Micro Personal Essay

                 My mother always told me I could tell her anything, even the scary stuff, especially the scary stuff. I’ve always been told I was mature beyond my age, and so didn’t always find applicable. I didn’t get int much trouble, not of the serious variety. I didn’t have much to tell her beyond friend drama and school issues. I was nine when my Popop died, I didn’t get to see my mother react in the moment, to this day I’m not sure how it affected her. My dad was the one to tell me, it was the first thing he said as he walked in the door from work. He told me like it held to emotional weight at all. No one ever made me feel like the risk of loss was real, it didn’t even feel real in the moment. I ran upstairs to my bed and clutched onto the stuffed pig he had given me and cried. I cried at the wake too, off the side with my head tucked into the poncho Nana made for me. My cousins teased me. A few years later my parents told me they were getting a divorce. I walked out of the room while my sister and mother were crying and my dad was talking excitedly about the house he already bought. We would get to paint our room however we wanted. I left and walked up two flights of stairs before finally collapsing in tears. They said they still loved each other but it didn’t make any sense. Love was supposed to mean we all stayed together. I returned to them in silence and spent much of the next three years that way. I was drowning in scary stuff and didn’t want to talk about it with my mother, especially not her. That night she came into my bed and asked me if I was mad at her. I thought it was unfair for her to ask. She wanted me to make her feel better, to ease the guilt she felt. It wasn’t fair. I deserved to be mad but I was never allowed. No, I had told her, I’m not mad. It was the first time I felt more mature than my parents. I had to become stronger for them, emotionally, and for my sister too. I could never tell them how I really felt, because that would mean becoming immature. I wanted to scream and yell and demand that it all go back to normal. I don’t want to be mature. I don’t want to detached. I wanted to drown. I wrote instead, bleeding only in ink. I thought about how as a child when I fell and got hurt no one rushed to my side. Instead I picked myself up and walked inside where mom was waiting with a bandage. Somehow things changed so that I’m still the one with the scrapped up knee but I’m bandaging up my mother.