Maya Angelou's Essay: A Growing Bond

A Growing Bond
“I Pray I shall have the courage to liberate my mother when the time comes”. Maya Angelou writes to us about the graduation day her mother gave her in “Mother and Freedom” Angelou rethinks back to her seventeen year old self walking away from home with her three month old baby. Angelo also tells us of how she wants to give her mother her own freedom by letting her pass on peacefully after she gets cancer, but is not able to yet, because she wants her mother to continually be a part of her life. I worry that when the time comes for my mother I, too, will not be able to give my mother her freedom, because of how poor of a relationship we had and how it is just now beginning to grow after lost years. When I was seventeen I felt like I wanted to be a wild teenager. I felt as I could do as I wanted, because I did as I was told.

Because I am stubborn, like my father, I found it difficult to look at the wrong in myself. I did not want change as I was comfortable with the way my life was, but the day I graduated high school, I began to look at my life in a different way. I became emotional, thinking this was it, my life is over, but then I looked at my family, but more specifically at my mom, and I overheard her conversation with a family friend of ours and I heard her ask how she was taking her only daughter graduating high school and then I heard my mother’s words, she said, “ if it weren’t for her staying home I don’t know what I would do with myself, she is my kid, and I am proud of her, and if she were leaving for college in august right now I would be crying like a baby”. Once I heard her words I knew I had to change my attitude with her, and since that day I have made it my goal to become a better person, and as I had made my choice to stay home and attend college in my home town, I also gave my mom and I a second chance at a stronger