Family Moab

Family Moab
In Arches National Park

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

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.

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