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“You didn’t come here to fight,” said my mother as I was lying in the hospital one day. This was the last thing I wanted to hear from my parents. However, it was my first reality check.
It all started during recess when I was just eleven years old. Recess was that time when kids run around like idiots, socialize, and forget about the classroom for forty-five minutes. As we got ready to go downstairs one of my fellow classmates decided to push and skip me. I didn’t pay any attention at first, but then he started making fun of my African background. As soon as I turned my back on him he pushed me to the ground. I tried to get up fast, but suddenly one of his friends hit me with a chair. Everything stopped; my head was spinning, and I stumbled like a drunk as I fell on the floor.
I woke up the following day in the hospital, and saw my mom and dad looking at me with disappointment. After seeing my parents faces I was in more pain than before. I couldn’t get their expressions out of my mind, which seemed to say that they didn’t care it wasn’t my fault. Why?
For weeks I couldn’t eat normally because my month was all stitched-up. One day my mom came to the hospital alone, she started crying and said to me, “You didn’t come here to fight.” My physical pain became mental anguish when I saw my mom in tears. Her tears signified failure and loss of hope. In African culture, I learned before anything else that family is the key to success; if a child brings sorrow to his or her parents it foreshadows a negative future for their child. My mother’s tears made me feel guilty, but also helped me realize the reality of my situation. I was in a horrible predicament and was losing education time.
At first I didn’t understand what she meant. I was only eleven years old and was wondering why she wasn’t on my side. I thought she was looking too deeply into the situation. To me life was about living it and I didn’t think about why things were the way they...