Bad Ideas for College Packing

When I was packing to leave for college, my mother told me she was ordering me an escape ladder she'd seen on TV to hang from my dorm room window in case of a fire.  It could extend up to four stories tall, she said.  I reminded her that my dorm room was on the 17th floor.  She would buy several, she amended, and I could tie them all together.  I was concerned about falling to my death, so I told her I'd rather take my chances in the stairwell.

Ungrateful!


When I was packing to leave for college, my mother told me I should take one of her inflatable twin mattresses with me so that I wouldn't need extra long sheets for the dorm mattress.  Instead I could just inflate the air mattress every single night and use old sheets from home.  I declined and bought myself the extra long sheets on sale at Bed Bath & Beyond.

Ungrateful!

"Show Everyone What a Good Actress You Are"

Up until my late teens I thought I wanted to be an actress.  I was in school plays and church musicals and even the occasional summer Shakespeare program, but after enough of them, I realized I didn't like performing or even rehearsing.  I liked attention and I liked pretending to be something I was not.  If I could have skipped the plays and gone straight to being hugged and told I'd done a good job, that would have been my ideal situation, but I didn't realize that at the time.

When I was in high school and depressed and had to speak publicly or mingle with strangers or do something social I desperately didn't want to do, my mother would urge me, "Show everyone what a good actress you are."  It worked.  I didn't want to fake happiness for the sake of making my mother happy.  My mother vastly preferred complaining to strangers over feigning happiness, and it irritated me that she wanted me to be a shiny happy person while she said whatever she wanted about me right in front of me (sometimes comically flattering, sometimes cruel or mocking) and continued her reign of martyrdom.  But I didn't want to be like her either, and I'd already learned that being cheerful made me dramatically more popular, so I "showed everyone what I good actress I was." 

I felt painfully shy growing up, but behaving as though I were shy tended to get me yelled at and publicly humiliated, so I'd learned to shut down my shyness along with my depression.  They were still there, but I locked them in a room of my brain where they temporarily couldn't get out or show themselves. I knew they were there, but I temporarily couldn't feel them.  I wouldn't have been able to function the way I was expected to if I could have felt them. 

It was a sort of pleasant dissociation in which the feeling part of me went on lock-down and I wore a smiling mask set to a socially acceptable autopilot program.  I don't think I said anything particularly charming or clever on autopilot, but I knew how to smile and respond politely and ask simple questions.  Based on people's reactions, I seem to have done fine.  I don't even think my mother had a socially acceptable autopilot program.  She simply smiled and laughed a little too loudly while she complained and overshared ("How are you today, Annie?"  "Oh, fairly partly cloudy.  My hips hurts, my son's unemployed, and my daughter is a moody teenager who can't wait to spend all my money a thousand miles away at college.  Kids and dogs and husbands!  Ha ha ha ha!"). 

I remember once in high school I won a small scholarship award and my mother told me I'd have to give an acceptance speech at the scholarship luncheon like it was the Oscars or something.  I'd learned to perform songs and plays from memory without panicking years ago, regardless of the audience size, but I was horrified at the idea of having to come up with my own words.  Writing always made me freeze up, even though I always eventually got through it.  I can't remember if she told me in advance or sprang it on me in the car on the way to the function, but I panicked until I had formulated a plan for something vague and sweet and humble to say.  When we arrived I, of course, learned my mother had been lying.  None of the other scholarship winners gave speeches or even said a word beyond, "Thank you."

I asked when I got to the podium if I should give a speech and the person in charge said, "If you like," in a surprised tone of voice.  Whatever, I thought.  I've panicked and written, and I might as well say what I wrote.  I also knew I'd probably be in trouble with my mother on the car ride home if I didn't give an acceptance speech after she'd expressly told me to.  So I gave my acceptance speech.  I pretended what I was doing wasn't absurd -- that I'd been so moved by their generosity I simply had to speak -- and I beamed and thanked everyone present and pandered to the organization so effectively that they gave me the scholarship again the next year when I didn't even apply for it.  I'm proud of that.  I was an average actress in theater, but I'm pretty good in real life.  I know how to behave anyway.  My mother should have thought about that before she started slandering me to her few friends and family in the years that followed.  She doesn't know how to behave.  It was yet another valuable lesson she taught me despite never learning it herself. 

