Seeing College as Possible

When I was in high school in the late 1970s, my best friend asked this:

“What do you mean you don’t know if you’re going to college? What will you DO?”

She was wonderful, but these were, in retrospect, loaded questions based on her own life experience. Think about all that’s built into that query. The assumption that I even see it as a choice or that it’s something my parents would encourage. The notion that, like her, I was coming from a household where the HOW wouldn’t be an issue. Where is the money for this? The scope of what one person sees as possible that another doesn’t.

It was never about thinking I wasn’t smart enough. I knew I was. My grades were good, I was a voracious reader, and I had already begun to excel in writing. I had no preconceived ideas of going to an elite school; it was simply foreign to me. I suppose that’s why I never felt the state college I went to was ‘lesser than.’

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On a recent visit to my parents’ house, my father struck up a conversation with me over coffee. He’s in his 80s and lately he’s been in a life review sort of phase. This day, he seemed concerned that I often speak with pride about paying my own way through college and that it reflects badly on his and my mother’s parenting.