Jan
9
I sat in her office on Friday morning as she peered over the edge of her glasses at my printed-out transcripts, which I had carried in a pristine leather portfolio I haven’t used since my last job interview, eight years ago. She tapped around on a computer while my hands nervously twisted in my lap until I forced them into stillness by locking my fingers together (here is the church, here is the steeple). Whenever she asked a question I responded with pathetic sincerity, eager to impress.
I was hoping for encouragement, a sense of reassurance. Maybe even, if I’m being completely honest, the sense that she was impressed with me in some way. I wanted a hearty go-get-em-tiger speech that would have me leaving the building with a thousand times more confidence than how I had entered—intimidated, unsure, feeling like I didn’t belong in the crowds of sweatpants-clad students who were younger and smarter and unfettered by children and jobs and mortgages.
Instead, she sighed. She was nice enough, but with that single exhale I knew I wasn’t going to be sent on my way with anything other than a headful of roadblocks.
She explained about the Oregon 3-credit classes I took and how they don’t transfer as well as you’d hope for the Washington 5-credit requirements. She pointed out the gaping math-shaped hole in my education and produced a diagram that illustrated how much work I’d have to do just to meet the base requirements for classes like chemistry and biology. She clucked over my grades, and told me that while she couldn’t officially advise me to do so, I might want to consider starting completely over, so as to not drag my GPA baggage along with me.
“The universities ask for your complete transcripts,” she said, “but to be honest, there’s really no way for them to know if you omit this information.”
Ah, I said.
So lie about it, then.
Just start over. Pretend those years didn’t happen. Start with a fresh slate and do it right this time. No one would know. If a shiny new degree is to be earned, it will be utterly untarnished by the failures of the past.
Fuck that.
I’m a very different person than I was fifteen years ago, but that life is a part of me. It’s part of who I am today. Every bad choice I made led me, in some small part, to where I am right this minute. I’m scared and overwhelmed by all the challenges, but I’m excited to learn and I’m by-god willing to put in the hard work to achieve my goals.
Those shitty grades? They’re mine, just like every other embarrassing or shameful facet of my past. I own them. Assuming I even get to that point, I’m not willing to fool some admissions process into accepting me. If I manage to plug away at all these goddamned transfer classes—if I actually find the time and money to get them done, if I actually pass the sorts of classes with descriptions that scare the shit out of me—I will be shouting my story from the motherfucking rooftops.
Goddamnit, I am not going to lie. And it hurt to have it suggested, even as gently as she did.
Thanks, I told her, and I left. When I got in my car, I startled myself by bursting into tears. Ugly sobs of regret and fear, thinking of this impossible hill in front of me. It’s going to take too long, it’s going to cost too much, it’s going to be too hard.
When I got home, I wiped my eyes. Put my papers away. Straightened my desk. Put the brand-new textbook on a shelf, cover up. Introduction to Sociology, one tiny baby step up that hill.
My class starts January 26th.
Jan
5
There was this brief, maybe 2-week period of time when Dylan was sort of sleeping through the night. He’d sleep one night, wake up the next, sleep the next two, that kind of thing. Then he had a cold or hit a growth spurt or the planets realigned or whatever it was, and he hasn’t missed a wakeup call since.
I go to bed every night with foam plugs crammed in my ears, which I started doing in order to sleep through the tiny, not-requiring-attention noises he was making (the solitary indignant bleat, for instance, as he rolls over and momentarily gets tangled in his blanket) and have now grown dependent on. The plugs are like the cloth over a parrot’s cage, making me feel securely tucked away in a quiet bubble, ready to close my eyes and dream of a Holmes/Watson-wich (“Holmes, does your depravity know no bounds?” I certainly hope NOT, Mr. Downey Jr., and hey, Jude, how about unbuttoning that waistcoat), but they don’t block out any actual crying or anything. No, I’m all too aware of his grousing, from the instant he ramps up into the first howl.
So every night I obediently swing my feet out of bed, pull my robe on, and go to his room. Every night I pick him up and sit in the rocking chair and hold his warm body as he collapses into me. And so far, every night I put him back down and he sleeps the rest of the night without a peep.
He’s generally happy to see me when I go in there and doesn’t wake me up more than once per night, and I don’t have any trouble falling back asleep. My energy is higher than it’s ever been (high five, running!) so I don’t feel like it’s making me tired. All things being equal, of course I’d rather have him able to make it through the night without intervention, but this, right now . . . is not so bad.
Maybe it’s the feel of his small body in my arms, and the knowledge that he’s so close to not needing that at all any more. He’s entrenched in that magical, difficult stage between baby and boy, where every day he startles us with the new words he knows and the things he understands, yet still frequently throws himself to the floor sobbing. He wants kisses one minute, wants to shout “NO!” the next. He looks so tiny, then suddenly, startlingly: so big.
“Doing, Mommy?” he asks, all day long. “Doing?”
“Oh, just putting the dishes away, sweetie,” I’ll say, and he cocks his little face and tries it out for size. “Dishzz. Mommy, a’ puttin. Dishzz.”
I love the boy he’s becoming, and I didn’t expect this—because of how hard it can be, so frustrating and limiting—but lately part of me is actively mourning the baby he won’t be for much longer. I suppose the thing is, at 3 AM, no matter how hard it is to leave my own bed, I get my baby back. Just for a little while.
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