyes. (People used to believe that I was adopted because my dad doesn't resemble me at all.) When I was nine years old, the kids at school were still picking My mother brought out an old picture album that I had never seen before and looked at me.

Then she pointed to a picture of a plump girl my age with boy-short blond hair. "That was me," she declared. "I lost the weight that you now have, but it took me a long time." I was kind of in a daze as I stared at her. You might or might not lose weight now. In either case, I believe you will develop into a stunning young woman, just like my mother, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and I all were. And you shouldn't give a damn if someone tells you otherwise. In any case, it's not their issue."

Needless to say, I stopped sobbing over my weight after that day, but I felt that something was wrong with my mother because I had never seen them and she never talked about them. Adam and I have only ever known our father's family. Dad would always respond to my questions about it with something ambiguous like, "They live on the other side of the world." 

My mother was depressed. My mother used to cry when we watched movies together when I was a tiny child. At the time, neither Adam nor I knew why, and Mom claimed not to know either, but there was always a different look in Dad's eyes. At ten years old, I reasoned that it might have anything to do with her family. She never really discussed them until she was explaining why I look the way I do—I have her father's hair and her mother's eyes. She said that I was her parents' real child, in the same way that Adam and Nate were her real children.