The Time My Mother Filled Out the FAFSA Wrong On Purpose

The FAFSA, in case you aren't aware, is the form you have to fill out in the US if you're hoping to receive any need-based financial aid for college.  How much aid you qualify for is based on how much your parents earn.  The FAFSA asks specifically for taxable income, just as any tax forms do.  My family had no taxable income.  My parents didn't really understand taxes, for that matter, though I didn't know that at the time.  We lived exclusively off nontaxable government aid:  a combination of veterans disability benefits and social security.  It was a sizable income though.  All totaled up, our household netted about $120k per annum.  Seriously.  I know.  

When my mother filled out the FAFSA for me, she filled it out correctly the first time with $0 as the taxable income.  The results it yielded said that I wouldn't be expected to pay anything out of pocket toward tuition.  My mother said, "Well that can't be right.  We're not that poor."  I can understand why she was confused.  We really weren't poor, no matter how often she swore we were.  Then she filled it out again as though our total income (or some number along those lines -- it's not like we had tax forms she could reference) were taxable.  The FAFSA said I no longer qualified for need-based aid of any kind.  That was version she submitted.  When the formal aid package came from my university and said I would receive a sizable merit-based scholarship and no need-based aid whatsoever, my mother was outraged and told me to write up an appeal.  It yielded me a $500 annual "hardship grant," as my mother called it.  It was a comically small amount next to tuition.  She seemed content.

This all happened back when my mother was still insistent my education would be taken care of and I didn't need to worry or talk to her about money under any circumstances.  It was also back before I knew better. 

Laundry in the Hoard

The washing machine at my parents' house broke when I was in elementary school.  The laundry room was a yellow, walk-in closet-sized room off of the kitchen that held the washer and dryer, a sink, and a counter my mother referred to as "the breakfast nook."  I remember the room being clean once for I'm not sure how long -- I remember excitedly eating cereal at that breakfast nook when I was maybe seven years old, give or take -- but by the time the washing machine broke, the room was basically inaccessible.  There was an approximately five foot high mountain of laundry from the back wall to within a foot of the doorway, where it sloped abruptly downward.  The washer could only be reached by standing on some of the clothes, followed by strategic leaning.  I recall a beautiful pink sundress I had never worn being relegated to that pile because it had wrinkled in the dryer.  My mother didn't believe in ironing, and that was years before she bought Dante and me each our own iron and ironing board for Christmas (I was genuinely thrilled, and I think Dante was too -- she had previously thrown away or piled up anything that wrinkled, which severely limited our wardrobe options).  I don't remember what made up the rest of the mound.

After the washing machine broke, my mother started doing the laundry at the laundromat.  She said the house was too messy to let someone in to fix the washer yet.  She had to get the laundry room cleared out.  Years passed.  As I got older, I started helping her.  Once or twice a month she would load up all the household laundry into large garbage bags, I would haul them to the car where they took up the entirety of the trunk and backseat, and -- because I had either school or work pretty much any given weekday of the year -- we would spend Saturday at the laundromat. 

She started yelling at me for putting my clothes in the hamper after only wearing them once, as I had always been taught to do.  She yelled at me for only using towels once too, though there was nowhere to hang them except over the shower, where they got extra wet the next time someone used it.  That's where we kept them though.  We could only ever tell which towels were our own because my mother always bought brightly colored beach towels instead of normal bath towels, and none of them looked identical.  You just had to remember which one you'd used and hope everyone else did the same.

