Mom, Dad, College, and Me

I may not have met everyone’s expectations of me; I wasn’t the valedictorian at Astor Collegiate Academy, and I haven’t ended up at the world’s best college. But I have met enough expectations to avoid being viewed as yet another casualty of the Jamaican or U.S. education systems. In the inner-city middle schools and high school I attended, I often got the sense that my classmates and I were expected to drop out and become failures—join gangs, become teenage parents, and so on. If it had not been for my family—particularly my mother—I think that could have been my fate. I feel glad, as well as lucky, that I haven’t been a disappointment.