Wriitng Topic #1 pg. 1326

My sophomore year of High School my Mother got really sick and she had to stay in the hospital for about two weeks and the only time I got to see her was on the weekends during visiting hours in a hospital that I still get nervous to even drive by. I was only fifteen years old and it seemed that at that age I needed her most, for comfort, advice and simple understanding. My Dad worked long hours so my paternal grandmother, someone I was never able to get that close to, came out from Los Angeles to “watch” out for us and although I do love her and it was nice to have someone there as a distraction, it just was not the same as having your own mother there. In those two weeks it seemed that I became like an Ostrich, I say ostrich because similar to that animal I tried to bury my head in the sand and shut out all the bad things around them and the world. Obviously I did not literally go out into my backyard and bury my head in the dirt. However, during those two weeks I tried to stay out of my house and I stuck to my friends as if they were my life lines and in many ways they were. I looked on them in this way because I did not want to feel the fear that my Mother was not coming back or that I would never see her again. Every chance I got, I would go over to a friends house, go to the mall or even do the homework that I so hated just to keep myself busy and preoccupied so I would not have to feel that fear. Like the Ostrich who shuts itself off from the world, I tried to shut myself off from feelings that I did not want to deal with. I did not feel comfortable confiding in either my father, grandmother or my friends about what I was feeling, yet I looked to those friends to provide a distraction. I never really told them where my mother was because I did not want to talk about it, I looked on them as a distraction so I hid anything and everything about the situation that I could because the whole point of a distraction is to forget about something. At the time it seemed like my only option because I felt like it was essential that every other aspect of my life stay the same because I felt that if I could control part of it, the whole situation would follow along and nothing bad would happen. But I think that being like an Ostrich all through that experience hurt me more than it helped me because I never really dealt with how I felt. Like they say, unfortunately it is the hard times we experience that make us grow and later in life such times actually help us to deal with tough situations that arise, and all I can remember about that time has to do with how my entire attention was focused on just getting through it and not dealing with it. But I do wish that I had let myself experience the whole thing because those times do really make you who you are and I think times like that can make you stronger and im sorry that I did not give myself the time to work through that and confide in someone.