I remember asking in my teens why we didn't just clear out the laundry room and get the washer fixed.  My mother frequently complained about how little money we had, and I saw how much we spent in quarters every trip.  My mother brought large Centrum vitamin bottles filled with quarters, and they each held multiple rolls.  She insisted it would cost even more in water bills if we did the laundry at home.  She said she would also be expected to do laundry every day if we had a working washing machine at home, and she refused to do that. 

When I got to college, the laundry room in my dorm was made up of the little machines designed for home use.  It was ironically my first experience using a classic washing machine with a lid and an agitator, like the one we'd had in my house all my life.  I was used to the high-capacity, industrial-grade machines we used at the laundromat, and I needed help the first time I used the dorm's equipment.  "You didn't do your own laundry at home?  God, you're spoiled," a dormmate informed me.  I didn't correct him.  After all, I didn't do my own laundry at home.  And at one of the most expensive private universities in the country, "spoiled" seemed like a significantly more flattering image than the one people would associate with me if they knew the details.

My mother finally replaced the washer and dryer in one of her spending sprees after I graduated from college.  According to the paperwork from my parents' divorce, they cost $5000 when she bought them a decade ago.  I don't know if anyone other than Dante has ever used them.  I've had my own personal washer and dryer since my husband and I bought our house.  Laundry is my favorite chore because it feels like I'm getting something done while a machine literally does the work for me, and I don't have to leave my house.  I can sleep on fresh bedsheets every week and have my favorite clothes ready to wear with less than a day's notice.  I've had to have someone come over to fix the machines and even replace them at one point, and I have to say -- it is still easier than going to the laundromat.  Then again, I've never had to scale a Matterhorn of wrinkled laundry to use them either.

The Time My Mother Gave Me Caffeine Pills

My mother started giving me caffeine pills my senior year of high school.  I was very tired.  I was in the school plays, took private music lessons at a local university twice per week, was an officer in several school clubs ("colleges want well-rounded students"), and spent all day every Sunday at various choir practices and church groups.  I frequently fell asleep doing my homework and broke down in tears when I had yet another paper to write.  My grades didn't suffer -- I had made straight A's for several years, and that didn't change until I finally got an 89% my last semester of AP Calculus -- but my crying seemed to annoy my mother. 

One day my mother gave me a little yellow box of pills she had bought and told me they would help me get my homework done.  This was the same year she gave me anti-depressants, about three years after she started self-medicating with pain killers and muscle relaxants, and several years after she started doling out to both of us pretty much every vitamin supplement she read about in magazines or saw mentioned on television.  Dr. Oz wasn't a thing back then, but something comparable must have existed because she had us on multiple supplements I had never heard of anywhere.  I don't even remember how many pills I was taking daily back then.  Six?  Nine?  I want to say nine because I knew I could take eleven pills -- including a couple Tylenol -- in one giant swallow.  Most of the supplements she bought had no discernible effect, such as the aloe pills and the garlic pills and the vitamin E.  The caffeine pills did though.  The box she gave me said each pill contained the caffeine of two cups of coffee.  I didn't see how this would work significantly better than just drinking more coffee, but I did as she said and took one, as I always had when my mother gave me medicine.

The caffeine pills didn't help me think or stay awake.  I still felt exhausted, but now I was shaking and freezing cold too.  They left me too wired to fall asleep, but writing essays still took work.  My mother urged me to try the pills again, to take another.  She seemed sure they would help me get my work done, as I always had regardless of what I took or didn't take.  After a couple more tries with the caffeine pills provoked exactly the same shaking and chills, I stopped taking them.  My mother was wrong.  They only made me feel worse.  I would make do without them, as I always had. 

The number of pills I consumed dropped considerably after I left for college.  I didn't have money to waste on supplements that did nothing, and the doctor I saw at university health services when I needed a prescription renewed had made fun of me for being on so many things at my age.  No one had ever bothered to make fun of my pill consumption with my mother in the exam room.  No doctor had ever dared to imply I should take less than what my mother was doling out.  She has a knack with doctors.   

