Living up to my potential

My good friend is concerned that her son is not living up to his potential.  Do any of us?  Is it even a fair question to ask?

I didn't live up to my potential.  Coming from a very small town along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I had the potential of marrying young, birthing several children, working in a factory or pink-collar job, joining a Baptist church and slowly committing suicide.  No, I didn't live up to that potential but I certainly gave it a good effort.

Neither of my parents were educated people.  My father stopped school around age 13; my mother made it to her sophomore year of high school.  Dad began working at the Bassett Furniture factory at age 17.  Mom worked at DuPont.  Factories were everywhere in Henry County at that time.  [Companies did then what they still do now -- that is, follow the cheap labor.  The only difference, in post-WWII America, was that the poor, uneducated, non-union workers were still citizens.]  After realizing the factory wasn't her idea of glamorous work, Mom became a 'beautician'.  My father started driving a truck long-distance delivering the furniture instead of assembling it.  They had one child - me.  There was no reason to expect I would do anything other than follow in their footsteps.  College was never discussed or planned for.  In truth, their goal for me could easily be summed up as "Don't get pregnant out of wedlock."  

I barely graduated high-school.  In fact, if not for those two years of chorus I wouldn't have met the credit requirement.  I failed Algebra two years in a row.  Same class.  Same teacher.  Same F.  So far, living up to my potential.  I was engaged to be married too.  I met my fiance when I was 17.  He was not what you would call good-looking but he was interested in me and that's all it took.  I decided I wanted to experience sex.  I thought it best to take this step with an older partner, someone with experience, someone I could trust.  I had played around with guys in the past but never gotten close to the full-on act.  When I met my future fiance, Michael, I thought he fit the bill.  He was a nice guy, responsible, experienced and he loved me.  We picked a weekend when my parents were out of town for this important rite of passage.  I don't think I have ever been so unimpressed with something so hyped.  Granted, we weren't in a seriously passionate relationship so the loss of my virginity was less like a Danielle Steele novel and more akin to the directions included with most IKEA furnishings.  I think we tried it one more time before I decided to pull the plug on this endeavor.  I wrote him a letter explaining that I just wasn't ready for this level of commitment.  I left the letter in my room, folded up and tucked between some books.  My mother found it while vacuuming.  She was horrified.  Those were the days when your value as a woman (a.k.a. your marriageability) was zero if you didn't have your hymen.  I begged her not to tell my father but she did.  Next thing I know, my father is making Michael and I promise we would never do that again unless we were married.  We didn't.  What we did do, well, what I did, was agree to marry Michael -- my way of making up to my parents for my 'sin'.  So far, living up  to my potential.  

Me as dispatcher at the Henry County Sheriff's Office

How I got out of that engagement is another story and another post.  The point is, by the time I narrowly graduated high-school I had no job, no fiance, no hymen and no plans for my future. That's when I took the job as a dispatcher for the Henry County Sheriff's Office.  I made less than $400 a month.  I sat in a dark, underground bunker, tethered to the phone line and associating with the scum of Henry County -- the deputies.  I was 19 years old but I looked 30 and felt 60.  Something had to give because I was definitely living up to my potential.

It was while I was working the 'graveyard' shift that a reporter from the Martinsville Bulletin came in to check the complaint log.  Nice guy.  A little older than me and a Yankee.  Steve was originally from Michigan and had the same body type and intensity as a young Dustin Hoffman.  We started chatting.  Over the next few months, Steve brought me books to read and then quizzed me on their content. The first novel he gave me was Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and he taught me how to pronounce the Russian names.  He forced me to explain Descartes' ontological argument for the existence of God from Discourse on the Method and I could.  In this post-Watergate era, Steve honed my debating skills on all manner of politics and helped forge me into the liberal thinker I am.   He was the first person to tell me I was smart and that I could and SHOULD leave Henry County and that the way to do so was through education.  It was Steve who talked me into applying at the local community college where I completed my first two years of study with a 3.8 GPA including an A in Algebra!  [My ex-husband and I still laugh at my parents' reaction when I told them I was resigning as dispatcher to go to community college:  "Why do you want to do that when you have a perfectly good job already."] 


Steve changed my life.  Of course, I did a lot of the work myself but I had no idea what options were available to me.  I was living up to my potential.   A potential that had been outlined for me by my unaware parents and the frightened, uneducated community of my birth. I had no clue, none, of what was capable of being but my experiences have made me unwilling to settle for anyone's idea of what is potential -- including my own.