My character

Emily crouched quietly in the shadowy room, gazing around at the empty shelves and dresser drawers around her. Suddenly, the deafening silence overcame her and she fell to her knees, instantly sobbing. Waves of salty tears cascaded down her sun-spotted cheeks as she unleashed an anguished cry that echoed against the bare walls, a further reminder of her solitude. As the last of her sobs subsided, she drew a deep breath and rose to her feet, prepared to face her first day without Kate.

With a click, Emily shut the door to her daughter’s vacant bedroom, hoping that Kate’s closed door would keep her memories at bay. She made her way downstairs where the morning sun streamed through the skylight, casting a ray across Emily’s half unpacked suitcase. Draped across the luggage was her newly purchased “NYU Mom” sweatshirt, its cuffs streaked with mascara from their role as Kleenex on her cross-country plane ride the night before. Leaving Kate at a school three thousand miles away was excruciating for Emily. This past weekend had been such a blur – meeting Kate’s new roommate, a trip to the grocery store to stock her mini-fridge, and then Emily and Cliff hugged their only child goodbye knowing they wouldn’t see her smiling face again until Christmas.

The foyer was lined with family photos and the framed snapshots beckoned to Emily as she passed through on her way outside to the mailbox. Kate with her soccer team after their championship win, the three of them on a weekend trip to Sun Valley, the beaming graduate in her cap and gown - all these memories washed over the lonely mother and at once she became livid. How dare Kate leave her alone? How could she do this to Emily, who had devoted her entire life to her daughter? And out of all the schools that had accepted Kate, why on earth would she pick the furthest away?

‘How ungrateful,’ Emily fumed to herself, storming down the front walk. Peering inside the mailbox, she was all the more distraught to find an envelope addressed to Kate - some brochure from one of the various California schools Kate had turned down in favor of the East Coast. Emily had had enough. In one swift movement, she slammed the mailbox shut and spun around, stomping back up the walk and into the house.

Cliff came home from work to find his wife in a crumpled ball on the kitchen floor. There she sat amid bits of smashed chinaware, clutching a half eaten package of Oreos in one hand while aimlessly flipping through a dog-eared photo album with the other. Hundreds of other family photographs lay strewn about Emily, who glanced up warily when she heard Cliff enter the room. Her expression explained it all to her husband; the mixture of sorrow, fear and remorse spoke more than any of Emily’s words ever could. Cliff extended his hand and pulled Emily to her feet, leading her to the couch before turning to the wreckage in the kitchen.

Emily awoke early the next morning and shuffled into the kitchen to brew Cliff’s daily pot of espresso. As she reached into the pantry for the coffee grounds, her hand grazed against the jar of Jif peanut butter, Kate’s favorite. Emily had used it to make Kate’s sandwiches for years, even back before her daughter decided she was much too grown up to go by Katie. Emily felt a twinge of despair as she recalled little Katie’s pigtails and chocolate stained lips. How wonderful a time that was for a mother, to be so adored by her child. Determined not to repeat the previous day’s actions, Emily turned her attention again to her husband’s coffee, pushing her longing memories to the side, at least for now.

After Cliff had left for the office, Emily decided she must spend today differently. She could dwell on Kate’s absence no longer. Musing over the day of freedom ahead of her, Emily began to list the ways she could spend her time, but she realized that each of them ultimately led to Kate. ‘Why don’t I run errands?’ she thought, but there was no prom dress to be picked up from the cleaners, no mechanical pencils needed for tomorrow’s math final. Grocery shopping was her next option, but without a group of ravenous teenagers around, the cupboards were more than well-stocked. It occurred to Emily that it was time to do something for herself, and herself alone.

Once she had pulled on a pair of sweats and tennis shoes, Emily set out to explore the neighborhood where she had spent the last few years. The three of them had moved into this cozy gated community right after Kate’s last year of junior high; Cliff had just gotten promoted and the new location allowed Kate to attend one of the best private high schools in the state. Emily had hardly gotten to know the place in all the time she had lived there, however. Throughout Kate’s education, Emily encouraged her to participate in a variety of activities and played an active role in her daughter’s life, attending PTA meetings, cheering at the sidelines of every game and assisting in the production of any recital or play that featured Kate. As busy as her daughter was, Emily’s schedule was just as hectic, if not more. As she strolled through the winding roads and cul-de-sacs, it dawned on this overachieving mother that for the past eighteen years, she had almost nothing that she could call her own. In fact, she had only one thing to show for nearly two decades of time and effort: Kate. All Emily had ever wanted was to be a good mother, but with her daughter becoming an adult, it was apparent that there was something more to life. Though only the day before she had been terrified of her loneliness, she now saw that her solitude was liberating. It was at that moment that Emily felt truly alive.

Writing response: I chose this character because I wanted to write in the perspective of someone in a different situation than myself but with certain aspects that I understood or had experienced. I’ve had friends go far away to school and I’ve missed them a lot, so I thought about how that felt and then took it to an extreme in the form of an overbearing mother. Something I thought was challenging was portraying both good and bad qualities while still making her believable. I wanted to show how Emily was very loving but also dependent to an unhealthy extent, which is something that’s tricky to portray. I used both familiar aspects (family, college, etc) and unsettling things, such as Emily breaking the dishes out of anger. I thought that would be the best way to make a believable character who still had some extreme characteristics.