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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963), The Road Not Taken
 
 
I walk across the stage, Trevor on my hip. He's not old enough to know what any of it means yet, but I want him to be in the picture. My parents take the snapshot. I'm grinning hard enough to make my jaws ache. As my advisor sees me coming down the walkway, she reaches out over the crowd. "You did it," she says.  "Uncle Henry is smiling in Heaven and now Trevor can tell his buddies Mommy did it!"  
 
It's a different path then I would have chosen, but it is not a path that I can regret. Seven years after my matriculation, I hold my Master's in Education and my BA in Sociology. It is the proudest day of my life.
 
Looking back, I remember things should have been a cakewalk. By 1996, my parents, 1970s immigrants of Jamaica, had done all the hard work and my siblings and I were poised to enjoy the prosperous college careers my parents' labor had earned us. My parents were successful engineers working for IBM, and all three of their children had large dreams. The way I saw it, my road to law school was straight, narrow and inevitable. But a chain of life events starting in October of 1997, curbed my path and almost extinguished my dreams.
 
In the Fall of 1997, my father's brother was diagnosed with Melanoma cancer. With three children enrolled in college and both my parents working full-time, there was little money or time left over for my uncle's care. The family pulled together and finances spread thin. With no money for a home nurse, I often found myself at home with my uncle.
 
Those that have seen cancer, will understand when I say that cancer dims the soul. It leaves a dull gloss over the features, and the moments you recognize a loved one for who they were become fewer by the day. For almost three years, my uncle dimmed. I watched over him, took him to treatments, changed his bedpan, held him through the nausea and knew that with my care he would recover.
 
But in May of 2000, my uncle passed away. I woke to a world in which I had dropped out of school twice, my GPA was 2.5, and my uncle, for whom I had sacrificed so much, was gone. The next semester I enrolled again, only to withdraw when my father was laid off in December of 2000. I took a full- and a part-time job to help make ends meet. I no longer believed that I would go back to school.
 
In the next months, I worked my way up to a managerial position at a local McDonald's and secured a job as a legal assistant. Working the drive-thru one day, I served hamburgers to friends who had started college with me and were now applying to graduate school. That night I dusted-off my academic planners and called my advisor. In summer of 2001, I again went back to school, this time with fresh determination.
 
I kept my jobs and started law school at Capital University, a small private school in Ohio, despite the fact that I had not graduated from undergrad (which the school knew). I was close to finishing my undergraduate degree, and was doing well with the concurrent enrollment, until exam week when my recent nausea turned out not be just nerves.
 
Over the course of my pregnancy, the relationship between Trevor's father and me deteriorated. So, when fall semester came, I found myself single, in academic danger and alone. I stayed in Ohio until I gave birth, working as an assistant to the attorney general during the day and finishing up my undergraduate classes at night.