last day of Essay Camp 2025

I'm still processing the difference between a blog post and an essay.  I tell stories here on my blog, and those narratives do indeed have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I'm not sure they are essays per se....

The prompt I chose for today:  

Describe a moment when everything changed.

I had a dysfunctional family - no news flash for those who knew me, and even less informative as you realize that no one has what I have described as a "Norman Rockwell" family - it just doesn't exist except in some hazy golden era of nostalgia

My father took off for parts unknown when I was in 8th grade, leaving my mother a pile of bills and a daughter who looked / sounded  much like him as far as appearances went at least.   To say my mother was bitter is an understatement.  To say she took it out on me is also an understatement.  She neither liked nor approved of me, and that was pretty tough because in her family, love was conditional - you met expectations and fit in or you simply were wrong.

My grandmothers were also pretty upset and not shy about telling me so.  Grandmom Hughes was distraught, although things there calmed down after my father got back in touch when he was working on the pipeline in Alaska.  Grandmom Riley felt, like my mother, that I was too much like my father and therefore needed to change. The animosity between the two families was pretty overt and I was stuck in the middle.

When I was a junior in college - at Towson back when it was a state college and not a university - I felt ready to break.  I felt totally inadequate, totally unacceptable to either grandmother or my mother, and as though I was disintegrating.  So I went to the counselor.

Now I don't remember the counselor's name, or even if I was talking to a man or a woman.  I remember sitting there and crying, sobbing that I didn't know what to do because I was so torn over what everyone wanted and I didn't know what choice I had anymore....   And they interrupted me.

"What do you want?  What would you chose?"

I just stared at them for a long moment, and they waited.

And then I straightened up in the chair, stopped crying, and started talking about what I thought.

"See?  You do have a choice."

And I got up, thanked them and left.  

From that moment on, I knew I had always had a choice.  Oh I may not like the choices or the alternatives, and there were always sometimes unforeseen consequences, and some choices were irrevocable, but I had a choice.   It may not be much of a choice, and the alternatives suck, but it is a choice.  

And that became a saying my kids got very tired of hearing:  "you have a choice".   Followed up with a statement that it may not be much of a choice, and the alternatives suck, but it is still a choice and it is always yours because over the years, you will become the end result of those choices -  all of them, the little ones, the unconscious ones, the big ones, and the irrevocable ones.