by Robin Romm
Considering I hail from an immigrant family, you could argue that ambition is in my blood. The very act of leaving behind all that is familiar to you in order to re-create a life in an unknown context means that you are at the very least brave. As a first-generation American, I was raised knowing that my life was inflected with the sacrifice of others. The act of leaving was ambitious, yet my family’s need to simply survive often masked it. The opportunities available to them rarely matched their capabilities and their intellect. We regularly heard about how our uncles, family friends, and acquaintances were “big-time doctors” or “well-educated” back home in Haiti, but we knew them as taxi drivers and maintenance workers in America. Even if no one ever said it to you directly, every night shift worked or second job acquired screamed: “We came to this country because of you!” The weight of that knowledge, being made aware that their parenting was about a fundamental disruption of comfort in the service of the possibility of success, was never lost on me. There was no choice but to be good, be better, be an outward contestation of and tribute to the indignities that my family endured. For every racist employer, for every news story that cast Haitians as a plagued people during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, or exasperated listener too impatient to understand heavily accented English, I felt that I had to do and be something.
My ambition started small—a flicker really—because of my shyness. My parents’ acrimonious breakup when I was nine, which plunged us into financial instability, is what made my ambition intensify. My mother gathered our belongings one day, and we had to move in with my aunt and her daughters; at times we lived seven to a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. With little privacy or space for myself as a moody preteen, school became my workplace, my refuge, my laboratory for creating a potion to turn a quiet girl into a force of nature. At home, there were too many people, all older than me, and it was difficult to stand out. My sister and my cousins were natural comrades because of their ages. My mother and her sister were the best of friends. I was alone in a crowded house. But, at school, where everyone was my age, I could assert myself, get noticed, and receive praise for being the best.
I attended Catholic schools paid for by the overtime wages of my mom, her sisters and her brothers, as well as the benevolence of unknown wealthy people I wrote thank-you notes to before summer breaks. I thought I owed all my backers my very best. Strangely, no one ever said I had to achieve. I am certain most people assumed I had a helicopter/stage/coach mom that forced me to get good grades and heap on responsibilities in extracurricular activities, and insisted that I keep focused on collecting every coveted plastic trophy in the Chicago metro area. The reality is that I was my own helicopter/stage/coach parent. My mother worked seemingly endless hours to take care of me. She would wake up and work for a couple of hours, drive me to school, pick me up at the end of the school day, drop me off at home, then go back to work her second job. We would talk in the car or in the half hour she spent showering and getting dressed to work again at her night job. I never felt ignored or unloved, but it was clear to me that love was work—not emotional labor, but intense, exhaustion-inducing work. When you loved someone, you went to work to take care of them. When you worked, you were bringing value to the relationship. I worked hard at school to honor my mother’s work. My dream was to one day be successful, so I could have money to help my mom, but I never imagined anything short of all-consuming work. You went to school so you could have a career and work all the time. The logic was simple, and this idea remained with me for most of my life.
By the time my parents were officially dissolved, I embarked on a campaign for attention and affirmation—the kind that my father never cared to provide—and it became clear that ambition was the route most suited to me. Growing up a girl teaches you that you will either be smart or pretty. Smart made more sense to me; it was practical. Trying to be pretty, to remain pretty, was risky and tiresome. If you are a pretty girl, boys and men pay attention to you. In a tight-knit, gossip-fueled immigrant community where a girl talking on the phone with a boy was met with as much concern as an unplanned pregnancy, using ambition to chasten yourself seemed reasonable, smart even. If I prioritized school, getting into college, and later getting into graduate school—if I remained ambitious as my friends turned boy crazy or simply boy confused—then I could avoid confronting my insecurities about dating and relationships. From my vantage point, women paid for their love lives with their ambition. The proof was on the daytime talk shows I watched while all the adults were at work. I found evidence in the cautionary tales circulated by my aunts, who told tragic stories of the goddaughters who married too early or the children that came before the college degrees. Fortunately, I met someone who showed me something different, and our marriage stands squarely against the tales told to me as a girl and young woman. I’ve enjoyed most of my professional success with my husband alongside me encouraging me and assuring me that I was the best (in his unbiased opinion). I hope our relationship teaches our children about partnership and how a couple can tend to each other’s dreams. I want this to be our legacy.
Although I’ve settled into a life with as much professional fulfillment as personal happiness, I’m still not sure if my ambition is friend or foe. In order to feed it, nurture it, and maintain it, I’ve allowed my life to get out of balance more than I like. I’ve signed up for too much and left too little for myself. The day I found out I got tenure, within hours of hearing the news, I was doubled over on the floor of my bathroom—vomiting uncontrollably for what felt like an eternity. The symbolism wasn’t lost on me. It took six years of a PhD program and seven years on the tenure track to finally arrive to that celebratory moment, and I was too sick to raise a glass of champagne or eat the congratulations cookie my husband bought for me after I called him with the good news.
