  Over and over again in my life, I find myself begging at the gate. I think it is my fatal flaw, my freudian conflict that my old brain recreates. I was born a veritable bastard, the child of the poor, disgraced family and the wealthy, powerful family in a town so small that those classifications mattered more than life itself.
So, having never belonged to anyone's club, I've made quite an identity for myself by pretending I don't care. And yet, again and again, I apply to the impossible colleges, that have consistently either turned me down or fallen apart before I could get in. I get my toe in the door at the upper echelon workplace only to quit when I'm sickened by the possibility of really making it among such high-class thugs.
This year was valuable in my journey toward self-awareness in that it more fully opened up the source of all my neuroses. I once thought it was my hoity-toity family members alone--who admonished me for opening doors for myself and not showering enough--who endeared me with this complex of illegitimacy. But this year I realized it was an endeavor equally contributed to by all the elements of my life. My family members of impoverished roots have all escaped their disgrace in that they made it out of shit town, almost all with nice degrees and well-to-do husbands.
But, like Poe's heart pounding from beneath the floor, they out themselves. Their guilty conscience won't allow them to really escape their past, and they seem to despise me for not sharing that quality. Not that I've escaped my past either. But that doesn't seem to be the point anymore. And in a funny way, that's my problem now. Did you ever play that game as a child where you stand in a doorway and open your arms until your wrists hit the frame, then push up against the frame for a minute? Then, when you step out of the doorway, your hands still want to raise for a few minutes? This is my psyche.
I've pushed so hard for so long against this obstacle of my past, that in its absence, I still find myself pushing. But against what? More importantly, toward what? We're in this really difficult state of flux thanks to the space program and my difficult pregnancies that combined to create for me a rather traditional role of mothering that I never desired or envisioned for myself.
I don't mind it now, it's become a beautiful road in itself, but I need to know what's on the other end of this. John says that's why I've made this little career for myself in writing ethnographically about parenting and mothering, so that I can lose myself to my children without losing myself altogether. But it still seems that the end of that road, if I stay on it, is graduate school. I don't want to find myself pleading to yet another program director, like the president of a secret club I desperately want in to.
I've used all my cards up for letters of recommendation. But can I really be an anthropologist without a graduate degree? When I say I'm an anthropologist now, I feel like a little girl playing dress-up. But I write! And that's what anthropologists do! I'm yelling into the wind now. The kids will be waking soon... 
