My roots

Boston is my home. I feel like I belong here in so many ways. I'll always have some Southern tendencies and I appreciate a lot about how I was raised and the experiences I had while growing up, but New England fits more with a lot of my values and beliefs. I also think that it provides me with better opportunities in terms of a future career (and my education). There are, of course, exceptions to this and there are many wonderful schools and career opportunities in the South, I just don't ever intend to move back.

In my first class in pursuit of my master's degree, we're discussing multicultural issues, including both ethnic minorities and the poor white. Perhaps this is why it hits so close to home right now, but using http://projects.propublica.org, which allows you to compare public schools across the country, I found that 39% of the students at my former high school get free or reduced price lunch. That's just the ones who take advantage of it, not everyone who qualifies for it. According to the site, "the percentage of children at a school who are eligible has often been used in education analysis as a proxy for poverty." This means that the percentage of students at my former high school who would be considered impoverished is, at the very minimum, 39% and likely higher.

I wasn't immune to this as a child. My parents struggled to make ends meet and sometimes the necessities (school supplies and clothes especially) were hard to come by. I can remember on more than one occasion going with my mother to pick up a box of food from the local church. At the time, my naive young mind thought we got food from the church because they had particularly good Angel Food cake (that was my favorite, at least). It wasn't until I was much older that I realized not everyone went to the church for cake.

The older I got, the more salient it became that my family didn't have money. When I turned 16, I got a 1993 Dodge Spirit that had been sitting in an old lady's driveway, unused, for years. It took forever to get all the leaves out of the engine and all of the mud and grime off the exterior. Some of my friends got brand new cars, or at least very nice hand-me-downs. When my friends would go out to the movies or to parties, I was working to pay for my own cell phone (my parents didn't even have cell phones at the time), my gas, my clothes, etc. While my friends went to the mall, I shopped at Walmart or Kmart. Other people were taking trips over school breaks; my first (and only) family vacation was after I started college and I paid most of that in an effort to convince my parents to go.

People often assume that, because I went to Harvard, there must have been some point where things changed. After all, Harvard isn't a cheap school. Harvard does, however, have an amazing Financial Aid Initiative. Harvard ended up being less expensive for me than a state school would have been because they based my tuition solely on my parents' income. I even qualified for extra money for books for a few years, which was incredibly helpful. Even still, I had to take out loans to cover the cost of a new laptop when mine died, my gown rental for graduation, etc. All the while I was working 2-3 part-time jobs in college to be able to go out with my friends on occasion and pay my own bills.

So while it doesn't surprise me that so many of the kids at my former high school are impoverished, it does make me sad. It also makes me feel a little guilty. We have been talking in this class about what one author called "first generation middle-classdom" and the "survivor's guilt" associated with managing to escape poverty and moving into middle class. While I still make less money than practically everyone with whom I graduated college (I would qualify for Section 8 housing), I'm doing better than a lot of people back in my hometown (even after the cost of living adjustment). That's hard for me to swallow when I'm always counting to my next paycheck, wondering if I'll be able to make my loan, rent, and bill payments. But I always do. I always manage to find a way. I make sacrifices sometimes to be able to occasionally splurge. Some weeks I just eat Cup o' Noodles because the week before I went out for drinks with friends. It isn't glamorous, but I'm making it.

My obstacles weren't as hard to overcome as some of those I've read about and seen in person, but they were challenges nonetheless and overcoming them shouldn't fill me with "survivor's guilt" when I read about the disadvantages in my hometown.While I may have packed up my roots and moved to a new place where I can grow more than I could have ever grown living in North Carolina, bringing those roots with me taught me a lot. I'm proud of my roots, but I'm equally proud of the person I've become and the accomplishments and strides I've made in the past six years I've lived in Boston.

This is home and this is who I am.