i was born in rochester, ny and the summer before 7th grade my mom, my brother and i all moved to a small town about half an hour east called clifton springs. my grandparents had just bought a brand new double wide trailer and were living in a trailer park. we also bought a brand new trailer, single wide, to move into the same trailer park. it was pretty exciting cuz we got to pick out everything--wall paper; rugs; appliances; etc. i also got a whole room full of new furniture. but i was also kind of embarassed. i mean, it was a trailer park. and i knew that that meant we were poor.

it seems like up until then, my mom somehow hid from us the fact that she didn't make much money and that my dad rarely paid child support. my brother and i went to catholic schools, which cost a lot of money. we always had a ton of christmas presents under the tree, a pile of presents on our birthday, and brand new school supplies every fall. now that i know how hard it can be to make ends meet, i have no idea how she did it. she told me when i was older that one year she got paid to be the model for gynecology students so that she could buy us christmas presents.

it took me until late in high school to not get embarassed when telling people where i lived. and even though i love my family, i really wanted to get out of that small town. college was my ticket out, as it is with many kids.

my senior year i got accepted at wellesley college. the "tea" that they had for accepted students was at a lavishly decorated house. these people were obviously well off financially and i feel that the image that was presented to me of wellesley was that this is the way that you live after you have a wellesley degree. while i'm not saying that wellesley isn't very respected academically, it still retains some of it's old reputation--that of a finising school where rich people send their daughters so that they can meet a harvard man to marry. in those days, wellesley students were taught how to be ladies. and without any financial aid, it was a very priveleged place to be.

so now i find myself stuck in the middle--i am too upper-class priveleged to really fit in with my lower-class upbringing; and too trailer park to fit in with the idea that is a wellesley alum. and i know that part of this is self-imposed. but some of it is based on the perceptions that people have of me. i can't fit in with either group. wellesley hasn't given me the easy life that i feel i was promised. and yet i know too much to go back to where i came from.

and i don't wanna say that my experiences at wellesley weren't valuable and very dear to me. they are. and the further i get from them, the more i can realize how unique my college experience was. and i wouldn't trade them for anything. i always think about how different my life would have been had i gone to any of the other colleges that i applied for. i mean, if i had gone to yale (which was my first choice when i started applying to colleges) i'd probably be an astrophysicist right now. that's weird to think about.

my junior year, i took a class in "passing" (black people passing as white people; women passing as men; gay people passing as straight) and in that class we studied "Pygmalion". i realized during this, that i was eliza doolittle; that someone (or something) had taken me out of the life that i knew, taught me something that pretended to be better, and then took it away from me. and like eliza, i cannot be accepted into either place.

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