Left

Alethia reflects on the relationship she had with her mother, before and following moving out. She comes to the realization that it took courage for her to leave a bad situation with her mother but she admits that she can see where her mother was coming from.

I like this piece because it shows a raw event. It starts off with an awkward encounter at the Dollar General with a cashier which launches into the backstory of why Alethia moved out of her mother's house. I like the addressing of the multiple meanings of the word "Left" and think that the title is simple but perfect. I thought it was interesting that it took time for her siblings to tell her of their relationship with their mother; it really showed the distance between them. I think my favorite line was ". All the time spent trying to confront problems that didn’t want to be confronted is time you can spend trying to heal" because I think that this is something that everyone can learn from and everyone can relate to but so few people recognize it that they get caught up in the past and end up holding grudges or feeling regret.

I think the transitions were a little shaky at times. There was a jump between a personal experience to telling history of her mother and back again that I think could have been fleshed out a little more. With this, there were times where spans of time were summarized only to go back to a time before that which left me a little dizzy trying to put the events in order. The scenes worked really well as you didn't need the dialogue for a lot of the yelling, though I think that would have made the piece stronger. By generalizing her mother's rage, the reader gets a biased side of the story (which I suppose is what a personal essay is supposed to do...) and makes her mother out to be "the bad guy".

I'm not saying that our author doesn't give credit where credit is due, it just seems like she was so personally affected by the situation that she doesn't reflect on the reasons her mother did some of the things she did. Did her mother feel entitled to her daughter's money because she was her daughter or because she had helped her in some way and thought that she deserved some credit? Can we get specifics on what her mother was sick with, so we can experience some sympathy? Was it verbal abuse that kept her siblings quiet or was it something else?

I think that this essay is written from the heart about a very personal experience. I respect you for sharing this story with us.