Literacy Narrative: By Nadeen Amoudi
She was forced to read when she was hiding from her mother. It was around the year 2003, she was about four years old and escaped as usual to the upstairs library. She adored that library in her first home, with its tall rectangular shaped window doors, and how the balcony overlooked the french-inspired looking garden with its large fountain surrounded by six skyrocket juniper trees. The sun would blaze through the trees near the windows and would hit the wood floors making it the perfect place to read because the wood was so warm. The library had a musky smell inside, with dark brown wood covering the floors and shelves, and the camel-colored leather couch that you could tell had a lot of history and character from four kids over the years. Then when her mother would come home, she would retreat upstairs.
When her mother would come home around five in the afternoon slurring her words and smelling of whiskey…she could sense it wasn’t really her mom at the time so she would go upstairs. She would always grab a chair and lean it under the door handles in the library because there was never a lock on the door. This would happen pretty often and she slowly grew to spend more time in the library room… until her father had to tell her it was time for bed.
Her mother reeked. And her father would always give her a look to go up to her safe space. It was then when she picked up one of the first books she could actually read Picky Mrs. Pickle. She never really understood or cared more to learn more about her mother’s problem or how it was affecting her household— so she blurred it out since it started. That book and that blockage of surroundings striked in her a drive to start reading and escaping in these books as a different character, a character that wasn’t herself.
Slowly she grew fonder and fonder of becoming a new character even if it was just for a few hours a day. The older she got the she became more engrossed in books such as: I am Malala, The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and The Outsiders. It was as if she was no longer a girl from Miami with a messed-up home life. She was instead Malala from Pakistani activist, or Dr.Jekyll a well-respected and intelligent scientist who meddles with the darker side of science, or as Ponyboy Curtis who gradually loses his innocence and matures overtime.
She continued reading.
Perhaps she started to read because it was the one thing that distracted her at the time. But as time passed and she got older, she started to have a bit more of an understanding of what her mother did to herself and why her parents split. What her mother was doing was toxic to herself and her mental state. Her presence affected the room and tore her family into nothing but confusion and veiling the pain. Around this time is when she began to journal or write on her laptop in times of pain or frustration.
She matured very quickly without her mother in the family picture, she was raised by her older sister because her father was too busy traveling on business trips trying to support his four children being a single dad. She always had an old soul and such a big heart in helping others. But somehow when it came to her own hardships she felt like no one really understood her pains and felt that it would be too much of a burden for others to hear. Journaling helped release a lot of her pain. There was this one time around the time she was in high school studying for her AP Economics on her living room couch in her grey pajamas, staring at the concepts of the Production Possibilities Curve for her exam for the following day. As suddenly she is interrupted with loud shouting and a loud object thrown. This has been occurring for months now, this teen, undergoing all the pressures of her family being torn apart. This family used to be whole, they used to laugh, they used to care. Her siblings and her got accustomed to being ‘adults’ too soon.
She sat there, her heart racing with rage–her voice being trapped until she screamed “enough i had enough!” Tears began to roll down her cheeks, as she grabbed her textbook and car keys and bolted for the door.
As she gets in the car she breathes heavily and plugs in her phone and blasts Aretha Franklin. She then goes down the street to a local coffee shop, with her tear stained cheeks and swollen eyes; orders a flat white–then grabs an empty wooden table to lay out her belongings. She instinctively opened up her laptop titled the date and poured out her emotions.
Over time she grew stronger through these troubles and unhealed wounds caused by her absent father and alcoholic mother. As she got older she began to allocate most of her time to her academics. It was in her senior year and Mrs.Guerra’s class where she learned to love poetry and appreciate the meaning behind it and how to decipher certain lines of poetry; and all the hidden meanings. She pushed herself to her fullest potential and not class and spent a lot of time after hours learning about literature, authors, and how to properly portray to your reader what you want to portray. It was from that point on through reading at a young age on her wood floors in her safe space, to pouring her struggles out on paper, to Mrs.Guerra’s class that truly taught her the significance of writing, reading, and literature and how it all portrays a writer’s life.
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