What was this all for, if it only made me sick and exhausted? It was for me, and for my family, and for my future little ones, and for the students whom I teach every year who show up at college the way I did—with this thing they call resilience and label “grit” in studies and in think pieces. We applaud young people—often first-generation college students—for having what it takes to survive. I share stories on my Facebook wall of the kid who moved from a homeless shelter into a college dorm, and I’ve had more than a few real-life students whose stories of overcoming adversity are shared in confidence. The world of higher education is starting to acknowledge the perseverance and determination not captured on a transcript or the anecdotes edited to comply with the college essay word count. If I were starting college today, my work life starting at fourteen, my responsibilities for paying for school clothes, my needing to contribute because we didn’t have enough, would be amplified and applauded. We are in a new era where we don’t shame the fish out of water, but we still know that staying afloat takes more than praise.
I’m excited about parenting. Unlike most of my endeavors, there is no opportunity to do it over again, to return to it like a manuscript that can’t quite come together or a denied grant application that can be revised for resubmission. I can’t merely move “BE A GOOD PARENT” to a different line of my to-do list when I get distracted. I have to be present each and every day, and it will require me to draw from other parts of me, not just my ambition. Will the parts of my life that will make me a role model for our children necessarily make me a good mother?
Now that I’m on top of one professional mountain, I struggle to sit quietly atop it and scan the horizon. I look down too much. I worry about tumbling toward the bottom and hurting myself along the jagged edges. I fix my gaze on the mountaintops on either side of me. I strategize. What will it take for me to scale that one? I hate that I’m not looking at the vista. I don’t want to nurture our children to be this way. As a historian of girls and women and an observer of the larger culture, I know the many ways girls are discouraged and shaken and demeaned. I want my daughters to be tough, to never shrink, and I want to do the other things that the books
I read about making sure your daughters have a healthy girlhood tell me I need to do. But I don’t want them to feel sick from overwork, for their ambition to get in the way of discovering the other things that matter—love, companionship, fun.
Growing your family through adoption disabuses you of ideas that your children will have your nose or your father’s brow or your bookishness. Your child gains what you provide—a love of classical music, a taste for spicy tofu, or a penchant for horror films. So, you start to think about how intentional everything must be, or at least I do. I think about this in relationship to my ambitiousness. Good or bad for parenting? I’m never quite sure. What I do know is that I have a lot to offer, to show my children. So, what will I teach my daughters? What is the right way to do all or any of this? I realize that in grappling with this question, I am struggling with the fruits of my labor—my kids will know an economic comfort, privileges that I envied as a kid. They won’t know the parental narrative of leaving behind the familiar to seek something better for your family. Is it in my nature to be so ambitious, or was it my mother’s circumstances that quietly nurtured these characteristics? In the world of educated parents, very little is left to chance. While my friends bemoan how hyper other parents are about their children’s achievements, they are also fretting about the admissions standards of kindergartens, scheduling extracurricular math and language classes, and imploring us to join them in the frenzy. Strangely, my cherished upbringing—in its emphasis on independence above all things—has provided me with a beautiful model that I feel totally incapable of following. I guess I’ll try to not overthink it, though that is unlikely. But, as I overprepare for parenthood, I find it strangely liberating knowing that this is one of the few places in my life where I can’t expect perfection. I know that it is an impossibility—being the perfect mom. I now take on this new sense of freedom and hope, learn from others, learn from myself, and rest on my desire to nurture. Maybe this sense of freedom will start to become second nature. Perhaps this new sense of freedom is what our daughters will inherit from me.
Crying in the Bathroom
ERIKA L. SÁNCHEZ
It was October, and I had fallen into the worst depression of my life, the darkness outside enveloping me in a crippling and unfamiliar despair. My therapist asked me if I ever thought about suicide. I said no, but the truth was I thought about it several times a day. I’d rent a cabin in Michigan and off myself with a bottle of wine and a fistful of pills. I’d listen to the beautiful piano works of Erik Satie as I slipped out of consciousness and into a peaceful oblivion. I was never able to say it out loud, mostly because I knew how melodramatic it sounded.
At thirty, my life was in shambles. I’d escaped my poverty-tinged upbringing to pursue my dream of becoming a writer, and here I was, a grown woman paralyzed with hopelessness and self-doubt. All I could do was binge-watch Gilmore Girls, finding comfort in the idyllic New England town of Stars Hollow, the benign and quirky characters getting into silly capers. I loved watching the interactions between Lorelai and Rory because it was so unlike my relationship with my own mother.
As soon as I hit puberty, my mother and I began to resent each other. Our relationship was nothing like the wholesome white fantasies I saw on TV. I grew up in the working-class town of Cicero, Illinois, which bordered Chicago’s west side. My neighborhood was plagued with poverty and violence. Sex workers and their johns loitered in front of a seedy motel at the end of our block. Strange men snorted drugs off our garbage cans.
