Mothering Daughter: College Admission Essay Sample

“So you want to go to med school. Is it for the money or to appease your parents?” Neither, because money isn’t worth the sacrifice of dealing with insanity and I have only one parent, who cannot be appeased by my attending med school. This was the answer I couldn’t vocalize to my counselor when I went to request a letter of recommendation. I didn’t want to be registered as the precocious child with a cynical outlook or the pitiful, unofficial head-of-the-household who has to cope with a manic-depressive mother. So I smile wryly, then slide her the ribbon-wrapped KitKat bar and a thank-you letter before heading out.

Of course, my counselor meant no harm with the joke, but I could never return those jokes with a frivolous comment, because I cannot think of one good enough to diminish the weight of my reality. Just like my response, my reason for pursuing a profession in the medical field, specifically in psychiatrics, is heavy and dry: I need to see my mother as a patient and a human being in need of my help, not as someone who should have been my caretaker. It was the day of my mom’s psychotherapy session, so I left school early to give her a ride. On our way back home, she gently took my right hand with both of hers and asked if I wanted to eat anything. She wanted to cook for me. We got home after dropping by the grocery market, and I sat on the dining table.

While watching her cook, I remembered going over to a friend’s house in seventh grade and watching my friend and her mom make Keish. It smelled delicious and looked exotic, but my eyes were fixed on their jubilant faces. When I returned home on that seventh-grade day, I asked my mom if we could cook quesadillas together for dinner. She got up from bed, walked past me, went in and out of the restroom with a bottle of pills, and slipped back into her blanket. “Turn off the light when you leave.” I turned off the light and stood by the door for a few more seconds before going out. I took out Hot Pockets and the Costco salad that my aunt had stocked in the fridge and sat down on the six-seat dining table, but I couldn’t eat. I threw them in the trashcan and rushed back to my mom’s room. I stood before her closed bedroom door and tried to figure out a way to express what I felt, but in the end I just decided to head back to my own room.

That was the first time I felt bitter towards my mom. Now I understand that the bitterness was towards my mom’s illness. I learned not to make those kinds of requests anymore, but that day, after I left my counselor, my mom voluntarily wanted to do something for me. I watched her fumble through the groceries and stagger back and forth from the fridge to the cutting board. She could not finish cutting one full carrot before jumping to the next step. Executive and procedural dysfunction in bipolar disorder--the first thing I register in my head and then the second thought comes out as tears. As I watch my mother trying to play the role of the caretaker, but the other part of her getting in the way, I loathe myself for the times I held her to my expectations of a parent, the times I called myself unlucky and imagined living with my friends' parents, and the times I pretended to be asleep while she groaned and sobbed. At first, I couldn’t view her as something other than a mother, and once I began to see that she is unable to fulfill the duties of motherhood, she became a hollow, incomprehensible creature that only drains and hinders me.

I say to myself that my unfulfilled desire for a caretaker figure is behind me, but when I hear jokes like the one that my counselor tosses out, I still see the seventh grade kid standing before her mother’s door in me. I cannot say that I am free of the deficiencies I experienced in my childhood, but I understand how to build other layers of character to amend the flaws. I can relieve my mother of her agony, the cold stares and the suppressed disdain. Endeavoring to become a medical professional would be the only way of getting closer to understanding her as she is with the illness and taking care of her without feeling any entitlement to compensation.