A 20-year-old woman fights self-doubt as she applies to a prestigious college after taking a year off to have her baby.
On Wednesday of spring break during my sophomore year of college, I
gave birth to an eight-pound, three-ounce baby boy. I named him for a
medieval Welsh prince and decorated the walls of his room in our tiny
apartment with maps from the thrift store and handmade quilts.
I was nineteen years old.
The next Monday, I was back in class, and for the next three months, I ferried his little baby carrier back and forth to the university on the bus, in silent defiance of those who said my life was over. But by summer, I had not registered for fall, and in September, our little family moved across the country, three thousand miles from anyone I knew and anything familiar.
There I was, barely twenty with a six-month-old baby in a place where people drove too fast, spent too much, and survived on a steady diet of cheesesteaks and a strange food called scrapple.
But I shook out my fur and got us a small dark two-bedroom condo near a reservoir the realtor called a lake, but was generously a drainage ditch. Termites crawled up through the carpet, and when the landlord did nothing, I peeled the carpet back and sealed the termite-holes with toothpaste. I found grocery stores and playgrounds and took the baby for endless drives in search of a decent cup of coffee. In a few months I had my sea legs, and thought to finish my history degree at one of the many local colleges or universities.
But my new region did not offer the customary University of State Name I expected, and the local institutions had names that glowered down on me from on high-Penn, Temple, Princeton, Swarthmore. And none of them seemed particularly welcoming of a teen mother and state-college dropout with empty pockets and a handful of pathetic transfer credits from some anonymous blip in the west.
These places were not for the likes of me.
But whatever kept me waddling into Twentieth Century Art while nine months pregnant and barely able to fit behind the little desk made me send away for a packet from a Seven Sisters college and fill it out.
But while I filled out the application, I secretly wondered who I was kidding. This prestigious college wouldn't have a place for me any more than the other highbrow institutions. Places like these wanted the brilliant, the talented, the exceptional. I had been none of the above since high school, where I cracked 1300 on my SATs and graduated in the top one percent of my class. Where my pottery had been periodically on public display, and I'd published several short stories in both local and national venues.
But that was more than two years ago, and no one would look at those things. Not while I had a diapered anchor clinging to my underage shoulder.
My grades from my prior university days were decent and several of my old professors were willing to supply good recommendations, but I hadn't spent my "year off" teaching kindergarten in a bullet-ridden tenement or building a women's clinic out of mud and adobe in a third-world nation. My grades and recommendations would speak for themselves, but somehow I had to bluff through the set of written questions accompanying the application, questions intended to gauge the applicant's level of recent accomplishment in the guise of a writing sample.
Think of a recent event or situation that challenged you. In what way did you confront the difficulties and what lesson did you learn?
"Over the summer, the politics of interpersonal relationships threatened the breakdown of a family superficially confident in its outward semblance of perfection. Certain biological difficulties presented me with the option of confrontation or negotiation; choosing the former, the lesson of difficulty's effect of separating gold from chaff will remain long in a fragile consciousness."
That is, parents don't want to become grandparents in their forties and they will let you know it. Siblings who ponder the baby's paternity and suggest abortion don't know how deeply it cuts. And friends whose eyes widen and gradually drop from the radar aren't worth keeping, but those who keep calling will stay around forever.
What was the last book you read? How did it affect you?
"Oh, it was a fast-paced and gripping analysis of the politics of resistance and acceptance by means of unpacking the interaction of monochromatic femininity and the archetypal lupine viewed through the Utopian lens of the sublime Edenic greenwood."
That'd be Little Red Riding Hood. Want to hear about prevailing notions of capitalism and deconstructionalism within the context of material selection in triumvirate porcine domestic architecture?
I sent in all the paperwork and stewed for months. They wouldn't let me in. But I did write a damn good statement of purpose. I was out of my league. They didn't know that.
The baby learned to stand up and consumed his body weight in Cheerios.
When the college called me for an admissions interview, I was elated. On my eighteenth birthday, my mother had rather optimistically bought me an interview suit and it still fit me the same as the day I tried it on. I looked like any other twenty-year-old prospective undergrad. I did not look like anyone's mother.
