Trice 1 Alisha Trice Professor Raymond Writing Prompt #2 UWRT 1103 6 July 2015 A Mother's Gift Growing up my mother valued the importance of education. She wanted my brother and T to be proficient in all subjects, especially reading and writing, She was very persistent when it ework, We would be up all night doing homework because she would came to checking our hom: all make us redo do an assignment if she believed we could do better. She would also buy us sm: booklets to practice our writing during the summer. My mother never had a chance to g0 to college because she had my brojKer and I at a young age. I hated doing extra work and sitting at the table every day. Even thoy(gh I didn’t have any homework sometimes she would make up assignments for me to coipplete. She would make me read a book and write a summary about it. Over the years my penmanship got better and J learned to flow sentences together to create a story. [began to appreciate the tough love she gave us when we were small children. When I turned seven she gave me my first diary and told me I needed to write in it every day. 1 could write about anything, she just wanted me to write. She told me it would be fun to look back on my old diaries and see how much I grew. Every evening we would sit in my room and ypo veTrice 2 write in our diaries. I really didn't write anything important, I just loved spending time with my mom. ‘A couple of years passed and I went through about four diaries. My mom got diagnosed with breast cancer and our nightly rituals slowly waned, Unfortunately my mother lost her fight, 54 oe to cancer. I was very sad but I had memories of her through my dairies and I would read am something from them every night. A few months later I began to journal again. I wrote about how much I missed my mother and the pain I felt during that depressing period in my life. 1 began to read Edgar Allen Poe during that time and discovered the art of poetry. | started writing poetry from then on, I entered many competitions in high school and won a few. If it wasn’t for my mother I wouldn’t have enjoyed writing on a daily basis as I did. She gave me the building blocks of proficient writing and because of her I can express myself creatively through my poetry.