Her honey brown hair tangled in the wind as she sat on the cracked green park bench, her fingers clawing into the wood until her knuckles grew white. The bright yellow sun landed on her tear rimmed eyes and made them shine like fairy lights, through her vision blurred with every shaky breath. The smell of freshly cut grass combined with the salt sting of her tears, a reminder of where she was and what she carried, a belly full of life, which she was due the next day. Her mind began to race with a plethora of questions like, “Who would do such a thing? Who would leave their baby?” Her environment around her proves her loneliness, in a park with people who are talking and laughing. Where she went unnoticed, where her pain was engulfed by the noise of a world that went on without her.
She rose at last, her white dress clinging to her form as though it, too, were weighted down by her grief. But with each step away from the bench, her stride straightened, converting her pain to confidence. “I can do this,” she whispered to herself, although there was no one to hear. Her voice cracked when she told her story as she knocked on her brother’s door, but his anger shouted down her words, his blame, he slammed the door, left her trembling on the doorstep. His rejection fueled her sense of aloneness, yet her sister later on, wrapped her in a deep warm hug, the difference was glaring. The warmth in that hug made her realize that kindness, no matter how rare, could save her when everything else was unstable. Her actions attested to her strength; she still walked, asked, hoped, even when all doors were closed.
The hospital fluorescent lights overhead hummed softly, cold, and crisp in the metallic scent of blood and antiseptic. She held her sister’s hand as doctors rolled her away to surgery, her mind repeating unspoken prayers. There was silence in the room for three, long, agonizing minutes, until a faint, weak cry awakened. From that day on, her daughter grew up in a house not of a single mother but double, with laughter echoing off the kitchen walls as cousins, turned into siblings, built forts out of blankets. The girl grew to be the mirror image of her mother’s strength, actions, and strengths. She eventually learned that storms don’t last forever. And while the park bench, the slammed door, and the antiseptic hospital room were memory scars, they also became proof, in the darkest of soil, she had sown a seed, and in time bloomed into light. And that little girl is...me.
I wrote this story in particular because it is close to my heart. It begins with fictional scenes, but by the end it becomes real. It is about my mother’s suffering during pregnancy and the life she was pregnant with was my life. I was inspired to write this story when I was studying abroad in Scotland. I had missed her so much at that time, and I decided to write about her. I recall hearing her recount on how she came to the U.S all alone, no family, and how terrible that was. Her sacrifices later became a happy and positive life for me, and I felt like I should accord her that respect. I wrote it first to record in a studio in Edinburgh, so my own voice could carry her story forward. Writing it taught me the way the darkest days can ultimately give light to the brightest.
The universal themes of perseverance, motherhood, sacrifice, and hope ring true in this story. My mother’s journey is unique, but the emotions it conveys, fear, rejection, longing, and love, are universal across cultures and generations. For example, the motif of doors, her brother slamming one in her face while her sister opened hers, illustrates the truth that some relationships fracture in times of crisis while others deepen. On a cultural level, her story mirrors the experiences of countless immigrant women who raised children with little assistance, often remaining invisible or undervalued. By weaving personal detail with this broader context, I hoped to illustrate that her story is not only mine to inherit but also part of a collective narrative of survival and resilience.
One choice I made in terms of setting was to open the story on the cracked green park bench. The fractured bench mirrors her fractured state of mind, while the laughter of strangers emphasizes her isolation. I constructed the syntax here deliberately: long, winding sentences evoke the sunny park atmosphere, while the short sentences that follow, “Her knuckles turned white. She whispered, “I can do this,” shifting the rhythm to capture her tension and inner resolve. The diction is also intentional. Instead of repeating “strength,” I used words like resolve, determination, and persistence to show the many dimensions of her endurance. The bench scene continues the theme of invisibility, showing how suffering can go unnoticed even in public. This insight connects to a broader idea, that women’s private pain often lies unseen alongside the indifference of the world.
I mixed fiction and lived experience in my writing. One of my mentor texts was Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, which uses evocative description to depict resilience without sentimentality. Like Walls, I tried to “show” rather than “tell” by basing emotion on sensory information, the smell of cut grass, the sting of tears, or the hum of hospital lights. One of the challenges was balancing fictionalized imagery and true emotional fact. I didn’t want the poetic imagery to be melodramatic. I pushed through it by focusing on creating details that grounded the story. In revising, I would like to explore more of the cultural and historical histories of immigrant single mothers, whose unspoken sacrifices shape generation but get shortchanged in American storytelling.
One sentence I would like to highlight is, “There was silence in the room for three, long, agonizing minutes, until a faint, weak cry awakened.” Here I slowed the narrative pace to make suspense and fear. The psychic distance is close, almost inside her body, because silence is drawn out and unbearable. I used syntax for a purpose, the extended build up mimics creeping minutes, and the clipped nature of “a faint, weak cry awakened” dispels tension like a gasp for air. The third person voice is intimate in tone, so the reader feels the trembling doubt of those minutes.
The choice affects the climax of the narrative, where hope gradually replaces despair. What I took away from working on this piece is how deeply personal it can be to connect with bigger themes. While this is my mother’s story, it is also the groundwork of who I am. Writing it made me realize that intimate particular details, a hug, a slammed door, a cracked bench, can carry symbolic meaning far beyond their literal selves. It also reminded me of how resilience is not just survival, but also tenderness, laughter, and rebirth. Through this process, I came to understand her story not only as her own but as a piece of cultural and historical pattern of women taking instability and making it into possibility. Most importantly, I learned that writing has the ability to preserve such realities so that a private story of endurance will sound like something universal.