The Week

“The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.”

― Hilary Mantel, "An Experiment in Love"

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Dear Kate,

I try to recall my first week heading to university, knowing well that I will remember it all wrong.

There will be no details but broad strokes, details that serve only the broad strokes to paint a picture for myself, to remember that week for the benefits of my children, the younger of them having his own this week, for them to see the contrast, the worse light that I was under that makes their brighter days possible, possible for them to see my obscure picture at all.

I like to recount the story of me lining up for hours to get my student loan, a death sentence as I saw it to enable a life that I didn't know if I wanted or needed, instant liability showing up as asset in my first bank account at a branch closest to my home then, me a perplexed young man in a country still foreign, a piece of loan paper in hands, fluttering in uncertain air like a meal voucher, welfare to my poverty.  How am I ever going to pay this off?

I was more than money-poor.  I wished my parents were there to navigate the strange water with me, feel the weight of the big fat and very expensive text books on my back, freshly purchased with fresh money I hadn't a day ago.  Their English was worse than mine, shoulders with more troubles to bear than I could appreciate then; in any case, the expectation was never there for me to ask for help.  Do you remember the yellow sticker on used text books in our school bookstore?  I've never purchased any of mine used.  I wanted everything new, everything perfect, to speak meaning into a situation I had yet to find any.

My kids must be tired of me telling this story.  Just because they don't need to suffer the same doubt now doesn't mean they can't doubt the moral of my story, which, no doubt, sounds to them like guilt-tripping, if not blackmailing.  History, whichever way you tell it, is only his-story, not yours: his words against yours.  I was blessed in a different way, blessed better as I can see now, but that is only for me to say.  My children will need to one day speak for themselves, telling it all wrong for the right reasons.

Yours, Alex