Recovering Ivy Leaguer

Last week the Harvard men's basketball team lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. They played a great game against North Carolina and fell short by only two points; an amazing accomplishment for the Ivy League Champions.  A few days later I received an email from the Harvard Women's water polo team that they had crushed the #19 team in the country, Santa Clara, by a score of 14 to 4, and narrowly lost to the #11 team, UC Davis, by a score of 10 to 11.When I played water polo at Harvard it was a club sport, not a varsity sport, and we struggled to beat MIT, not California powerhouses. The men's basketball team during my tenure lost to UNC rival Duke by a humiliating score of something like 100 to 29. The point of this statistical run-down is that for the first time in my life, my pride in being an alum of Harvard College was not mixed with a sense of failure and shame. Those feelings not related to my school's athletic failings, of course, but to my own.

As a wife, mom to three kids, and part-time swim instructor I do not have a title or salary that would command respect anywhere in the country, let alone various Harvard Clubs and alumni meetings. I have lived with - and previously written about - the sense of failure that accompanied me everywhere since I left the business world fifteen years ago. Sometime over the weekend I spent writing at Regis, I realized that the sense of failure was gone. As we talked about books we loved, first lines we cherished, movie adaptations we hated and authors we aspired to be like, I realized what a gift my English education has been. I played in the rich playground of letters and love of the English language, learned Spanish and Spanish poetry, and geeked out in the ultimate geek-loving atmosphere.

Sure, that meant that other students wrote much better than I, that graduate students pulled their hair out when wrestling with my essays, that I felt inferior and small-fish-in-a-big-pond. And yes, it has taken me twenty years to get over myself. I wasn't used to failing, to feeling inferior, to looking bad, and it shut me down vis-a-vis writing. But now, suddenly, I'm free! I am free to fail and work harder, fail better the next time. I am free to cheer for Harvard without irony, to proudly claim my alumni status in March Madness along with three of my other siblings (Georgetown, Villanova, and Oregon - all sadly out now). I can see the gift, and realize that it was gift all along.