Curfew

My mother refused to give me a curfew when I was growing up.  I wasn't allowed to go anywhere without an adult chaperone until I was old enough to drive anyway, but even then, she said "no curfew."  She just told me to be home "at a reasonable hour."  Each time I arrived home, she would decide if the hour was reasonable or not.  She also wanted me to call and inform her every time I left somewhere or arrived somewhere else, though I interpreted that rule literally enough when going out to pick up friends that she told me to stop it in exasperation.  I think it was still my sixteenth birthday.

The first time she assigned me a curfew was the summer after my freshman year of college.  I had been living on my own in a big city far away, I was nineteen, I was working full-time to save up money for the coming school year, and I had finally started going on dates.  She said my curfew was 9pm.  If I wanted to go to a movie with friends or be out after dark, I "just had to ask."

Mother Takes Her Cut

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I applied for and accepted a campus job as a Resident Assistant.  My payment was a rent-free studio efficiency apartment that would normally cost a little over $10k for the school year.  In order to accept the job, I had to quit my mail room job I had worked since freshman year.  It had been my sole source of income during the school year.

Because my RA apartment didn't come with a meal plan, I had no way to pay for food.  I also had no way to pay for the phone line the school required me to have, or clothes or anything else.  My social security checks were still being kept by my mother to pay for my books and tuition.  My parents kicked in a lot toward tuition, and I paid for the rest with a hefty academic scholarship and student loans.

After my explanation of the situation -- that she wouldn't have to pay for my housing and could redirect funds toward the things I'd previously paid for with my mail room job -- my mother agreed to give me a monthly allowance so I could buy food and necessities.  I believe it was $150 per month, if I recall correctly.  I know the budget I worked out allowed me to spend $20 per week on food, so I had to stop buying whole grain healthy stuff and eat a lot more ramen.  Unfortunately, that was the same year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, so I had a lot of doctors bills, and I had to pay bus fare three times per week to get to the hospital for my initial follow-up appointments and some related blood tests.

I called my mother and told her I needed more money to pay hospital bills, and she screamed at me for daring to pay any of them in full.  ALWAYS put them on a payment plan, she told me.  NEVER pay hospital bills in full!  I hadn't known.  I asked for payment plans going forward, but I still needed more money.  I was barely getting by, and my boss got mad whenever I argued that I didn't have money to eat restaurant food with the other RAs.  My boss expected me to pitch in an equal amount whether I ate their food or not.  My mother eventually gave me a little more money and purchased me a small supplemental meal plan through the school so that I could eat larger, healthier meals occasionally.  Then she spent somewhere in neighborhood of $70 -- more than three weeks' worth of grocery money in my world -- to send me a Hershey's Chocolate Tower of Treats made up almost exclusively of foods my doctors had told me to avoid, such as nuts and popcorn.  I had even told her about the diet restrictions before she sent it.

After graduation, after my mother went off the deep end, my dad mentioned the monthly allowance I had lived off of for those last two years of college, except the figure he quoted to me was more than double what I had received.  "She told me you hated me," he said.  "She said I had to give the money to her because you would never accept it if it came from me directly because you hated me so much."  And then she had taken a more than 50% cut for herself.  Every single month.  I'll let slide the fact that she told my dad I hated him because parental alienation was old hat with her and shouldn't have come as a surprise.  But knowing I was struggling, hearing me cry over the phone that I couldn't afford anything and was embarrassing myself in front of my boss, she made the repeated decision to take her cut.  Every.  Single.  Month. 

My dad didn't even control their money.  He only ever bothered controlling his own comparatively tiny social security checks, which were about 10% of their total monthly income.  The rest was all hers.  About $9k per month, all hers, at least $6k of which should have been disposable income.  I guess she wanted more.

