BETRAYAL

As I mentioned before, I had a huge crush on my homeroom teacher, Mr. Anderson. Besides being handsome and funny, another thing I liked about him was that we had serious discussions in his American history class. One of these end-of-the-day discussions prompted me to stay after school. I’ve talked in my blog about how shy I was—how invisible I tried make myself after being humiliated by Mr. Main in sixth grade. When I didn’t leave with the other students at the end of class, Mr. Anderson walked over to where I was still sitting, casually leaned back on his desk, and asked me what was going on.

I told him what my mother had confided to me a few days before. I’d known that it was her dream growing up to go to college—and, of course, she had, thanks to the G.I. Bill—and she’d gotten a Master’s Degree in clinical psychology. But I’d never heard the story behind it—that my grandfather had been opposed to her getting a higher education. For a woman, he argued, what was the point? He, himself, had had to drop out of school as a teenager to help support his family when his father abandoned them to go gold-digging in the Klondike. (Maybe it was hard for him to allow my mother to have an opportunity he didn’t?) Nevertheless, he eventually agreed to help her pay for college if she would work for a year first. My mother said she still had nightmares about her factory job, where she was clumsy and frantic on the production line and needed help to keep up. The following year, as she prepared to go to Cal, my grandfather reneged on his promise, telling her he’d only made it because he was so sure that once she was earning her own money and could afford to buy herself things, she would give up her dream of college. She wept when she told me about his betrayal.

It was the first time I’d seen the vulnerable side of my mom in years, and it had such an impact on me I needed to tell someone about it.