Episode 14: FAIL!!!

A better ending for the previous year could not have been had.  In my mailbox today lay the last sentence of a bitter chapter (Chapter 7) in my life: a court order granting my bankruptcy.  Oh, the consequences of the triggering event are not over with and never will be, but now at least I can look toward a brighter day with a hope that has been difficult to conjure since September 2008.  I’m starting over financially—not completely with a clean state, as I’ll still be paying student loans—but I’m okay with that, other than the interest gauging me every minute.  Somehow it seems apt that higher education and I remain tied together, despite our bitter divorce.  I owe so much to ol' H.E., personally and intellectually. Yet higher education is why I’m bankrupt in the first place ... one of those dichotomies in life than can never fully be reconciled, so to speak.

I’ve alluded to this story in other episodes, so I’m going to write it out here to get it out of my system.  That was then, and this is a whole new year, and I'm going to put it all behind me in 2012.  If I need to refer to the whole ugly mess again I can just footnote this two-part chronicle without going into the details—a process that only serves to upset me and keeps me looking backward rather than forward.  How the event will affect me in the long term, I can’t say, but right now I believe I’ve been through the worst and am beginning to see a future that glimmers again but has, as yet, no definite shape.

First, some brief background.  Oh, who am I kidding?  I can’t do brief.  But I’ll be as concise as I can. Forgive me if I sound boastful in any of the following paragraphs—I’m trying to give you some context, not toot my own horn.  I’m not in any way saying I am a perfect person or smarter or better than anyone else.  I know many people who are far smarter than I, and I’ve lived long enough to know that academic ability is not the sole measure of a person’s worth by far.  I just happen to have done better in academics than in, say, football.  It took me fifty years to proudly assert I'm a nerd, but a nerd I am.  So the following describes my relationship with academics before the fall (FAIL!!!) to try to illustrate how hard it felt, hitting bottom.

I’m the youngest child of two very intelligent, warm, loving parental units.  I was a child of the 70's, and they were very much the quintessential 50's/60's dad and mom--he the reserved but wise provider, she the emotional heart of the family.  My father was an electronic engineer.  He led the design team that developed the first commercial radar altimeter used in airplanes, making millions of dollars for his company, as he told me years later.  Inventors didn’t get a cut then--we were merely "comfortably well off," and he rose in the company to serve as the technical man on the sales team, traveling all over the world.  He is listed as inventor on two patents, but they're too technical for me to figure out what, exactly, they do.  He was genius, no doubt about it.  The neighborhood saw him as something of a mad scientist.  He’d spend hours in his workroom downstairs soldering circuit boards, his oscillograph’s circular screen emitting an eerie green glow.  But let me tell you, dress him up in a tux and give him a martini or two, and he cut the suavest figure on the ballroom floor despite his bald head and craggy features.

My mother was very bright but never went to college, to her never-ending regret.  Her realm was words.  She was a prolific punner, often following her latest verbal concoction with a groan—but her quips always worked on some level, often quite cleverly.  Punners need wit, which comes from a command of language, and she had plenty of both. She gave me my love of books, or at least laid the solid foundation.  On my sixth birthday, she gave me Now We Are Six.  “I’ve been waiting for you to turn six to give this to you!”  she told me, then sat me down and read aloud,

When I was one,
I had just begun.
When I was two,
I was nearly new.
When I was three,
I was hardly me.
When I was four,
I was not much more.
When I was five,
I was just alive.
But now I am six,
I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six
now and forever.

On my eleventh birthday, she gave me her own copy of Anne of Green Gables, still on my bookshelf, and told me it had been her favorite book as a young girl.  For me, who has become a deep lover of wildflowers and woodland glens, it is my Bible.

As a girl, when I looked toward my future, college figured in it murkily, but my main ambition was to write a book--a bestseller, of course. I wasn’t sure I needed college.  (Traumatized by busy work, I still thought school a somewhat dirty word.)  I certainly had role models who'd gone to college.  My father earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry, though he never worked in that field.  My eldest brother went away to Georgia Tech when I was eight, where he majored in mathematics, though his true love was computers—he’d spent most of his high school years in a basement lab with a vacuum tube computer at the University of Maryland—but “Computer Science” hadn’t yet become a major.  When he graduated, he was hired by the University and retired at age fifty as their head of computer security.  My sister, a budding hippie, packed off to Antioch in Yellow Springs before quitting college and spending years backpacking all over the U.S., South America, and Europe--though she'd return to college later and eventually earn a Master's Degree in Shakespearean Studies at the University of Maryland.