[Edited:  I forgot to factor in my tuition and their various car payments -- I don't even remember how many cars they would have been paying off at that time -- when I said they had $6k in monthly disposable income.  I was going on what their finances looked like when I took them over a couple years later.  I think their mortgage payments were less back then, before the refinance, but I don't know by how much.  They might have had as little as $4k disposable income per month. Of course that number also factors in if my mother had paid both the home equity line of credit payment and my tuition rather than paying the HELOC payment every month and then immediately borrowing against it again to pay my tuition, which is what she said she did (in one of her "you are why we're poor" rants).  Actually, she said she paid for at least one car with the HELOC too, so that payment wouldn't have been extra.  Never mind.  I can't even picture what finances looked like when my mother was in charge of them.  I've tried before, and that way madness lies.]

My Mother's Oral Family History

I have always known who my biological mother is.  She was the same mother who raised me.  But finding out about her family history was harder than finding my biological father.  I haven't found a single person in her family interested in genealogy but me, and our family is full of secrets that we only know from oversharing.

I grew up within a mile of my maternal grandparents and saw them at least once a week for the first eighteen years of my life.  There were certain things I grew up knowing, stories I grew up hearing over and over again, but they were specific and limited.  I knew my grandmother had had ten pregnancies in eleven years.  I knew my only biological aunt had died of SIDS on Christmas Eve and that my then 3-year-old mother had tormented her own mother with the persistent question, "Where is my baby?" for weeks afterward.  I knew my mother had been named after her own maternal grandmother, and that her grandmother had hated her own name so much that she'd gone by her middle name nearly all her life.  These were some of the facts my mother recited to me regularly, just like the story of my birth (I "ripped [her] from end to end") and of my brother's adoption ("she called and said, 'Do you want a peanut?' A peanut is what they called premature babies.")  They were her oral history, and they are embedded in my brain.

I knew my grandmother had gotten married at age fifteen because she wanted to run away from home, but I didn't know she had been running away from her "wicked stepmother."  I knew her own mother had married at fourteen and lost custody of my then 2-year-old grandmother when she became a teenage divorcee, but I didn't know my great-grandfather's name or that he was a college graduate, unlike anyone else in my family for the next 75 years.  Grandma's maiden name was Adams, or Addams* -- I didn't know which -- and my mother hated my great-grandfather for taking Grandma away from her mother.  He "didn't like girls," my mother told me when I asked why Dante had been invited to meet him and I hadn't.  I knew he'd written and self-published a memoir that my mother claimed was a catalogue of his sexual exploits, but I didn't know the name of the book, and I didn't know that he lived within a half-hour's drive of my home for over a decade of my childhood.  I didn't know he was the only person in my family to live to the age of ninety, or that he'd died within a year of "the love of his life," my Grandmother's longtime stepmother.  I didn't know they had given my grandmother a half-sister, who had finished college but who hadn't been able to bear children of her own.  She has an adopted daughter close to my age who has a graduate degree.  They're both on Facebook now.  She looks like a younger, healthier, more affluent version of my grandmother. 

I've mentioned before how my cousin helped me with my search for maternal family by providing old letters our grandmother had sent her.  Our grandmother used to write letters once a week to pretty much everyone she knew who lived out of state.  My cousin had kept several years worth of Grandma letters.  She pulled them out of storage at my request.  She said they shared too much information, that she wouldn't be comfortable rereading them if Grandma had still been alive.  They read more like private journal entries than something you would say to a granddaughter.  Those letters also held names and dates I hadn't absorbed from my mother's oral history.  They gave me search terms, and the knowledge my mother had embedded in my brain filled in the blanks.  My cousin didn't know the things I knew -- even our great-grandmother's first name -- so I was able to fill in some blanks for her too. 