Before the interview, I had a tour of the campus. My student guide was a blond-maned girl from upstate New York a year my junior who planned to major in chemistry. She chattered about clubs and parties and what dorm was the best to live in. I listened with a certain amount of patient irony, thinking how I hadn't even been to a movie since the baby's birth and wondering how my roommate would like tripping over gnawed board books while she put on her makeup for club-hopping.
The campus buildings were Gothic revival and magnificent with their weathered stone, roundel windows and pointed arches. A series of cobbled paths webbed through them. Inside, the original hundred-year-old woodwork shone beneath a mellow patina created from the sliding of endless hands. Three massive libraries housed almost a million volumes, including a substantial archives and rare books collection.
My guide flung a disinterested arm at the ornate Gothic structures with the casual air of one who never doubted she'd be at a place like this. For her, it had never been a worry. For her, it meant almost nothing.
When we'd walked over the entire campus, she led me back to the cozy admissions building for my formal interview. The interviewer asked me what I planned to study, why I'd chosen that particular college, how I handled stress. My replies were cool and well-presented; history, because of the institution's proximity and academic strength in my discipline, writing and long walks. I took a stroller on those walks and wrote during naptimes, but she didn't need to know that. She was smiling and nodding at my responses, and her demeanor told me I was doing well.
Finally, as we were standing up and saying goodbye, she happened to look at her notes and said, "I see you've taken a year off. What have you been doing? Working? Traveling?"
What went through my head was, "Oh yeah, right now my job is really grueling, seven days a week and no vacation time whatsoever. Five in the morning till eight at night, if I'm lucky, and it seems like every night I'm called in for the graveyard shift. The pay is lousy and there's no 401k, but the benefits are pretty nice."
But what came out of my mouth was, "No, I have a nine-month-old son, and I've been staying at home with him."
She smiled and cooed and asked to see his picture. Then she dropped back into interviewer mode and asked, "Do you think having such a young child will affect your academic performance?"
What she meant was, "Do you really belong here? Shouldn't you be looking into hairdressing or medical transcription at community college?"
I did not hesitate or flinch. "Yes. He will affect my performance. For the better. I have a better reason to do well than some eighteen-year-old kid whose parents cut you a check once a year."
She leaned back, pursed her lips, then nodded. And it occurred to me, once I'd said it aloud, that not only would I do well, I'd do better than girls who did less all day than I did before nine in the morning, and I'd do it on half as much sleep.
Everything that had gotten me through that first grinding year of motherhood with its strung-out all-nighters, its isolation, its sidelong glances and mutters about my age-those were the very things that would see me through a prestigious Seven Sisters college and beyond. I would do well not despite being a teen mother three thousand miles in exile, but in a large part because of it. Because I had a damn good reason to do well and a lot more to lose if I didn't.
And success at an ivy-hung grey-stone place like this for me, underage with a baby on my hip and one box of pasta away from starvation, would mean more than it would to someone who expected it, who had never had to worry about her place in the world. Someone who had never had to make her own.
When my acceptance letter arrived several months later, I wasn't surprised. Only ready.
This article originally appeared in the February 2006 issue of the feminist newsjournal _off our backs_.
J. Anderson Coats has a cool surgery scar unrelated to childbirth and she's been given the curse of Cromwell on a backroad in Connemara. Her essays have appeared in off_our_backs, MotherVerse, and MAMAPHONIC: BALANCING MOTHERHOOD AND OTHER CREATIVE ACTS. She lives near the Puget Sound and at http://jandersoncoats.livejournal.com.
As the old wisdom states: in order to understand the future, you need
to understand the past. How true is that? The past entices learning,
reminds us of what to do and what not to do, teaches us valuable
lessons, and shows us from where we have come and how far. Women
suffragists have blazed trails for our future, herbal women have taught
us how to heal and nurture ourselves, our travels have taught us to
value what we have or to reach for a better future, and our innermost
desires poke to the surface reminding us to act, that there is more we
want to do. Of course, we need to look toward the future, but the
wisdom of the past must always be our companion.
Fittingly for our Passion themed issue, we welcome our newest Cahoots Community member, Saskatoon's Positive Passions, which has come on board to sponsor Sarah Stefanson's column, Sense and Sensuality. Through their retail location, home presentations, resource centre, and website, Positive Passions provides an open, welcoming, and healthy place to obtain information, resources, and products in regards to sex, sexuality, and sexual dysfunctions.
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