My plan was always to become a “famous writer,” but if I had to work in the meantime, I wanted to teach English.  However, I shared more than just a love of language with my mother; I shared her somewhat debilitating anxiety.  A friend's older sister told me that teaching was a "glutted market."  What a relief!  I could use that excuse not to enroll in college--I didn't want to do anything but teach, and the idea of standing in front of a class and being in charge terrified me even while it intrigued me. In fact, I didn't really confront the college issue; I sidetracked it.  I’d fallen in love with my high school sweetheart, who was the first in his family on both sides to graduate from high school and, though we glanced at college catalogues, there wasn’t much chance he was going away to school.  

Part of the problem had been that I’d graduated a year early.  I’d been granted a “waiver” of my junior year.  That is the year when students get college information and applications from guidance counselors.  I missed all the literature and visits to campuses, and since I was the fourth child in a family of motivated kids my parents didn't do much to push the issue, so I wasn’t very clear on what to do or expect.  My mother had written the letter requesting the waiver after I’d convinced her I had the maturity and depth to skip that year—when, in fact, I just wanted to graduate with my then-boyfriend so we could be together in eternal bliss.  That was the sum of my ambitions just then.  I’ve always been a bit puzzled as to why she wrote that letter; she must have seen what was happening, and if I was too young to see that the two of us were ill suited to one another, surely she could have--but write it she did.  I found a copy of  it recently, and it surprises and saddens me to read it.  She truly thought me much more mature than I was.

Among those papers I also found some old report cards and other documents from school, including a standardized Iowa Test score of 99th percentile in abstract reasoning when I was in third grade.  Again, I say this NOT to toot my horn, though of course I'm proud of that little piece of paper and that my mom had saved it.  Maybe she believed a girl who had scored so high on such a test and who graduated from high school at age sixteen would have a good head on her shoulders.  Which I did.  For books.

Unlike the other students taking waivers, I did not have to take English in summer school because my electives had included a lot of academic courses, so I could instead double up on English classes in my "senior" year.  In other words, I’d always leaned toward the academic.  I found the “hard” subjects interesting.  I didn’t study a lot and did the minimum amount of homework and I wasn’t competitive at all about grades, not caring whether or not I made the Honor Roll, but I generally liked learning.  Thus I graduated at sixteen, academically ready for college and mentally not ready for Real Life.  But it was Real Life I got, because I had latched myself onto someone I thought would keep me safe in these new waters.  That, at least, is how I see things nearly forty years later.  I was scared.

My brother and older sister had both gone away to school.  Even though the University of Maryland was practically within walking distance, I’d never considered going somewhere near home.  Going to college meant going away.  I’d first been traumatized by that fact at the age of eight, when my big loving brother walked out of our house pretty much forever (with a very few visits) to go away to college. 

So, like my mom, I became a secretary and, like her, I did extremely well because I could type very fast and punctuate.  In fact, I was the only person in my entering class at The Washington School for Secretaries who did not have to take business English because I had aced the placement test, a factoid I give to suggest teaching English is, indeed, what I've been programmed to do.

I chose secretarial school at age seventeen after ten months of waitressing at Bob’s Big Boy. By then, I’d broken up with High School Sweetheart and was reading a lot of Cosmo, a somewhat dangerous thing for a impressionable seventeen-year-old to do.  I was tired of waitressing and never considered college as an option--School!  Blech! -- but I was restless.  If anyone had explained to me I'd be in a classroom a relatively few hours each week, perhaps it would have been more appealing.  But the ADD in me chafed at the idea of days upon days spent in more classrooms.

But there had to be more of a life out there than serving hot fudge sundaes, not that there was anything wrong with that.  Several of the women I worked with supported their children on those tips, and they worked hard.  It wasn't for me, though--not long-term. One day, glancing through The Washington Post want ads, I saw amazing salaries for secretaries.  Hey, that’s what my mom did.  If she could do it, couldn’t I?  I saw myself in some cool apartment somewhere, on my own, making good money and buying lots of clothes.  Living The Mary Tyler Moore Show while I was young enough to really enjoy it!  Again, I plead ADD.  Impulsivity and bad judgment.  And underneath it all, a deep, deep fear of failure.  I probably wouldn't fail at being a secretary, I thought, though as it turned out the job is complex and difficult and I ended up with major anxiety about it for some time, as reported elsewhere.  Again, though, I aced secretarial school.  School I could do.  Having both academic ability and at least a streak of artistic ability, I turned out clean, well-punctuated copy, and I ended up with honors in shorthand and business subjects.  I typed fast, but I'd get too nervous in typing tests to do well on those, but later I'd be called "Machine Gun Mary" for my speed--and I was accurate, too, as long as no one stood over my desk with a timer.