I assume my great-grandmother's first pregnancy ended in miscarriage because she got married at the age of fourteen and didn't give birth to my grandmother until over a year later.  I learned these dates from documents on Ancestry.com.  She got divorced in the 1930s at the age of 18 and lost custody of my grandmother to her ex-husband.  My great-grandfather left my then 2-year-old grandmother with his parents and moved on.  My great-grandmother spent time in the Deep South, though neither I nor my cousin knows why.  My grandmother's letters made it sound like purgatory.  My grandmother lived with her own grandparents until she was eight.  She became close with her father's only sister, whose name I recognized because my grandmother had visited her every week at her nursing home until she died in the 1990s.  At the age of eight, my grandmother moved in with her newly remarried father and the woman she referred to in letters as her "wicked stepmother."  Her father called her the love of his life.  My grandmother wasn't happy there.  As I mentioned earlier, she ran away at the age of fifteen to marry my grandfather.  She didn't know how to cook, and she never learned how to drive.  Neither of them finished high school.  They eloped on my grandfather's birthday, allegedly to distract the court registrar out of asking for proof of my grandmother's age.  It apparently worked.  Their marriage license lists her age as 18.  My eldest uncle was born ten months later.

I've found my great-grandparents' headstones.  My great-grandmother remarried at least once, but she survived her final husband, so even her death certificate doesn't list his full name.  My mother told me she died of stomach cancer, but her death certificate cites cardiac arrest.  I've learned that death certificates list whatever catalyst literally killed the person that day and will never say what led to what killed them, like cancer or diabetes or blunt force trauma.  I come from a long line of ladies who battled their weight, and my great-grandmother relished the easy weight loss that came with dying of stomach cancer.  One of the few pictures I've seen of her shows her svelte figure standing with both legs inside one leg of pants, demonstrating that she was half her previous size and delighted by it. 

My grandmother's aneurism created the same effect.  The weight melted off when she spent months on a liquid diet, unable to swallow most food without choking.  She recovered though and was unhappily battling her weight again by the time she died some fifteen years later.  One of my last memories of her was of visiting her and my grandpa's duplex and witnessing one of her daily weigh-ins.  She had gained weight and was disappointed.  She was in her seventies. 

Mental illness was my mother's best diet.  She lost around eighty pounds when she stopped eating or drinking or getting up from the couch in her early fifties.  She was pleased with the effect and bragged to me over the phone in the days leading up to my wedding.  It was the thinnest she had been since before I was born.  She commandeered one of my dad's old wheelchairs because she had grown too weak to walk.  When I saw her next, she had aged twenty years.  Her formerly thick brown hair was sparse and grey, and the skin hung loose from her face and neck like wax dripping from a candle.  She reminded me of Emperor Palpatine.

My grandfather's lineage was much harder to trace because his parents were never married or lived together, and he never spoke about either of them.  I met one of his half-siblings once as a child, but it turns out there were at least six more.  More on Grandpa next time.

How My Mother Bought Me a Car

When my brother was a teenager, my mother promised to buy him a new car if he made straight A's in the years leading up to his 16th birthday, rather than the failing and barely passing grades he had previously earned.  I was very young and assumed the same deal would be extended to me, the straight A overachieving child, and argued "not fair" at the claim many years later that it was not.  "Elephants and children never forget," she muttered, and my parents were buying me a car.

She wanted to get the cheapest new car possible.  I was concerned when she told me that the car she wanted to buy would crumple like a tin can and kill anyone inside if I got into an accident.  I suggested getting a nice used car like my friends had instead since they are dramatically cheaper than new and we could get something better quality, but she said she didn't want to have to worry about me being stranded in a broken down car at night (spoiler alert: it broke down a lot). 

When my social security checks started arriving in the mail in my name instead of hers, my mother decided I should pay for the car myself.  The new, poor quality car she wanted to buy cost double the amount of my checks, so I again claimed "not fair." She told me to lease the car so that my checks would just barely cover it, to which I again said "not fair."  She refused to add me to the car insurance plan she and my dad had, arguing that I would make their premiums skyrocket.  Their premiums were already high based on the number of tickets she got and accidents she caused.  She spent my high school career so close to losing her license that she went to court every time she got a speeding ticket.

