Erin Spiotta (back to contents)

When I was a baby, Mother woke me up each morning, strapped me to her back, and carried me to the courthouse downtown where we worked (snoozed and slobbered) diligently all day long in order to buy Gerber’s and purchase Dad’s medical degree. I grew up, tied to this intelligent and intense, obstinate and obsessed, strong and self-sufficient, steeped in the traditions of the deep South woman. I was reared wearing white gloves and reciting Rilke.

When I turned three, Mother taught me to address adults as “ma’am” and “sir” and how to count to ten in Spanish and in French.

When I turned ten, she showed me how to set a formal dinner table properly and told me I could go to an Ivy League school when I grew up.

When I turned fifteen, she instructed me on the importance of snaring a husband named Vanderbilt or Kennedy, and she made me promise never to forsake my goals or abandon my aspirations in order to be with a man.

As I approached eighteen, I began to kick and squirm, struggling to escape the confines of the backpack. I chose to go to Duke, “that cold, expensive school in the North.”

As I launched my college career, I sought to define myself, to make my own decisions, to explore different people and to experience foreign ideas. I had the gall to date an improvident boy whose father had declared bankruptcy and the audacity to pledge a sorority other than Tri-Delta. What I called divergent value systems, Mother called spite; to what I considered to be independence, she gave the name BETRAYAL. Soon the buckles and straps which had held us intact dissolved entirely, and threats to be expelled from THE WILL were legitimated and surmounted only by the roaring silences which ensued.

I went to France my junior year. Somehow the strength and stature of Paris rendered me passive, awestruck. Rather than try to buck the flow of life and manipulate the course of events, I let the city speak to me. For the first time in my life, I, solitary, sat down to watch, to listen. Paris taught me not only about Picasso, surrealism, and good red wine, but also about family, about future. I realized that I admired and appreciated my mother and that perhaps it was possible for me to follow the parental prescription and go directly to law school without sacrificing the identity I had worked so hard to create.

When my family came to visit me, I got to be the master, the tour guide, the provider. I showed them my city, my methods of survival, introduced them to my successes and my failures. As Mother was boarding the plane back to Memphis, she turned to me and said, “Your grandmother called me the other day to wish me a Happy Birthday. For the first time in forty-four years she told me that she loved me and that she was proud of me. I want you to know before you turn forty-four that I love you, and I am proud of you.”

The fighting is over for now; we gave up…or grew up. We are trying to exist in tandem.

I returned to the States this year inspired and empowered, ready to engage and invest once again. I know now that my desires can concur with the wishes of my mother without being dictated or dominated by them. I can get a law degree that will not float in the shadow of hers and continue doing what I have always done—cheer for the underdog. From rescuing sand fleas stranded on the beach, to insisting that my best friend in the seventh grade, caught in the crossfire of a custody battle, live with me, to defending gays in my hometown, to standing up to my college roommate’s abusive boyfriend, to expressing outrage at the guardian ad litem reports filed by my mother, I have always been an activist. I love to fight for the powerless, for those who choose the paths of most resistance.

I also love implicit moral rules. I remember once in high school after losing to a particularly inhumane soccer team, I was quoted in the newspaper as exclaiming in defense of my own team, “We prefer to play ethical soccer.” Similarly, I would like to play ethical law, to have a role in cracking the media-thirsty and money-hungry lawyer stereotype. I like to play rough, to dance on the edge, but I do not lose quietly to cheaters. I would like to have the freedom to be an activist, a defender, of something other than my decision to attend law school!

I am intelligent and intense, obstinate and obsessed, strong and self-sufficient. I want the power to reach out and help change the lives of others and to expose truths rather than employ tricks. Why do I want to go to law school?

Not because my mother told me to.

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