The document describes the author's childhood and relationship with their mother. It details how their mother was very involved in raising the author as a single parent after divorcing their father. As the author grew older, they struggled with independence and acting out, causing conflicts with their caring but anxious mother. However, their bond strengthened again once the author learned to manage their emotions in college.

1. Growing up my mom was always there for me. I spent
much of my childhood with her, and considerably more time
together than I did with my dad. He worked a lot and
traveled a lot, and my mom stayed home and raised me. When
I was four she drove me to preschool in the mornings, to
the sand spur colored church on Skidaway Island. At noon
she picked me up.
We often rode bikes on the weekends and went crabbing
in the summer. We stood on the wooden planks of Delegal
Marina and pulled blue crabs from the muddy water. During
the week, after school, my mom often took me to the mall or
in town to shop for groceries. We rode into Savannah in a
white Volvo station wagon.
I always liked Diamond Causeway and the beige concrete
bridge across Moon River. We’d drive past yellow wild
flowers, low tide and blonde grass. If I looked carefully
and indirectly into the passing trees, I could spot the
baseball fields of Bethesda.
A mile down the road we’d pass a small nursery that
sold viburnum and azaleas. If I asked enough times she’d
stop. I’d sit on the tan leather seat as my pet shark
growled and poked his cotton head from the car window. I’d
wait as my mom walked inside. She went to buy me a few
sticks of honey.
During the evenings my mom cooked dinner. Each night
my brother, my dad, my mom and I sat around the kitchen
table. I often fought with my brother over the seat with
the view of the living room. I tried to leave the T.V. on
quietly, to watch Rugrats. My mom often made me turn off
the “boob-tube”. She wanted us to talk to each other at
dinner—not “vegetate”.
As a kid, my mother made a point to keep books around
the house. She taught me to read sometime around my fifth
birthday. I remember the first time I sat with a book on my
own. I plopped down in my bathroom, on the white linoleum
counter top, a modest crease of yellow light seeping the
brass hinges. And I disappeared. I found myself in a
cobblestone world standing next to a large wooden clock and
man in a yellow rain coat. The man wanted me to help him
find his friend. He said his friend was a monkey named
George. Curious. When I finished the story, or dream, I
raced from my bathroom to tell my mom what happened.
“Mom . . . where did I just go? I . . . wasn’t in my
room. Wasn’t in the house!?”

2. “That’s your imagination. And it’s as real as anything
else you might understand.”
In kindergarten my mom planned and helped set up field
trips. She packed me lunch. Read to me before bed. And she
continued to pick me up from school—when I was good, and
when I was bad. I didn’t always agree with the way the P.E.
teacher picked teams for kickball, or how the music teacher
didn’t let me play drums with the claves. I often found
myself in Mr. Bell’s office, the grey haired ancient
principal. In second grade, my mom drove to school at least
once a month to bail me out of trouble. She’d walk into the
tiny white office with the glass windows so old they
drooped at their bottoms, and flash me a quick look of
disapproval. I’d look down at my sneakers, my feet swinging
a few inches above the floor. My mom followed Mrs. Bell,
Mr. Bell’s wife, into the back office. I never heard what
they said. When my mom came back she’d tell me I needed to
stop “butting heads” and listen to the P.E. teacher.
“But she’s dumb. Her rules don’t make sense.”
“You have to listen to her. I’m sorry.”
In third grade, when my parents divorced, I chose to
live with my mom. The judge, or whoever, granted her the
rights to our old home. At the time, to live in the place
my parents raised me, offered a meager sense of stability I
desperately needed. I found comfort knowing I could spend
evenings on the couch in the living room, or hear the sound
of crickets in my room with the windows open.
Toward the end of the school year spent a lot of time
in the cafeteria after hours. My mom started her old job as
a nurse in the OR and she often worked sixteen-hour days.
At times I might see her on a Monday and not again until
Wednesday. She wanted so badly for things to stay the way
they were, for my brother and me, when we were kids. She
didn’t want to sell the house. She didn’t want us to change
schools. And she did everything she could to make sure that
didn’t happened.
I played a lot of video games in middle school and I
started cooking my own dinners sometime in sixth grade. I
learned to love hamburger helper and ramen noodles. One of
my favorite meals came from a friend who taught me about
egg-in-the-holes, a fried egg cooked in the center of a
hole bitten through a slice of white bread sizzled in
butter, cheese on the top. A few nights a week my mom came
home early and cooked. Sometimes she left a twenty-dollar
bill for me to order Chinese.

