Personal Narrative...

I have not mentioned much about school lately and how things are going. I think I am doing very well. I was able to finish a 16 week course of math 082 in just 8 weeks. I managed to get a final exam score of 91% with a final grade of 92%. Not too bad for someone who has not really done math in over 30 years. I also have finished my Healthful Living class with an A as well. I did very well on the 2 two-hour tests closed book tests we had. So 2 classes done with after 8 weeks and both straight A's.

My CIS 105-reguired computer class-is driving me insane. It is a lot of reading about things I have no interest and will never ever use in my lifetime. Then I have to take a 20 question quiz over the material. The good thing is I can use my book and I get 3 tries for each quiz. We also have a computer portion with Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint. These are very difficult assignments that they do not allow shortcuts. But even though the teacher is really no help at all, I am managing an A so far. I hope to keep that A as I have worked hard for it.

My last class is English 101. This is in no way teaching me English when all I do is write 4 papers. Not a tough class. But papers are subjective if the teacher does not like your writing style. I have been fortunate that my teacher happens to think me a writing genius. I have included my last paper we had to write. It was a personal narrative about our life. Boy, did she get a shock. The following is my original paper I wrote and then her comments at the end. Grade for the paper was 100% and yes I have an A in this class as well. Please realize that as with my blog I don't hold back the truth in my papers either. Many of you may not know about my childhood, and this only skims the top 1% of all that happened to me growing up.

"God didn't promise days without pain, laughter without sorrow, sun without rain, but He did promise strength for the day, comfort for the tears, and light for the way." (1)

Growing up, I was a very odd little girl and endured a very difficult childhood. My only dream was to be normal and have a fairytale life with the ideal house and the perfect family. I thought I had all of that until a few years ago when things began to drastically change. Cancer entered my world, shattered my dreams, and taught me that normal is nothing but a setting on the clothes dryer and does not exist in the real world.

I cannot pinpoint when I learned that I was adopted as a baby, it is just something that I have always known. Knowing that I was adopted I always felt that I was different from most people. My home life was such that I felt like a round peg that tried to fit into a square hole. I did not share the same emotions or actions that my adopted parents had. Only when I found my birth father did I truly understand the role of genetics verses learned responses.  The more time that I have spent learning about my birth father the more I have realized that my actions and what makes me the person that I am today came mostly from him.

My childhood forced me to learn how to become a survivor. A couple of different men sexually molested me at a young age. My physically and emotionally abusive adopted mother died when I was nine years old and my adopted father remarried a woman with two sons shortly after. My new step mother was not able to love me as her own child either. Since I had two mothers that were not my birth mother, I was under the delusion that birth mothers had to love their own babies. This was proven to be a false statement and after finding my birth mother in 1993. From this experience, I learned that not all mothers love all of their babies. 

During my high school years I felt like a freak most of the time. I wore clothes that my step mother made and they looked very funny and different from what everyone else was wearing. I was also not allowed to drive a car to high school. This forced me to get rides with people or walk. I was not very popular, but did have a good group of friends that were outcasts like me.

When I had my own children, I was determined to not repeat the cycle of abuse that I went through as a child. My goal was to be the kind of mother to my children that I did not have growing up.  I was a stay at home mom for my three daughters, volunteered in their elementary school, and allowed them to be little girls. I also took on the huge challenge of home schooling them when they asked me to try.

My greatest source of learning, challenge and change came when my twenty-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. She had two forms of fast moving blood cancer, leukemia and lymphoma. As I was the sole caregiver I had to quickly become well educated in doctors, nurses, chemotherapy, procedures and hospitals. She survived and was in remission, but her health was on the mend only for a brief time, as she soon became immune compromised and developed two forms of pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). She was placed in the Intensive Care Unit which was where I began my training all over again. This was a whole new kind of experience with more intense care and consequences. After fighting for thirty-three days, she died.

Now I have lost many “friends” that found it too difficult to deal with my daughter’s death. I feel as if everywhere I go I have a sign over me that screams “mother who has a dead daughter.” I cry in public for no reason in which anyone would ever begin to understand and then feel as if I am being stared at even more. I was not normal growing up and I will never be normal again. I just have to keep reminding myself that normal is just a setting on the clothes dryer and does not exist in the real world or my world and that is okay.

(1)  Unknown source http://www.great-quotes.com/quotes/category/Life/pg/4

Sherry, you have endured and survived so much more than any child would elect to experience. You write so clearly, it feels like the words describe a scene in the present.

Congratulations on your resilience and tenacity.

normal is nothing but a setting on the clothes dryer and does not exist in the real world. This is a line that Erma Bombeck would have been proud to claim!

Well done! 25/25