A narrative response to Lives on the Boundary

Part one: A great debt

I was the first college graduate in my family. This achievement came with a lot of pressure that was thrust on me from an early age, repeated until it became a mantra: study, do good in school, get a job with good money. My parents had the utmost best intentions in drilling this on me;  it was understandable, borne from a narrative of hardship that they both shared. My mother and father both came from poverty, both my maternal and paternal grandfathers were miners who lived hard lives barely scraping by, so the economic realities of schooling resonated more to them becoming the impetus for a college degree. It was a narrative that sometimes haunted me like a specter, looming, always watching me, berating me if I didn’t succeed in school. My mother was a constant disciplinary force, a presence that made me wary of straying from the path, whether it would be a bad test grade, an unsatisfactory comment on a report card, or missing homework. Every time I failed to meet a school standard, she would remind me of how easy I had it, how everything was at my disposal, at my feet. All the resources that I had made it inexcusable that I should be so careless with my studies. This culminated into an episode in third grade where I forgot to do a project of some kind. At my desk, I tried desperately to start the assignment but my mother was furious, yelling and physically overpowering me until something snapped inside me. I beat on the desk with my fists in response to her and broke down bawling. Realizing how far she had gone, she cradled me in her arms and apologized, telling me that she only wanted the best for me and hated to see me squandering. But what exactly was I squandering? To her it was my insufferable disregard for responsibilities; I disrespected the teacher and my parents by not completing the project in time. I had also lied to them and wasted their time. From that day on, I began to see the resources that I had as constant reminders. Symbols of something far deeper, a struggle. For all of the things I had, all of the Encarta encyclopedias, dictionaries, marble composition notebooks, and colorful folders, my mother made no secret of the painful truth that she had to struggle with growing up in poverty. For everything that I had, my mother had nothing. And now whenever I looked at the things I had, I was reminded that my mother had nothing and the room became bare.