MARISSA writes:

The following words of Mrs. Sherman’s struck a real chord in me:

“Sometimes “free” comes with a terrible price. Teen children need their parents more emotionally than people know, and this is often the time when mothers choose to go to college or to work. Some women lose their own children, spiritually, emotionally, and physically, in order to go after a degree.”

This is exactly what happened between my mother and me. She went back to school to pursue an advanced professional degree when I was around ten or eleven, and finished when I was eighteen. In the intervening years, she lost me, so that when she finally graduated, I wanted little to do with her.

My parents divorced when I was quite young, and as is normal in these days, I lived with her. In the years before she went back to school, I remember baking cookies together, float trips on the river, picnics in the park with ice cream and books, and enlightening conversations on the many subjects that any inquisitive child asks about. After she started school, all that was gone. I spent long hours at home alone, before I went to bed, alone, while she was at work. I saw her only in the mornings when she woke me up and hurriedly took me to school on her way to the university.

My teenage years were terrible. I recognized that all or most of my friends from earlier years had taken up unhealthy and self-destructive habits, and stopped talking to them. I told my mother of my troubles once or twice, but she merely brushed me off with “You have to be a friend to make a friend” before going off to work, or to the university to study. That is what I remember more than anything from my teenage years, being dismissed with some cliché saying, because my mother was too busy to actually talk to me or deal with my problems. I became deeply depressed and turned to books and videogames for solace, spending long hours doing nothing else but “killing time” before I fell asleep.

I was constantly assured with vague promises of “I know it’s rough now, but someday, it’ll all be worth it, when I make some real money.” Since I had little else from her but what she bought me, I eagerly agreed. I had started to associate love with being bought things. But I knew the lie. Even as a young adolescent, I swore to myself that I would never have children unless I could stay home with them.

Now I am 27, and she has been working in her profession for nine years.  We have never recovered our relationship and find it difficult to talk to one another. To me and everyone else, she pretends all is fine between us. Sometimes I wonder if she really is pretending, or if she knows that it isn’t normal to have absolutely nothing to discuss with your only child. On some level I know she cares about me, but it is really hard for me to think that she does.

No amount of money makes up for this.

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