My father, who had plunked down the cash for me to attend the school without a whole lot of questions, told me afterwards he was proud of me.  "You did really well," he said.  "You can't know ahead of time if you have those kinds of skills, so it might not have worked out like this."  He said this after I landed a job in the DC suburbs at a salary that astounded him--remember, I was seventeen years old.  A law firm of six lawyers hired me as their office manager/legal secretary, rather astounding, actually--but that was the kind of kid I was. I was smart, I was capable, I had excellent skills.  I came across as so mature.  Two years later I tried to leave the firm for a raise--I wanted to make the "big bucks" the secretaries made in downtown DC--and they raised me to that salary level.  I talk about myself as about someone I knew once--a precocious young woman with the world at her feet if she could have only recognized  it, but one whose anxiety and self-doubts led her to, once again, choose the safe route--or what she perceived to be safe.  By then I was married, and not long after the big raise I was pregnant, and I never went back to work there after my water broke and my first son was born two months ahead of schedule.

Indeed, if I'd stayed in that field I would probably be raking in the money today, with tons of leave time and great benefits. When the kids were young I went back to work in DC and, in 1988, I made only $4,000 less per year than I do now, thirty years later, and my leave and benefits were much better, too.  Of course, if the FAIL!!! had not happened, the monetary reward for dedicating my life to higher education would have been more commensurate with the effort.  Yet isn't it ironic that I, who should have been a poster Non-Traditional Student demonstrating the benefits of going back to college at an older age, should be the one who so ultimately FAIL!!!ed??

During the next ten years, my relationship with academics (as a field) was tenuous but still existent.   I reconciled with High School Sweetheart, married him, and we had two wonderful sons together.  I spent a lot of time at home because we could only afford one car.  As I’d done during my shy, fairly quiet childhood, I lived in books.  Reading and writing them.  I had my mother’s old Selectric typewriter, and I was always trying to write the Great American Novel.  I took a non-credit "Writing for Young Adults" class, and my teacher told me to submit my manuscript to a contest.  I didn't win, of course, but it felt good that she liked it so much. With some Christmas money, I enrolled in a novel-writing class at the University of Maryland.  I not only learned a lot about writing fiction, but I also got a brief survey course in Modern American Literature. Our professor, Peter Porosky, frequently used examples from his own published novel, but even more frequently those of D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway, Faulkner, et al.  When he held the final class and  party in his apartment, his walls were lined with bookshelves filled with books. 

Yes, that was how I wanted to live—not going to drag races and correcting my husband’s grammar, or trying to bring his social views into the twentieth century.  I decided that, if I couldn’t go to college, I’d read the classics on my own.  I started with D.H. Lawrence, one of Peter’s favorite authors, and started buying Penguin Classics paperbacks for my future “library.”  After Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley's Lover and more, I wanted to try something else, so I started on The Canterbury Tales, not exactly modern literature, of course, but Chaucer was a name that kept coming up and I wanted to know what he was about.  I remember reading it one day at the corner of Connecticut and L, while the light was red, before walking across to the Farragut North metro stop.  "Pleasure reading, huh?" said a lawyerly type standing next to me, with a knowing grin, as if saying, "I, too, suffered through that." I smiled, wanting to say, "Yes, in fact it is pleasure reading," but I didn't have that kind of nerve then.  

During my twenties,  I’d take three more college classes—Novel Writing II with the same teacher (who, of course, I had a mad crush on), World Lit I, and Intro to Philosophy.  I was lucky enough to be assigned to two other terrific professors—one a bit older, about to retire, but mocking our class when we didn’t laugh at the women's lines in Lysistrata playing on the word "come." “Come on, Class!  That’s funny!” he yelled at us good-naturedly.  I was still young enough to find it hard to imagine someone as old as he joking about sex, but his doing so opened the world for me, just a little, and made the idea of getting older not quite so damned scary.

The philosophy professor worked full-time somewhere else and taught evening classes part-time (the dreaded adjunct I would also become one day).  But he was passionate about philosophy, and he worked us through the three-inch-thick textbook without skimping on academic rigor.  He covered Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Platanism, the Stoics, St. Augustine, Kant, Spinoza, and more, and he did so by having us read the primary texts and being tested on them.  His tests were hard; he graded his papers hard.  But he gave me a foundation I’d put up against any who’d had a similar class at Harvard or Yale.

Also during the eighties, I lost both my parents—my dad of a heart attack when I was twenty-five and my mom of liver and pancreatic cancer when I was twenty-nine.  They were almost seventy and sixty-four, respectively.  I’d always had older parents than my friends did, and mine died relatively young.  Thus, I had them for a fairly short period in my life, though I realize many unfortunates have even less time with their parents.

