I began to question, if all we are is a sum of our actions, isn’t a child who makes no decisions on their own only a sum of their influences? Though I had once denied the impact of influence, (convinced that free will alone dictated our actions and all other reasons served as convenient excuses,) as I came to know people raised with varying values, I began to concede that our environment did plot our options.
Though we had little in common, Derek and I identified our similarities and set out to build a relationship upon them. That is not to say that we ignored our differences, but at the beginning, those differences were the mysteries that fueled our romance. When it came to influencing other people, namely Andee, those differences clashed in conflicting lessons.
I had known that, like Ann, Derek did not graduate high school, but I excused Derek’s situation since he had not made the choice himself but instead, his mother had pulled him out of school so he could work full time and help support the family. When we first started dating, that story inspired sympathy in me. I failed to gauge how the values inherent in that simple fact could affect my life later on.
Now that I had started to pay attention, I came to learn that my new home state ranked the lowest of all 50 states in high school graduation. No recent immigration or sudden plummet occurred to account for this situation. The state had hovered near the bottom for some time, and the cause has less to do with opportunity than attitudes.
Only the minority of Derek or Ann’s immediate family had graduated from high school. In my home town we had dropouts too, usually those perpetual failers who took the graceful bow from being the 20 year old junior to join the military or get their GED at community college. However, this was the first time I encountered parent-sanctioned dropouts. The stratus of society became more apparent in these attitudes that divided students into two categories, college track and not college track. The college track kids were the A and B students who achieved those grades on their own volition. The other kids, well, they could always join the military or take on a trade. Of the people I worked with, about half had kids in the military, a quarter had grown kids living at home and another quarter had college students.
In Derek’s case, his mother made what she thought to be a smart economic decision. Derek showed promise as an electrician. Why should he spend his time learning history when he could bring home more money, his mother figured? Her shallowness and shortsightedness irritated me. I would say familiar cliche’s like ‘those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it,’ and she would say, “what a funny saying, where did you hear that?” I came to learn that Derek had never heard of lots of things that I considered common knowledge as well.
“When I was 16, I had what I thought was a lot of money,” Derek said, “I bought my own car, and would take my friends out on weekends paying for everything. They never had any money. They were still in school. Now they make twice as much as I do, own houses and retirement accounts, and all that money I made when I was young is gone, I just spent it without thinking about where it went.”
This all seemed so obvious to me, I saw lots of kids in college squander their opportunity the same way, the follies of youth, but college created that transitional environment safe to make such mistakes. I was raised in a college culture, even my grandparents went to college, male and female, on both sides. My mother, like Derek’s mother, was divorced raising three kids, but she invested her alimony in our college education while Derek’s mom bought furniture…and the moment each of her boys reached the legal working age, Derek’s mom plucked them from school and set them to work minimum wage jobs that started them up the ladder of the trades. Derek’s oldest brother kept falling off the said ladder and ended up as an alcoholic cashier, who worked in sketchy convenience stores and railed about people who he considered lowlifes. Derek’s younger brother married an army engineer, and though he worked in the same field as Derek, had the benefit of her veteran’s perks. Derek, who did get his GED, trade licenses and certifications, made good money for his experience but he had married down and now valued education more for what he knew he didn’t have.
A few years before we met he was recruited by a consulting firm. He earned a six figure salary and worked in a high rise office, but it didn’t take him or them long to realize that he didn’t fit in. “They talked like you,” he said about his co-workers, “used words I heard but couldn’t define. They would reference things that I vaguely remember from school like I should have remembered it. I just felt so dumb and out of place. Finally someone said to me, ‘you didn’t go to college did you?’ I don’t want that to happen to Andee. I want her to be able to not only get the good job, but feel like she belongs there.”
Though Derek aspired to raise a college graduate, neither him nor anyone within Andee’s range of influence seemed poised to enforce that option with their actions.
When Derek discovered the truth about Andee’s grades, Ann asked why he made such a big deal of it all of the sudden. “So what if she drops out; she can always go to work,” she said. Derek walked into the other room so I couldn’t hear Ann’s comments through the phone. When he blew up about her project in front of his mother, that woman too, called him as we pulled out of her parking lot asking what made him so mad. “It is just a school project,” she said, in a tone of someone who views something of lesser consequence. Everyone around Andee, with the exception of me, held the opinion that her immediate happiness was more important than her grades. Every time Derek threatened punishment for some serious offense of Andee’s whether it be lying or failing, it fizzled within 24 hours.
For me, my future course was college or death, because the scenarios people gave me of what life without a college degree looked like was one not worth living. I would be ‘scrubbing floors at McDonald’s’ they told me, living in rat infested basement apartments with drug addicts constantly attempting to break in to steal my stuff because I had no choice but to live in the worst part of town. I felt that I could tolerate that at the time, because the bohemian life appealed to me in a thrilling, living on the edge sort of way, but I couldn’t endure my parents’ disappointment if I did choose that path.
My mom always said she believed in me…and for that reason I couldn’t let her down. So I went to college and ‘followed by dreams’ by pursuing linguistics, something no company hired for, but I did it just to ‘follow my dreams’ and graduated college, which I did with honors actually. And though I graduated college I still earned half as much as Derek, who didn’t even graduate high school, just because I chose a shortsighted subject to specialize in because my family considered any college degree important and he pursued something useful because his parent’s didn’t, so though I parroted my parent’s mantra that Andee needed to go to college, I thought about all the other things I could have spent $160,000 on, and resisted giving her the college or death ultimatum.
High school, however, was mandatory.