Home School

Despite what many people think, I did not marry Chad Morgan. I don't mind the assumption, I just want to set the record straight. Because, since leaving my sleepy little hometown in rural Oklahoma more than 15 years ago, this is still an assumption people make when they hear me use my new last name.

Chad came from a family of athletes. He is the middle child of three smart, handsome, and talented boys, all well over 6 feet tall. John Carl is the eldest, Brett is the youngest. I met Chad in the first grade. He and I were the best students in Mrs. Williams' class. Sensing we were bored with the curriculum, she challenged us to a read-off. Whoever read the most books over the course of the year won a pizza party. Which, ironically, was to be shared with the rest of the class.

So for the entire first grade, Chad and I went to our corners furiously trying to read the most books. Sadly, he defeated me in what I think everyone agreed was a Cinderella story. I still vividly remember that I read 48 books to Chad's 52.

Later, in high school, Chad and I were both in advanced placement English and Calculus. English was my strongest subject (despite, or maybe because of, losing to him in the first grade); his was math. Over the summer we were assigned The Old Man and the Sea. While I read a dozen books that summer, Hemingway wasn't one of them. But Chad did read it. Maybe even twice. But on the essay test he got an 87% and I scored almost perfect having just read the book jacket. This angered him. He snapped at me, claiming this was so unfair. How did I do it?

Eh.

In Calculus, however, Chad didn't even have to try. Everyone in the class made A's, including two classmates whom I tutored, and I could still only eek out a low B. This upset my father greatly. Did he want me to be a mathematician? Did it embarrass him that I had the worst grade in the class? Even if that grade was only a f**king "B"? One evening after a horrendous test in Calculus, I proudly told my parents over dinner that I had made an 84%. My dad kept chewing his meat until it was finished, put down his fork, wiped his mouth and asked, "What did Chad make?"

I still have no idea if my dad was kidding in that moment. But joke or not, it's still an issue between us. When I graduated magna cum laude from college my dad leaned over and said, "Chad graduated summa." When I got accepted into my doctoral program my dad responded to the news by saying "Isn't Chad in optometry school? They make better money than professors." And in the hospital after the birth of my child, my father held my new daughter in his hands, tears streaming down his face and blubbered, "I bet Chad could do this."

When you grow up in such a small town, which appears to offer so little in the way of diversity, opportunity and experience, you can't help but be excited at the prospect of getting the hell outta there. To dream of challenges greater than Chad. I enjoyed growing up where I did. Was proud of my upbringing. Loved my childhood home and all the country air. I liked the people I grew up with and had class with, who I was in Girl Scouts with and whose birthday parties I attended for 17 years. I liked high school enough (though junior high can kiss my ass), and I thought we received a good education. But I just always felt there was so much more outside the tiny town. I think maybe we all felt this way.

In a town like this, friendships are formed in toddlerhood and carried through until adulthood. I've reconnected with many of my former classmates over parenthood. With several others I never lost touch. But growing up, it was a mission of mine to move away to a college where no one I knew was going. It was crucial that I studied abroad in a land far, far away. It was imperative that I started a career in a bigger city with lots of art and jobs and high rise apartment buildings. And it was not a question that I would marry someone who had never once been to my home town.

And during my time abroad I spent a weekend in Wales with my European friends. After horseback riding all day on a foggy beach, we all settled into the town bar for drinks. When the bartender asked where I was from, I rolled my eyes and said, "The states." More sheepishly I added, "Oklahoma." With my voice even lower, "A very tiny rural town with only two stoplights."  To which she replied, "My heavens, that sounds magical!"

And when I found a man to marry, a different Morgan, a man who himself was well traveled and educated and cultured, I was warmed by how truly important it was for him to meet my parents, to see where I grew up, to understand my childhood and to fall completely in love with it.

Where we live now does provide more opportunities than where I grew up. Maybe too many. Recently, a few of my friends have been struggling with where to send their children to school. The city's school district has 55 elementary schools, not to mention the 5 major suburbs, 3 private schools and a smattering of charter schools both within and out of the school district. Each school offers its own unique brand of teaching, from dual language immersion to how to knife someone during recess.

Urban sprawl has harmed the city's school district in a way that neighborhood schools are no longer prominent and lottery systems are set up in order to allow your kid ample advantage over all the other kids. Interviews with principals and school tours must be conducted to get at the root of the school's ability, and exceptions must be made to allow your child to jump neighborhood lines. It's not uncommon for people to rent apartments in desirable football districts just to have the right address. IEPs, Gifted and Talented programs, parental donations, sibling preference--it's a ridiculous game of who-you-know that lands your child in the best school. A school to give your child the upper hand, the biggest advantage, the priority. And ensure your child will be among many other children just like yours.

I myself worked tirelessly to get my daughter into a daycare that has literacy hour, foreign language lessons, music class, organic gardening, toddler yoga, expressive painting and daily water play. And I squeal when they send home progress reports and I marvel at the monthly curriculum, even though I know I'm still not making any headway befriending her classmates' parents.

Which makes me think of my own hometown. A town in which the parents have bonds that reach far beyond their children's participation in football. A town where the movie theatre only has three screens. A town with lots of mom and pop shops standing strong against Wal-Mart. A town where the sight of a person riding horseback down main street isn't unusual. A town in which you describe people not by the content of their character, but by their relationship to the postman. A town in which my father co-founded the Calf Fry Festival; the long-running, heavily-attended, event of the year in which local businesses vie for the best tasting fry battered testicles. I can't make this shit up. 

But the quaint, pastoral town, like any other town, isn't safe from poverty, or domestic violence, or racism, or ignorance or hatred or crime. So, thankfully, it only offered one option for school. Every kid--smart, dumb, rich, poor, black, white, sister-of-the-postman, never-heard-of-the-postman--were all collected in one building. And no amount of dual immersion, European-based, top-rated, nationally-certified, award-winning pedagogy can top what that provides its students.

In my class of nearly 100 people, there is ample evidence of success. A couple of doctors, a few lawyers, a college professor, a handful of teachers and nurses and dental hygienists, an abundance of people with advanced degrees, and lots and lots of people who stayed in the town and have started and maintained successful businesses. And most people have husbands or wives or loving partners, and lots have children of their own, some of whom are making their way through the same school district we all left a decade ago.

So now, when I go to the university to teach undergraduates in a town not far from my hometown, it shouldn't surprise me when I have students in my class with whom I went to high school. And it also shouldn't surprise me that their first question is: Did you marry Chad? Or, no, Brett? Oh wait, it was probably John Carl, right? It's not that people from my hometown truly believe that there is only one Morgan family in the world, or that they think Chad or Brett or John Carl were particularly well suited for me. It's more that they think of our town first, maybe only, and can't imagine why we would need to search for anything beyond it.

I always liked that everyone knew who I was because of my last name. They know my father, or my mother, or went to school with my siblings or maybe they even know of me personally. My last name was my connection to my home, my badge of honor, my stake in the land, proof that I existed once in a community that was as loving and inescapable as mine. I was worried I'd lose that a little when I took my husband's name. But, because of the identical nomenclature, Morgan ties me back to Chad, which in essence, ties me back home.

I know I should be wanting more for my daughter than I had for myself. For her to have a better childhood, a stronger education, more interesting friends, greater opportunities. But looking back at what I had, that just seems impossible.

Unless Chad one day has a child, with whom she falls madly in love and marries.


Or maybe just slaughters at the Science Fair.