An Excerpt

From Lowery Cate Morgan’s Admissions Letter to Brown University

April, 2029

...and so I must come to the point in every admissions essay in which the impact of the parents must be acknowledged. While this is a standard, albeit cliche, elegy, my parents must be understood in order to understand the kind of applicant you are considering.

My mother and father raised me well. At the very least, I never wanted for anything. I was loved and supported and given almost every opportunity that was crucial to my future success. I won’t praise my parents for doing what parents should do—raise and protect their young—but I will acknowledge the kind of people they are and the kind of marriage they share, as I cannot deny its significance in my upbringing.

On more than one occasion my mother has been accused of having a “big personality.” She’s energetic and outgoing and is extremely passionate and opinionated about even the most ridiculous of causes and the details surrounding them. She is a self-proclaimed Marxist, her biggest pet peeve is religion, and no matter how many documentaries we watch, she still adamantly denies the moon landing. She can be a bit eccentric and politically too radical, but she’s somehow mainstream and gracious enough to have lots of friends. She’s always in a happy, nearly hyper, mood and the only times I see her depressed are when she is without a project or any time she gets an email pushing the need to put “Christ” back in Christmas.

I am nothing like her. Nothing.

In fact, to a certain extent, I resent her. Not because I don’t love her, or admire her or see the wisdom in her way of life, but I sometimes find it difficult to be around her. Because not only am I nothing like her, but she exhausts me.

My mother’s smart and driven, which is apparent by many of her accomplishments, not the least of which was earning a PhD before she was 30. But for all her brains and ambition she often loses her keys, forgets her social security number and has, on more than one occasion, left my baby sister in the cart at the grocery store. Though no one would call her uptight by any means, her constant excitement for whatever the case may be makes it impossible for her to calm down unless she’s drinking a large glass of wine. In all my years with her, watching her mercurial vigor for various political and social issues, I have never once seen any part of my mother in me. But when I start to theorize about a mix up at the hospital, I look toward my father and find myself.

My father is my soul mate. Mostly because I find his personality, his serenity, his consistency, not only a refreshing change of pace from my erratic mother, but the mirror image of my own seemingly sedate personality. My father is smart. He’s smarter than my mother, no matter how much he denies it. His passions equal that of hers, but he is not so forthcoming with his opinions and that kind of restraint impresses me. I aspire to carry through life with his command of respect, his inquisitive nature and undeniable work ethic. Whereas my mother puts her opinions ahead of herself so that even our postal carrier knows her side, my father presents himself first and allows his points of view to catch up to his kindness, his sincerity and his equable personality.

My dad is a writer by trade and a photographer by luck, which are both skills that require patience, persistence and an un-jaded view on life. He and I both love the quiet, the peace that comes from silently reading a book, and the eye rolling we share as my mother dances to salsa music while she vacuums joyfully around the house. But I suppose what I find most endearing about my father is the pure selflessness he brings to his marriage to my mother and his parenting to my siblings and me. Upon graduating from film school, his professional life was on the fast track—working for one of the major TV networks as a screen writer—and he chose to leave the exciting world of Hollywood behind so he could move to the Midwest, buy a home and wait to fill it with a family. That time in his life proved that my father was beyond capable, talented and in demand, but even still he could happily reject it for a different kind of excitement. My mother, I believe, would have never left the exciting circumstance my father was able to abandon because, while she would have hated the long hours and impossible workload, she would have basked in the glamour of it all and would have struggled to let it go.

More than a decade older than my mom, my dad patiently allows her to steer the ship, urged her into her master’s program, and shortly after marriage, allowed her to quit her job to pursue a PhD. Perhaps in trying to bridge the age gap he carefully and methodically lets my mother call most, if not all, the shots so that she can rise to the maturity and the demands of adulthood and also not feel as though she was robbed of any of her youth.

Most people couldn’t help but admire my strong and independent mother braving the world of academia, even while 9 months pregnant, but it is my father who is the true hero. After all, he was the one who held me—14 months old with an earache—while my mother defended her dissertation.

In the moments when I can’t seem to understand my mother, or at least I can’t relate to her, I just look at the way my father looks at her and I recognize that what he sees in her is reality and it makes me love my mother all the more. His love for her is unconditional, pure, and a surprise, I think, to no one.

Now, it may sound as though I see my mother as terribly flawed and my father as perfect. But this is not the case. I admire my mother, even when I don't understand her. In many ways, I wish I had her energy. She carries herself with such ease and confidence—often buried behind a self-effacing modesty—and though she fully recognizes that I’m nothing like her, she never pushed her children to be anything but the very truest versions of themselves. And she truly seemed to be in awe, and in love, with both of us. This made me mad at myself for wanting her to be different sometimes, when she never once wanted that of me.

My mother gives herself fully to her students at the university where she’s a popular professor who always packs her political science classes. She encourages heavy, tear-inducing debates among 18 years olds who’ve never once thought about the constitutionality of gay marriage but are pressed by her on this issue the first day of class. She’s an academic and highly respected in her field, and for the work she does in the nonprofit community, but she loves go-cart racing, well done scatological humor and nights out drinking. She’d rather have the respect of her students than her colleagues, and when the university tried to promote her into an administrative position for substantially more money, she politely refused on principle.

The evening my mother came home to tell my father the news of her promotion, he burst into laughter at the thought. I couldn’t understand this logic. More money, less work. Why were they laughing? My mother made so little as a professor that it barely covered her gas money for the commute. My father, an editor for a popular regional magazine, barely made more than her. Our dishwasher leaked rust, our old creaky house was always drafty and they were about to send their first child to an out-of-state university and they just laughed in the face of a financial solution to it all.

I couldn’t understand in that moment but what it came down to was that my parents were happy. Not just with each other, and not just with themselves, but with the life they had purposely built.

For all their faults it was their union that allowed for the much-needed balance. Without my father, my mother would be overdue on bills, would struggle to focus on her career, and would have burned down the house. Without my mother, my father would sink into his natural state of seriousness, would become obsessive compulsive about folding clothes just so, and would probably never have had the joy of laughing so hard he almost peed. I could point to the times when my mother embarrassed me, like when she staged a protest outside my high school upon learning my biology teacher was covering Intelligent Design. I could complain that my father sometimes spent more time reading books, or writing his magazine articles about other people, than experiencing or reveling in his own life. I could point to the most difficult, and consequential, conversation I’d ever had with my mother—the time I told her I had learned about Reaganomics in government class and I kind of bought into the philosophy. And I could fault my dad numerous times over for letting my mother be too powerful, too demanding, and too crazy without the slightest protest from him.

But with the two of them together there is a strange equilibrium that made growing up anything but tense. When most of my friends struggled with arguing parents, or a broken family, my siblings and I at least had the comfort of a stress-free home life. And I think that’s the greatest gift they gave to us—the freedom not to worry about our parents' happiness or their marriage.

They took care of all that for us.