She eventually caved to my complaints and they paid for my car.  I would pay for the insurance and gas and maintenance, and it would remain in her name.  "You can't have a car in your name at 16 anyway," she said.  "You're still a child."  When I asked again at 18, she said no, that putting the car in my name would put me in the pool to be called for jury duty.  Jury duty starts at age 21 there, but I didn't argue.  

When I left for college in a big city far away, I left the car behind.  My mother was angry at my refusal to continue paying for my insurance plan in my absence.  I would no longer be receiving my social security checks since my mother said she needed them to pay for my tuition, so the only money I had to get me through the school year was what I had saved up working that last summer at home.  I told her to add the car to her insurance plan.  The car needs to be covered, not me, I explained.  She calmed down.  I don't think she understood how car insurance works.

A few years later she rolled the car into a ditch, as depicted in The Car.  She had taken Ambien before driving and fallen asleep at the wheel.  She said the car was totaled but demanded I pay to have it fixed.  I hadn't lived in the same state or driven the car in years, but she insisted it was still my car and thus my responsibility.

I reminded her that the car was never in my name.  She had forgotten.

How My Mother Spent My College Fund: Part 2

When I turned sixteen, my social security checks started coming in the mail addressed to me instead of in care of my mother.  My mother was very angry when that happened.  She took care of me anyway, she said, so why did I need money?  Now she wouldn't get checks addressed to her name at all.  The checks made out to my dad still went into their joint account for her full use, but it wasn't the same.

My parents continued to let me live in their house rent free and eat their groceries and use their utilities, but I took over paying for my own makeup, entertainment, gas for my car, car insurance, just-for-emergencies cell phone and plan, and clothes, which I bought at second hand stores.  I'd always been more of a saver than a spender, so I socked away everything I had leftover into a bank account my mother had opened with me when I turned sixteen.  Birthday money and savings from summer jobs went in there too.  It would be my new college fund -- the one I saved up all by myself.

The summer before my senior year of college, my mother took me on a trip to visit the colleges I was considering attending.  It was a multi-city tour that spanned 1500 miles.  We went sightseeing, ate expensive food, and even saw Broadway shows.  By the time we got home, I'd picked my first-choice school.  It was expensive, but my mother was adamant that price wasn't a factor -- I'd been a straight A student and I deserved to go wherever I wanted to go. 

When I next checked the balance of my bank account, it was almost empty.  I'd saved thousands of dollars since opening it, but now it held about $50.  I went to my mother in a panic.  She explained that she had needed the money to pay for that extravagant college visit.  "I spent it all on you," she said, so I had nothing to complain about.  She hadn't taken my money.  I'd just spent it all without realizing it.  "I'm going to be paying for all your college anyway," she said.  "You wouldn't have been able to pay for it yourself."  The meager amount I'd saved up shouldn't matter.

How My Mother Spent My College Fund: Part 1

When I was little, I remember my mother telling me I had a savings account.  She said my dad put $1k in it towards college each year, which would yield a good amount for a college fund back in that day.  I must've been about five at the time because she said there was currently $5k in it, and that my brother, Dante, had a comparable savings account too. 

I remember asking about my savings account when I was a little older, and my mother said it had $5k in it.  I wondered why my dad had stopped putting money in the account, but I didn't question it.  I didn't want either of my parents to yell at me.

I knew Dante's savings account had paid for three things:  a new bedroom set when his bed broke, sessions with a child psychologist, and a very old Mustang that our mother had bought and presented to him as a gift. 

I don't know where my savings account went.  When I started getting my college financing lined up at age 18, I asked my mother about it and she said the money was gone.  Later, when I was grown and started talking with my dad on the phone, I asked him what year he had stopped putting money into the account.  He said he hadn't. 