3. My routine from age twelve to fifteen consisted of
carpool, studying, soccer and Halo. I became fairly self-
reliant over the years and I watched as my mother became
the same way.
As time passed, our quiet home became an odd sort of
haven for me. I didn’t have to worry about parents when I
made it back from school. It gave me time to do all sorts
things boys at the age of thirteen do, but not around their
parents, smoke cigarettes, masturbate, and try pot. I began
to enjoy my solitude, the idea that I could live on my own.
In time, I more or less forgot what it was like to live as
a family.
In high school, I spent much of my time at night
looking over homework and reading. I always felt that if I
did well in school, and got into a good college, I’d live a
happy life. I often sat with my mom in the living room at
night, reviewing history and vocab from yellow and pink
flash cards. She’d sit with me for an hour or two after
working all day and read the backside of my paper note.
“Chinese political and military leader of the Chinese
Republic, 1928 to 1975”
“Mow Ze Dong.”
“Nope.”
“Sun Yet Sen?”
She’d quietly shake her head
“Bill Withers.”
“Not quiet.”
“…………………”
“ ~ ”
My mom and I have always had a sort of dry irony to
our humor. I’d apply the frustration and she’d apply the
love, and somewhere in the middle we’d meet with
understanding.
The word nurse describes my mother perfectly. She’s
diligent, caring, overprotective and loving. I don’t know
if all nurses are loving, but when I think of a nurse I
think of my mom. To work she wears a white lab coat and an
orange and white nametag. In her right pocket sits a black
pen. She wears colorful earrings, or gold earrings and a
small silver Rolex. For most of my life I’ve known my mom
to wear her blonde hair short. It flips in a series of
sporty, elegant curls and folds to a short stop long before
her shoulders and neck in the back.
During the week she packs her own lunch and takes it
to work in a black polka dotted lunch box, salads and
tomatoes, chopped up bits of carrots and turkey. On
Sundays, when I stop by the house to relax, and escape my

4. noisy place downtown, she cooks a huge dinner and enough
food for her to take to work throughout the week. My mom
doesn’t cook all the time, like she did when I was little,
but she makes a point on Sundays to make sure there’s food
the kitchen.
Our relationship, and what it means to be a son and a
mother, changed many times throughout our lives. As a kid,
my mother was just that, my mom. She embodied a loving,
uninhibited sense of compassion. She cleaned my clothes,
cooked my meals, tucked me in at night. She sheltered me
from the parts of the world I felt were unfair. As I grew
older, and the situation of my family changed, however, my
mother took on new roles. She became strong. Resolute. And
whether consciously or not, she attempted to fill the roles
life often assigns to a father.
I often fought with my mom about my comings and
goings, my need to spend time on my own. She maintained her
position as a caring mother, and she worried, especially
about my time on the water.
Growing up in Savannah I learned to appreciate the
ocean as a kid. My mom grew up in Chicago, in a suburb
called Glenview, and she only knew a little about boats,
from the times my father took our family out on the
weekends in the summer. We argued on this point a lot, and
maybe she knew more than I gave her credit.
When I was thirteen and old enough to drive a boat, my
mom bought me a small Boston Whaler for Christmas. Chubby
cheeked and still pretty torn up about my parents’ divorce,
that yellow skiff meant more to me than I can possibly tell
you. I spent as much time on the water as I could, pushing
that little boat as far into the sounds and down the coast
as I could make it go, on twelve gallons of gas. The ocean
offered me escape, restitution and solace from a world I
resented, and didn’t fully understand.
I’d drive out by myself during the long summer
evenings and float down the caramel or sun bleached shell
banks, popping a small cork above the flooded oysters,
hoping to ketch a speckled trout or a large redfish. I’d
sit and listen to the wind blow, to the immense silence and
distant cackle of shore birds. I’d look out at the setting
sun and the orange three-hour evening. I grew accustom to
the silent nights, the cicadas, the wind, the soft smell of
warm salt air. After a day of fishing I’d stare out at
Wassaw Sound, and the distant white beach, the rim of
saltmarsh now grey and covered by the night. I’d tell
myself I’d never leave this place. I’d tell myself in a
sort of aw—‘this is my home’.

5. Without my father around, I had no one to back my
curiosity and redouble the confidence I felt toward my
worldly outings. This conflict between maternal love and
boyhood desire lead to many problems between my mother and
I. Over time she became neither a mother nor a father to
me. She was simply a loving mother trying to be strong.
In high school, I often lost the ability to control my
temper. I tee-ter-totter-ed back and forth between a quiet
love I felt for my mom and the need to satisfy my own
selfish desires to experience the world. I found myself
unable to control my frustration when talking to her and
her anxiety. A lot of the time I knew what to expect and I
tried to leave the house as fast as possible.
“Okay-mom-going-out-on-the-boat-be-back-later-ok-bye,”
and I’d try to shut the door all in one motion.
“But Park, wait.”
And she’d come up with some reason why I shouldn’t go,
anything from a worst-case scenario to something as obscure
and unrelated as the weather. I’d be left convulsing in my
shoes, staring and shaking and looking out the window. Many
times I did much worse. I snapped. At this point I did
exactly what I saw my father do when I was a kid. Scream.
At first I’d try to control my voice. I’d try to reason
with what seemed beyond reason. A mother. But once I got
going, I couldn’t stop. What’s sad is that I had the
strange ability to watch myself during my psychotic
parades, yelling and slamming doors and screaming at my
mom. And I felt bad. I just couldn’t stop. There’s still an
imprint of my fist in the stainless steel refrigerator in
the kitchen.
It’d be easy blame my out bursts on something as simple
as privilege, or my dad, but I don’t think either one is
fair. I simply and sadly lacked maturity and humility, and
a solid foundation of restraint, and I’m very sorry for
that.
It took me into my early years of college to learn how
to control my frustration and inability to talk to my mom.
However, when I did learn, her place in my heart returned,
and she became something more than just a mother and a
substitute for my father, she became once again the love I
knew as a child, my mom.