Love is Something Unexplainable

Understanding What Love Is

I knew my mother abandoned me. How could I not, but still I told myself she would come back and take me home along with my baby sister. She broke her word of coming back in 3 days. That was when I knew at 5 years old that my mother didn't want me. She left me at an orphanage. The same one my mother grew up in and the only reason why they took me in, since it was only an orphanage for babies.

I should be thankful that I wasn't home where my father was drunk every night and became abusive towards my older sister and me. Or how I would see my mother trying to protect us from his blows the next morning after she stayed awake all night to take care of him. But even though my family was broken and poor that we couldn't even have a decent meal, I wanted to go home.

The neighborhood I lived in wasn't a place for kids. Men would fight with pocket knives in the middle of the streets with no one stopping them or else they would get hurt or killed. And there wasn't any law that could stop them. I remember watch my own father and uncle in one. What was more terrifying happened when my mother woke me and my sister up in the middle of the night, to see my father and uncle fighting against each other with a knife in hand. And just how close I was to almost being stabbed by my own father. But my mother saved me.

I didn't understood my mother and her choice and I didn't want to. Call me childish but I was a child at that time, a 5 year old who knew that her life wasn't the same anymore. I worried that I would be separated from my younger sister, the only family I had. Or if I would even get adopted and to whom it would be if I did. When I first heard that I was going to America I didn't want to leave the only place I knew. In the end I did because one I didn't have a choice, and two I didn't want to be separated by my younger sister.

Life doesn't go as we always plan. In a year I came to America, I got separated and readopted. Though I blame my mother for all these things happening in my life, I learned, now that I'm an adult, that she did it for me to have a better chance in life. She thought of my well being and future. I didn't think on how painful and hard it must have felt for her when she made that choice. All I could feel was mine.

Love is selfish but also selfless. Love is something that you sometimes can't explain, because you can't. I learned that love is forgiving and understanding. But love is also painful. A pain that can't be described.