I struggled to find a place for myself in this harsh environment. I had always been a weird kid—most of my family and peers misunderstood me, disliked me, or both. Nearly all the girls my age looked like traditional Mexican daughters, with their neat clothes and braided hair, or wore “urban” clothes—sneakers, basketball jerseys, large hoop earrings. Meanwhile, I wore combat boots, flappy black dresses, alternative band T-shirts, and dyed my hair funny colors. When I “became a woman” and my sexuality began to flourish, I turned into a serious nuisance. I had opinions and no one liked them. I had feminist inclinations, hated church, enjoyed solitude, and loved to read and write. I was always scandalizing my mother in some form or other.
One of my earliest forms of rebellion was shaving my legs. I was thirteen, and my dark hair was growing in thick as cactus spines. Embarrassed, I secretly used my father’s razor in the shower. One afternoon we were at a family party at my uncle’s house. It was summer and I was wearing a pair of overall shorts, and as I passed my mother, I felt her hand brush against my leg.
“Hija de la chingada,” she muttered, her face flushed with anger and disappointment.
I constantly groused about the unfair distribution of labor in our house. Why did I have to heat tortillas for my brother? Didn’t he have hands? Why couldn’t it be the other way around? And how come the men always ate first even though the women did all the work? To my mother’s chagrin, I was not at all interested in housework. Anytime she tried to teach me how to cook, I’d end up storming out of the kitchen, exasperated by her criticism and profoundly bored by the minutiae of chopping onions, sorting beans, or frying tortillas. I was not the ideal Mexican daughter. I was a straight-up aberration.
My mother grew up in a cabin in rural Mexico. The daughter of a migrant worker in the Bracero Program and a frequently ill mother, she had to run the household and take care of her seven siblings. She started cooking at the age of five, which would be cute if it wasn’t so depressing. Though smart and driven, she was allowed only a few years of schooling in her remote mountain village. This resulted, unsurprisingly, in a very narrow worldview, particularly when it came to gender norms. In 1978, at the age of twenty-one, she immigrated to the United States. Two decades later, when her daughter began to act like an Americanized teenager, she was rightly bewildered, and reacted how any Catholic Mexican mom would: with unbridled repression. She wanted to know my whereabouts at all times, grew suspicious of me whenever I left the house. Though she was only trying to protect me, she always suspected the worst and did everything in her power—mostly through shame—to prevent me from getting pregnant and ruining my life.
In the beginning I just wanted some room to breathe. After a while, though, I did the kinds of things she feared: I experimented with drugs, had sex, pierced body parts, and got my first tattoo. I’d try anything to quell my restlessness. Once after an argument with my parents, I punched a door in frustration. When I was really desperate, I cut myself.
To escape the wasteland of my working-class hometown and my tense relationship with my mother, I lost myself in books. I latched on to writing. Writing made me happy. I excelled at it, and I hoped it would offer me a way out. I realize now that it was also, critically, convenient and inexpensive. All I needed was a pen and paper. I had many other interests—particularly art and music—but those required many more resources. My parents once bought me an acoustic guitar from a garage sale, but I soon gave up when we couldn’t afford lessons and I was unable to teach myself with library books. Writing was the cheapest way for me to feel free. I was scrutinized and controlled at home, and the blank page offered me endless possibilities, a vehicle to create another reality for myself.
In high school, a few teachers noticed my talent and encouraged me to keep writing. One particularly supportive teacher, Mr. Cislo, would give me mix tapes and books he thought I’d like. Once he even made me a packet of all of his favorite poetry. The work of Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, and Sandra Cisneros—women who wrote unapologetically about their bodies and inner life—struck me. Writing felt like an emergency. And so I wrote poems about menstruation, sex, and sadness. Writing offered me a way to explore the stigmatized subjects of sex and mental illness.
My sophomore year I got censored in our literary magazine for using the word cunt. Another time I was reprimanded for reading a poem with vaginal imagery at a school assembly. Those were some of my proudest moments.
While I was brooding in my room reading Anne Sexton and wr
iting poems about my vagina, most of my family members were breaking their backs as laborers. My dad got up at dawn to make cheesecakes with my uncles and cousins in a factory on the west side of Chicago. My mom worked the night shift at a paper factory and came home with chapped, cracked hands and melancholic eyes.
Success in my family meant sitting at a desk; it meant you had air-conditioning in the brutal summer months; it meant your boss didn’t talk down to you because you didn’t speak English; it meant you didn’t fear la migra would deport your ass while you were minding your own business trying to make a living.
Neither one of my parents made it past sixth grade, so at thirteen, my brothers and I had already surpassed their education level. My older brother and I became our parents’ interpreters and cultural brokers. We translated legal documents and important medical information. The power dynamic between immigrants and their American-born English-speaking children can be mystifying for those who’ve never had to advocate for their disempowered parents. Sometimes we had to be the caretakers, whether we liked it or not. Talking to strangers and asking for things became easy for me. I learned to shed any sense of self-consciousness or intimidation because my parents needed me—at a parent-teacher conference, at the mall, or on the phone with an insurance company.