Autobiography

When I was little, I didn't really know my mother. We spent lots of time together, but it wasn't until she starting writing that I really learned who she is. Writing is also one way I found out about myself.

Our story begins in 8th grade English class. Our class has just finished the Diary of Anne Frank (both the play and the movie), and our teacher decides to have our huge assignment of the term be an autobiography- specializing in how we feel about life. The assignment description was lengthy and arduous- a specific assignment for each of the 16-20 pages we were required to do. At this time, my hormones had kicked in fully and the last thing I wanted to do was actually pay any attention to squirmy feelings. Additionally, there was quite a bit of uproar at home between my mother's health problem, my younger brothers' autism, and the rest of my younger siblings. I was feeling overwhelmed, and not much else. I sat at the computer and said to myself, "Okay, he wants to know how I feel about life." I began writing how I felt about my life. It quickly turned into a story that was a cross between Pippi Longstocking and Cinderella. There was a girl who lived in the kitchen working away for the stepsisters and family upstairs. Other than the neverending demands, they really weren't much of a problem. The girl lived with 2 horses, named Strawberry and Brownie, a couple of cats, and a molting, revolting shrieking parrot. Her problem: she was craving chocolate. Well, the king and queen were throwing a ball for the prince and everyone was invited. The girl wanted to go because the castle was offering a free chocolate bar and a cat had just eaten the last of her hidden stash. I turned in the story. My teacher took one look at the top page, without even reading it, and said "This isn't the assignment, and you're too late to do it again." I was very angry.
Fast forward to 11th grade English. Again, our teacher was having us write an autobiography; but this time, she provided a way for all of us to accomplish it. The assignment description was short and open-ended. "Write about an event in your personal life that changed the way you viewed the world. Keep it less than 3 pages. (The description then had the list of good writing traits that she was actually grading us on)." She also read a few examples from past years, helped us map out a series of events in our lives to get our minds thinking, and frequently checked in with us to see how we were progressing. I did the map and the rest of the prework, but I couldn't think of an event in my life that I wanted to write about until 2 days before the rough draft was due. It actually happened as an accident. A few days before our teacher had given us the assignment, I had had a very vivid dream- so vivid that when I got home from school that day I spent an hour and a half writing it up. Well, I was on the computer cleaning up my files when I spotted this dream. I read through it and realized that here was the event I had been looking for. I knew from past experience though, that I needed to prove how this story fit the assignment, so I wrote a introduction at the top explaining the fear I had always lived with and a paragraph at the end explaining how this dream helped me conquer my fears. We read in groups for rough draft day, and were supposed to pick the one story that stood out as a good example. The class came down to two stories- mine, and another girl's. She had done exactly what the teacher had envisioned, writing about how a hiking trip had changed the way she felt about her dad. However, everyone in the class agreed that my story was just as moving, only so out-of-the-box that it was unexpected. The teacher asked for a copy of my story after she graded it, explaining that she wanted it as an example to show how open-ended the assignment was. I gladly agreed.

Anyways, the moral of these stories is how I learned to know my mother. It wasn't the real life things she did; but the stories she told that taught me more about how my mother viewed life. Fiction is a gateway to the soul- bypassing all the baggage of reality. And that is why her life history is contained not in the pages of a journal, but in her actions and the stories that bring her to life.