Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir

by Wendy Davis

  But then the “big envelope” came from the school of my dreams, and everything about our lives changed.

  TWELVE

  The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  HARVARD LAW SCHOOL was offering me admission.

  It is hard to describe what that moment was like for me. Seeing the envelope as I drove up and got out of my car, walking nervously up our porch steps toward the big envelope that our postal carrier had clothespinned to the outside of our bronze mailbox because it wouldn’t fit inside, was one of the most thrilling moments of my life. My hands shook as I grasped the envelope, ripped it open, and read these words:

  “It gives me great pleasure to report . . .”

  I reached for one of our wicker porch chairs and sat for a moment, the envelope in my lap, the letter in my hands, and I read it over and over and over again, tears streaming down my face.

  I had been accepted to my dream school, and I was overcome with emotion. All that work. Those many hours of sacrifice that all of us had made—Amber most particularly. They really had meant something. I was about to become not only the first person in my family to graduate from college, I had been accepted by the best law school in the country. For me, going to an Ivy League school was a dream, a fantasy that was about to come true. Like a character in one of those motion-picture moments when they see their entire lives pass rapid-fire through their brains, I sat there and soaked it all in. Not cutting it in college when I first tried. The blessing and responsibility of Amber. That moment when I stood outside our trailer with a two-week severance check in my hand and cried, motivated by an overwhelming sense of gratitude at that particular blessing. All those miles that Amber and I had logged in my little red Mazda pickup truck. The blessing of all the people who nurtured me along the way—from the pediatricians and nurses I worked with; to my dear friend Lisa, who had taken Amber into her home and cared for her while I was at work; to my mother, who gave as much as she could in the way of help and support; to my ex-in-laws, who had played such an important role in providing Amber with stability when they could; to my dad—always my greatest teacher, and whom I still called to report my grades every time I received them at semester’s end; to Jeff, who had cheered and supported and encouraged me when I wasn’t sure I could manage. Angels, every one of them.

  The religious beliefs I’d come to hold after being exposed to differing perspectives about God’s direct role in each of our lives had morphed together into a personal belief that God does provide us a path. He asks only that we look for it, that we see his hand in it, and that we do our part to take advantage of opportunities he lays before us.

  That day, sitting on my porch with the big envelope from Harvard, I couldn’t help but see his hand in all the dips and curves and highs and lows I’d come through. That experience provided me a moment to stop and take measure of it all. And to receive it, to own it, as the incredible blessing it was.

  “It gives me great pleasure to report . . .”

  Jeff was the first person I called. And then my dad (who cried). And then my mom. Each greeted the news with much excitement and happiness. It felt like such an incredible achievement, not just for me but for our family as well. I knew that my dad felt that way. He was so, so proud. I would be living a dream, not just for me but for him, too. And wonderfully, without skipping a beat, Jeff began planning with me how we were going to pull this thing off. There was never any doubt in either of our minds that I would go. It was an absolute dream come true to have gotten accepted into what was considered to be the number-one law school in the country, and we both decided, without any hesitation, that we would figure out how to make it work. We immediately dismissed the idea of our entire family moving up to Boston, since Jeff needed to stay in Texas—his work was in the title-insurance arena, which is all about relationships and not the kind of job you can just pick up and move somewhere else. And we also dismissed it because Fort Worth was our home. It was the place we wanted to raise our family, and we weren’t going to give up on that. Fort Worth was our long-term future; my semesters in Cambridge would be for the short term only. With that in mind, Jeff and I flew to Boston in the midsummer of 1990, not long after I walked across the stage at TCU and accepted my diploma bearing the words “summa cum laude,” and began looking for a place where the girls and I would live.

  We settled upon the historic town of Lexington, just under ten miles west of Cambridge but always a twenty- to thirty-minute commute. It had an exceptional public elementary school for Amber and a quality day-care center for Dru. And to lock in the rental rate, we signed a three-year lease with the landlord. We were confident that this setting would be most comfortable for Dru and Amber. But for me it meant a commute that became more of a challenge than I had anticipated.

  —

  Pushing aside doubts about how difficult these next three years would prove to be, Jeff and I loaded up a U-Haul truck with some of our furnishings to set up a new home for me and the girls in Lexington. It took us about four days to make the drive (unlike my dad, Jeff and I believed in stopping and resting along the way!). To pass the time, I read a mystery novel to Jeff as he drove. We talked with excitement and a bit of trepidation about what this part of our life’s journey would hold.

  Upon our arrival in Cambridge, we quickly realized the challenge that traffic there would present when we entered the ramp onto Storrow Drive, only to discover our U-Haul wasn’t going to clear the overpass. This required pulling over and waiting for a policeman to stop traffic and allow us to back our way up the same ramp we’d used to enter the roadway. Other drivers were not amused.