Mother Goes to College

Both my parents came from working class families filled with mostly skilled laborers and artists, where going to college was unusual.  I had always planned to go to college for as long as I can remember, originally planning to attend an Ivy League school and become a doctor, and my parents had been supportive of my ambitions.  One of my cousins started taking a sign language interpretation course so that she could hopefully pay rent while looking for work as an actress.  As I got closer to graduating high school, my mother tried to convince me to do the same.  I could continue living at home and attend a local community college to become a sign language interpreter too and then, she said, I could finance my own four-year degree after that.  This had never been my plan -- neither the extra two years of school nor staying in the same state as my parents -- and I refused. 

When I solidified my college plans and got ready to move out, my mother decided she would go to college too.  She would attend the local community college and become a sign language interpreter.  I thought this was a fantastic idea.  While my older brother, Dante, was still living at home when he hadn't recently been kicked out again by one of our parents, he was no longer treated like a child and my mother seemed to be going through empty nest anxiety.  Second, she had a history of taking jobs for which she was both overqualified and ill suited -- fast food service, warehouse temp work, the paper route -- often followed by getting injured in some way or doing something else that would abruptly end the job.  Finally she was aspiring to a job that required her to become more qualified and might hold her interest too.

My mother was very nervous about the community college entrance exam.  She was a perfectionist.  She told me that, in high school, she had taken remedial classes whenever possible so that she could be the best in the class.  The community college entrance exam covered two years worth of math she hadn't taken.  In preparation for the exam, she bought some geometry and trigonometry flashcards, and I taught the subjects to her.  It was unexpectedly easy.  She understood most concepts without my having to explain them twice.  She was obviously smart -- even at math, which I consider hard -- but she demurred and gave all the credit to my teaching.  She'd never believed she was smart and certainly never expected to go to college.  I understand the second part -- neither of her parents finished high school, they were poor, and she was a girl in the '60s -- but I don't know why they didn't tell her she was smart.  She always told me I was smart, and it is the one thing I never doubt about myself.

She had to write an entrance essay too.  It was riddled with unnecessary commas and all the same cliches she used when she spoke.  In fact, it sounded exactly like how she talked.  If she'd been writing as a character, it would have been fantastic.  Her style required a bit of tweaking and editing for an academic setting, but she was a good writer.  She didn't believe me.

She was afraid the other students would make fun of her.  She was an old, fat lady, she said.  She was self-conscious about her appearance, her eyebrows.  I reassured her and taught her to apply makeup.  First she seemed happy and calmer; when it came time to visit the school, she said it looked ridiculous.

Finally the summer ended and we both started classes.  She made two new friends, one my age and one a little older than Dante.  I was homesick, halfway across the country from anyone I knew, so I called home a lot.  My mother got angrier.  "I let you go to that school because I thought it would make you happy!"  "All you ever do is talk about yourself!"  Aside from the homesickness, I was actually happier.  School was hard, and I had to make all new friends, but having access to healthy food whenever I wanted it, walking outside without anyone stopping me, and living in a clean space with friendly people had a positive effect on me.  Colors looked brighter.  It was literally like a grey veil was lifting.  I was just experiencing new stressors and missed my mother.

She upset one of her new friends by saying her 4-year-old daughter was so fat she looked nine months pregnant.  She didn't understand why her friend was upset.  "It's true!" she insisted.  This was her standard defense when someone became upset at her insults.  Her other friend got married and adopted a toddler.  She told me about each of her friends' marital and sexual problems.  She recounted the stupid decisions they made and how each of them was better and kinder to her than me.  I don't know if her insults were becoming less subtle or if I was becoming more attuned to them. 

Near the end of her two-year degree program, my mother's anxiety attacks reached an apex.  With less than a semester left, she dropped out of her classes.  I couldn't convince her to stick it out.