The effect of all this education, combined with the devastating but maturing experience of losing my father, was deadly to my marriage.  In 1985, I split with my husband.  I kept the children and moved in with my grieving mother.  My husband didn’t take kindly to the separation, and his pain was torturous to me—but I knew I had to do this.

I lived with my mother for a couple of years before moving into an apartment near-by with the kids.  I was then working as a secretary closer to home and dating a guy who introduced me to the small mountain town with the university where I now live. I'd dreamed of living in the mountains since I was a kid and we vacationed at an antebellum resort in West Virginia every summer.  I'd talked to my mom of the dream, but she did not want me moving away--something that surprised me, since so many in our extended family lived in places far and wide, rarely in the same town as their parents.  But the issue would become moot when she became sick.

A few years later, while my parents’ estate was being settled, I thought again of that mountain town.  I no longer dated that guy, but the town was still there and right in its center was a state university.  Motivating me beyond my own feelings of inadequacy beside my siblings and others with college degrees were the words of that boyfriend's father as we ate dinner in a restaurant one night.  He'd managed to skip college and yet land in a good computer job.  "Well, look at you," he said to me.  "You're a secretary now, and you will most likely be a secretary the rest of your life."  I don't remember what point he was trying to make, but I knew when I heard those words I would not allow them come true. 

The frenetic sensory pace of life in DC had simply become too intense for me.  Losing both my parents in the space of less than four years knocked me flat.  A youngest child, and one prone to making decisions not always in her best interest, I depended on my folks emotionally and, often, financially.  Without them to navigate my way, the shifting kaleidoscope of urban life was just too much.  I needed to go where I’d find a balm from all that.  In retrospect, that decision most likely saved me.  True, I am financially bankrupt, but living in these Appalachian hills has enriched me far beyond the coins of the realm ever could.

I applied at the state college and was accepted for the fall when I’d be thirty years old.  I had two children, one ten and one seven, one of whom had a fairly severe physical disability. My first child was born at thirty-two weeks (two months premature) and had a cerebral hemorrhage during his twenty-six days in the intensive care nursery, leaving him partially paralyzed on his left side.  One in four preemies, supposedly, have this happen to them.  Subsequently, he had three neurosurgeries for craniosynostosis, a skull malformation, cause unknown in his case and most.  I now believe his premature birth may have had something to do with my primary aldosteronism--a condition that would play a starring role in the FAIL!!!

The state university accepted me and insisted I attend a freshman orientation weekend.  I called the administration office to beg off, but I got nowhere.  If I wanted to attend classes that fall, I had to attend that weekend.  (I now know that was not true, but I was a neophyte then.) I had to find child care for the kids for a weekend while I shared a dorm room with an 18-year-old who probably wondered why she’d gotten stuck with the old person.

I didn’t look old, of course, but I didn’t look eighteen, either.  In fact, most of my life I’ve looked younger than my years --don’t seem to anymore, though; funny how that happens.  After a few hours of placement testing en masse, I was walking out the auditorium door, wondering what the heck I was doing, feeling ridiculously out of place, when some football types said, “Hey, Mary” (we’d all started to get to know each other’s names by then),  “Can we ask you something?"  I nodded.  "How old you are?”

In 1990, the “non-traditional student” had barely been coined as a phrase.  I saw no one else my age in that mass of freshmen.  All at once, the old anxiety sprang through me.  What a fool I looked!  “Oh, I’m too old for this," I answered.  "I don’t think I’m going to do this after all.”  My face was flushed, and I wanted to run.

And then one of the football types said, “Oh, come on!!  You’ll have fun!”

And that was all it took.  Instead of running for my car and speeding back to my old life, I scanned the program, checked the room for the Honors Department, and followed the campus map to find it.  That day, I’d meet my first true mentor, a woman named Maureen who would help me navigate the bewildering world of higher education.  Heck, I thought I could get my PhD in English at this small state university—that’s how little I understood of the system then.  But my higher education was about to begin, and I would learn much, much more than how to explicate a text and speak post-modernism.  Higher education would be an institution that saved me and one that kicked me when I was down.   But, as Nietzsche said, “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  And so it’s still uncertain as to whether higher education and I will formally reconcile, or whether we’ll remain uncomfortable housemates, as my life is now intertwined with the very system that rejected me--unfairly, I'd argue, even illegally.

It all began when Maureen said to me, "Why are you majoring in English and secondary ed?  You need to teach college."  The dream grew higher and farther.  The fall (FAIL!!!), if it had to happen, would now be longer and harder.

Conclusion in Episode 15.