  Finally making our way to what would serve as my temporary new home, we unloaded the U-Haul and made my new place feel as much like home as possible. Then we flew back to Texas. A few days later, I flew back to Boston with the girls. Amber was eight and Dru was almost two when my first semester at HLS began. Amber greeted the whole thing as an adventure. Dru seemed more confused than anything. The day-care center I enrolled her in would be her first experience being cared for outside the only home she’d ever known. I feared that it would be hard on her. And it was.

  In order to make it all work, I had to seek permission from Harvard to reconfigure my class schedule. At Harvard Law School, the incoming class of approximately five hundred people is broken into four sections. The one to which I was assigned was not feasible. It included 8:00 a.m. classes, which presented me with the impossibility of getting Amber to school, Dru to day care, and me into my classroom seat by eight. So, nervously, I went to a dean of students and asked if I could be moved into another section. Thankfully, I was switched to Section 3, a fateful turning point in my experience at HLS, because in that section I would meet and befriend Patti Lipoma, to this day one of the dearest friends I’ve ever had. Not only was Patti in my section, she was also in my orientation group—or “O group,” as they were referred to. She, too, was from Texas—Dickinson, a small town outside Houston. Under any other circumstance, Patti and I would not have been put into the same orientation group. Harvard worked very hard at assembling a diverse selection of people within orientation groups, and putting two Texans together was not something they would have otherwise done. But my last-minute change into Section 3 and into that particular O group was a blessing. In addition to Patti, that whole group of around a dozen people would become dear friends, not only during law school but all these years later as well. I love them like family. And just as I’d always relied on Joey for companionship and moral support, the friends I would make in my O group became my touchstones while at Harvard.

  Patti grew up in a stable, loving, two-parent home, quite different from mine. But we both had tremendous drive and focus. Most of the people in our group were coming straight out of college and were closer to twenty-two years old, but she and I were both a little bit older—I was twenty-seven and she was twe
nty-five, and because her mom had passed away a few years prior and because I’d never really had a best girlfriend as an adult, we became a female support system for each other. Later I’d be a bridesmaid at her wedding to her husband, Jonathan, and I would stay with her after the birth of her first baby, helping out the way her mom would have wanted to and as my mom did for me. Patti and I and our children remain as much a family to one another as our own flesh and blood, and I am the godmother to her daughter, Sadie.

  With my base of friendship support established, Amber, Dru, and I settled into a daily routine. Just as it had been in Texas, driving around for hours in my little red truck, going to work and school and getting Amber to and from child care, navigating the logistics of each day—instantly, all proved to be complicated and frenzied. Each weekday morning I would first drop Dru at her day care and then take Amber to school or to the school bus stop, depending on what time my day would begin in Cambridge; then I’d drive to the Red Line T station at Alewife, not far from Harvard Square (I’d been unable to get a coveted campus parking permit); then I’d take the train into Harvard Square and walk to the law-school campus to be in my seat by 8:30 a.m. At one point I even started taking a bus to Alewife instead of driving there and spending money on parking. Even though Jeff had been making a comfortable income for us when we’d all been living together as a family in Texas, paying for the cost of my schooling, another place for me and the girls to live, and day care for Dru was a pretty significant strain on our family budget. It was a real stretch for us; I did my best to help keep my costs down, but eventually in my third year we had to take out a student loan and cash in Jeff’s 401(k) in order to pay the tuition.

  Whereas my fellow students would essentially stroll across campus from their dorms and come into the classrooms to begin the day, by the time I sat down at my desk, my day would already have included getting two girls up, fed, dressed, and off to school and then a commute into Harvard Square. Thinking that living in Lexington would somehow make life better for me and the girls was proving to have been a misjudgment on my part, but it was too late to change course. We were locked into that long-term lease.

  I started law school on September 4, 1990. There are precious few dates that I have committed to memory, but that is one of them. It’s hard to describe what those first days were like—the stress and determination and excitement I felt at what I knew was going to be one of the most amazing experiences of my life. That first semester of my first year was, not surprisingly, a very challenging time, one filled with the fear of failing: I was living in a strange city where I didn’t know a single human being outside my O group, I had my girls with me, and I was trying to set up a household there and be a good mom to them—all while engaging in the most hypercompetitive academic experience I’d ever known.

  I wasn’t unique in sensing those academic pressures. Just about all the students who ended up at Harvard Law School went from feeling like one of the ablest people on their college campuses to suddenly being in an environment where others were leaps and bounds ahead of them. I was simultaneously fascinated by the intellectual capacities of my fellow students and intimidated by them; ultimately I came to embrace the opportunity to be surrounded by such extraordinary people. One of the things I realized pretty quickly at HLS was that while the teachers there are top-notch, an equal or even greater benefit comes from what is learned from the observations and perspectives of your peers as part of classroom discussions. I can recall many instances of being awestruck by a particular light shed or an opinion voiced by classmates on many difficult and complicated issues—deeply nuanced perspectives from which I learned so much. I give tremendous credit for my acquired ability to see and appreciate differing opinions to the three years I spent at Harvard, and I will forever be grateful for the gift of learning that came from my peers there. Developing the ability to respect other people’s opinions, similar to or divergent from one’s own, was one of the most valuable takeaways I gained there. I truly believe that I became a better person, a fuller, deeper person, as a result of my time and experiences at Harvard.

