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Transitioning to college is difficult—as a freshman in my second semester of college I still don’t have it all worked out. I’ve always known who I was, what I liked, disliked and wanted. However, moving into adulthood I’ve found that most of those change. I don’t really know what I want, I like things now that I didn’t before, and I dislike people that I used to enjoy.
The thing I’ve found that stays most consistent has been my relationship with my mother. My senior year of high school I read the book “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About,” written by various authors and edited by Michele Filgate.
The book is composed of essays detailing various complex relationships each writer had with their mothers. I then decided to write my own. As I was recently rifling through my old things, I came across it, and as I read it I found that a lot of what I had written didn’t hold true anymore. Therefore my revisions to the essay go as follows:
My mother and I have always been bonded at the hip. I enjoy bragging to various individuals and anyone that will listen about it now because the older I have gotten, the more open my eyes have become to the fact that it is such a rare and beautiful thing to be fully seen and understood by your mother. I have two older sisters, only 18 months apart from each other. They always had each other to play with growing up, which left me to play with my mother. This has led me to enjoy activities like drinking coffee in the morning and going to bed early.
As I got older my mother and I drifted in closeness, and I received a cell phone for Christmas when I was 14. This changed everything— the way I viewed my body, soul, and personality. It made me resent my mother for some reason, and every morning before I left for school we would bicker about how messy my room was, and how secretive I had become about my personal life.
As a senior in high school, I knew that when I graduated, I wanted to, for lack of better words, get the hell out of Russellville. But as I got letters back from schools it became increasingly more apparent that that was not happening unless I was prepared to take out a hefty loan.
Therefore, I ended up at Arkansas Tech– but moved out of my house to gain independence apart from my parents.
As I have gained what I think of as independence, I have found that transitioning to a new chapter is hard and my mother was right. I started the year alone. My best friends that I had grown up with since elementary school went to separate colleges from me.
I started picking up the phone that had once split my mother and I apart and calling her. What I discovered is that I really missed the way she took care of me, and she has a lot of wisdom to share with me. So while I thought I hated my mother’s nagging, nit-picking, and constant need to make me feel like I need to be a better person—I actually love it. My mother has become my most cherished part of my life.
As you get older you start to understand your mother and realize she has always understood you. I don’t know much about life and what being a mother feels like, but I do know that I’ve given her too hard of a time. I’m so appreciative that I get such an empathetic person to call mom- someone who fully sees me for who I am, and unconditionally loves every part of me even when I can’t see the full picture.
So there will be times in my life when I fall to pieces, but I am comforted in knowing that my mother will always be there to help me pick them back up.
