1980: The new year and new decade arrive as T and I celebrate in the French Alps with my family. In Tours, we’re close enough to Paris to go for the day, and we do, often. In the middle of winter, we visit Vienna over a long weekend. For spring break, we go north to England, Scotland, and Wales. Late spring, I wake up on our futon, smell coffee, and am nauseated. Turns out it’s no trouble at all for me to get pregnant. In June we return to the states and look for a place to live in Athens, Georgia, where in the fall I’ll start law school and T will start social work school. We borrow money from my parents and end up with a little townhouse. Law school is tons of reading, and for the first time ever, I stop reading for pleasure. In a first year class that’s about one-third female, I appear to be the only one who’s pregnant.
~
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
Being pregnant and starting law school, not to mention embarking on a career still rife with chauvinism–couldn’t have been easy. Did you think about those things or were you just so in the moment, and so full of what you were learning and adjusting to coming motherhood, that you didn’t have time to focus on anything but doing?
The people around me seemed to think I was crazy. I remember thinking what my father had always said to me, that I could do anything. For me, it was always this is what I want and then how do I make it work. I remember it all being lots of fun.
Oh, that’s wonderful. And funny enough, my incredibly chauvinist father (women shouldn’t work, women are terrible drivers, and so on) used to say that very same thing to his daughters, b/c you know, those rules apply to ALL OTHER WOMEN but not his little girls, who were so smart and talented and special. As much as I wish he could see outside his bubble, I’m grateful for his insistence that if I worked hard, I could do whatever I wanted. It was the antidote to my mother’s “Ambition is unattractive in a woman.” Here’s to daddies who love their girls.
Go girl! 📖🎀
: )