  —

  Those observations are formed with the benefit of hindsight, of course. But even if I had known that at the time, even if I hadn’t read One L, Scott Turow’s classic tale of surviving his first year at Harvard Law, and even if I hadn’t seen The Paper Chase, where Professor Kingsfield, played by John Houseman, tortures his poor first-year students with the Socratic method of teaching law, I still would have been filled with fear on my first day of class. Everyone is. Every first-year student is terrified that he or she will be the one to get called on that first day of class, and we shared a common fear of making complete and utter fools of ourselves in front of a roomful of ridiculously brilliant people. And we’re all afraid of how we’re going to perform on the high-stakes exams—exams upon which our entire grade is based—which are given at the end of the semester and on which we have to prove that we’ve got what it takes.

  My first class that first day of school was Civil Procedure, a required course for all first-year students. Our Civ Pro class was taught by Professor David Wilkins, now one of the vice deans and the Lester Kissel Professor of Law. He and I are still friends today. Back then, in 1990, Wilkins was a young, dynamic, newly tenured African-American professor who’d been a Harvard Law School student himself. I found that former HLS students who had become law professors could go one of two ways. Either they could torture you so that, like them, you would have to endure the same trauma they once had. Or they could go out of their way to put you at ease and treat you with a softer approach. Thankfully, Professor Wilkins fell into the latter of those two categories. Instead of the stiff, formal, and intimidating Kingsfield-like demeanor we were all expecting, Wilkins asked us questions in a gentle manner and reassured us with his warmth and humor. “Just relax,” he’d said. “You’ve done the hard part. You’re here. You earned a seat in this classroom. It’s all downhill from here!”

  The first time I was called on in class was in Contracts. I can’t recall what the case was about, but I do remember that our professor was at least kind enough to give us a day or two’s fair warning that our turn was coming. Like Professor Wilkins, Professor David Charny was a Harvard Law School alum, and he fell into the softer, gentler category. He was young and brilliant and filled with a frenetic energy that kept us rapt with attention in every one of his classes. You could almost hear his mind racing from whatever point he was making to a series of fascinating tangents it would lead him to. He’d write all over the board, his chalk hitting hard at every stroke and often breaking. He was always moving, pulling at his hair and pacing back and forth in front of the chalkboard as he followed the trail down which his brilliant mind would take him; by the time class was over, he would literally be spent, his hair on end in several places, sweat soaking through his button-up shirt, which would have come untucked, and covered in chalk from head to toe as though he had just lain down and rolled around in chalk dust. We all loved him and were very sad to learn a few years later that he had passed away after a brief illness.

  For all my anxiety, I don’t remember ever completely embarrassing myself in class. Unless you count the sort of embarrassment that comes from your friends making fun of you for always raising your hand and trying to get called on to give the answer. I know! I know! I know! they’d imitate me, hands comically in the air while calling me Horshack, my apparent doppelgänger character from Welcome Back, Kotter.

  —

  With my dual role as parent and student, and with never enough hours to execute either role as fully as I would have liked, I tried to approach school as if it were a job, studying in the library as late as I possibly could in the afternoon before it was time to pick up Amber from school and Dru from day care. Sometimes Amber would have to ride the school bus home and latchkey it with the help of my landlady, who would look out for her until I could make it home with Dru in tow. In the evenings I tried
to be as disciplined as possible about getting them fed and bathed and read to, checking in with Jeff to share stories of our day before I could turn to my studies for the evening. And just as it had been during those years prior when I was at TCC, I would get very little sleep before having to wake up and do the whole thing all over again the next morning.

  At the end of the first semester, right before we went home for Christmas break, the months of stress had finally taken their toll. I was nervous about exams—first-year exams at Harvard are given after you come back from break, not before, which prolongs the anxiety even more—and then I got the flu. I paid a visit to a doctor in Lexington, who, after taking my blood pressure and checking my heart rate, took my hands in his, looked me in the eye, and gently asked what was going on in my life. My blood pressure and heart rate were both very high, extremely abnormal for me. He could see instantly what I had been in denial about as the semester wore on—the stress of it all was really getting to me. With no support network—no mom, no sitters, no Jeff close by—it was as if I were inside the hiss, hiss, hiss of my maternal grandmother’s old pressure cooker. So it was with tremendous relief that I boarded the plane home for Christmas, to study for my first exams and to do so with my support network all around me and the girls, who had also begun to show the signs of what our schedule was doing to them.