I Overcame My Late Mother’s Expectations to Become a Poet Instead of a Dentist

I got the best advice from my worst nightmare.

In between spoon-fed mouthfuls of red hospital Jello, my mom says what will become her dying words.

“You’re gonna be a great dentist.”

A senior in high school, I’d written many essays about my future in dentistry: how I’d start a practice called Sunny Smiles and travel to poor countries to save people from tooth decay (like every good, white savior fresh out of the factory of supremacy).

It was a future I borrowed off the shelf of lower-class aspirations. You could either be a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, or something with equal measures of student loan debt and societal prestige. I used my dentist story to fill blank pages and conversations with family, teachers, friends’ families. It always went well. Everyone nodded and smiled.

It’s awful, the pressure we put on young people to know what they want to do and who they want to be before they can drive, drink, or vote. As children, we’re constantly exposed to other people’s ideas of who we should be — and our parents’ expectations are front and center. I digress.

When Mom died a day later, she was preserved as a hero in my mind. Her words became my mantra. An unbreakable oath. A promise to try and never give up. That’s what happens when a parent dies before we grow up — we crystallize them as perfect in our minds. I didn’t get the chance to recognize my mom as a human with faults, so she had none. The pain of early grief leaves no space for nuance.

I took AP Biology, Calculus, and Chemistry like a good future dentist. I tore through Kaplans and practice tests. I now recognize that as a classic American response to death: you get one week off and a few Hallmark cards, then the world expects you to return to normal.

All that work, just to score 1s and 2s on the AP exams. Meanwhile, I got 5s on the language and literature ones without cracking a book. I was too young to realize I was living someone else’s story — my mom’s, my community’s — even though the signs were everywhere. Living someone else’s story is a lot like swimming upstream.

On the first day of college, my advisor shrugs and flashes me a tired look. Even though it’s the first time we’ve met, I don’t feel new to her.

“Not a single English class? Are you sure?” she asks, even as my perfect scores in English glare back at us from her computer screen, even though we spent the first 20 minutes talking about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a tattered copy on the floor at my feet.

I shook my head, obstinate, committed. I needed to get ahead in pre-med.

A week later, I failed out of Advanced Biology. I cried impotent tears into my journal. Without pre-med classes, I couldn’t be a dentist. I couldn’t be the version of myself that everyone expected. I couldn’t be my dead mother’s daughter.

I trudged back to my advisor, tail between my legs. Perky, she pulled up the roster of English classes and I begrudgingly chose the only one left that fit into my schedule: Intro to Poetry.

That first class, I felt like a wizard handed a wand. I could not read fast enough to satiate my hunger for more. I was in a love affair with Norton’s Anthology, each page thin as rice paper but holding an entirely new world to enter, observe, dissect. Poems were magic — words distilled to their most potent form — and they cast a spell on me.

That semester, I wrote an essay about Adrienne Rich and used her poems to examine my own mother-daughter relationship, one that felt tense and abridged. I began the life-long journey of healing from parent loss. Susan Faludi gave it an A+.

I wish I could say I switched my major to English. Became a poet. But I didn’t take a single English class for the rest of my college career.

Mom's mantra played like a broken record. If I wasn’t going to be a dentist, I was going to be something else that made her proud. I tucked away my love for poetry and went back to the grind, hellbent on living a story that was already written. I wanted my future to come pre-approved, like a Discover credit card.

Living someone else’s story is a lot like swimming upstream.

The grind was my comfort zone. It gave me certainty where there was none. It kept the shame and grief at bay. After a few classes in Government and Legal Studies, I got lawyer and politician ironed out of me. In the psych department, I craved the imagery-laden storytelling of poems. But I was too busy to pause and listen to my inner voice.

Finally, I settled on Sociology — the English of the real world, if you will, word choice and rhyme scheme swapped for society and oppressions. It was as close as I allowed myself to get to what really mattered. I hid behind the righteousness of social work and well-written essays about whiteness. I didn’t have to tell Dad I was an English major at Christmas.

I graduated. Worked odd jobs. Traveled. I even became a life coach and helped creatives get unblocked. The traveling, the working, the helping — they were my habits on repeat. They distracted me. I traveled so I didn’t have to grieve. I worked hard so I didn’t have to do the real work. I coached others towards their dreams so I didn’t have to take a chance on my own.

The minute I gave myself a second to breathe was the minute it all caught up to me.

I was in my mid-twenties with my first year-long lease ahead of me. My mind was spinning with assaults: I’m not good enough. I should have a real job and a real degree and a real life. What will people say at my college reunion? What if I never become anything worthwhile? I should go back to school. Get a Ph.D., and prove myself an accomplished scholar. Make Mom proud.

Drowning in an abyss of shoulds, I applied to local labs to jumpstart a career in psychology. I was about to accept a lab assistant position at UC Berkeley when I started having recurring nightmares that went like this:

In a room full of toddlers, I hold up a poster of monosyllabic words. They run around the room, screaming and punching as I strain for their attention. It’s month six of a ten-year social development experiment. I need them to answer my questions so I can file them as data points for my thesis. Three to five times a week, I hold up the same poster to a different group of toddlers. Tears boil behind my eyes.

That’s when it hit me like a ton of books to the face.

The price of living someone else’s story is a nightmare.

The price of living some else’s dream is waking up one day and finding yourself in someone else’s life, with the light drained from your eyes.

As Brené Brown puts it, “you either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.”

The idea of turning down a lab position at Berkeley made me sick to my stomach. I could picture Mom rolling in her grave. But the thought of living my nightmare — putting years of work into someone else’s Ph.D.— was scarier.

I shook off Mom’s expectations. I shook off the shoulds and the shame. I declined my acceptance to the lab with a promise to myself: I will waste no more time. I will be a poet.

The first couple of months were shaky; I questioned my decision all the time.

It’s been a year since I said yes to my story. My first book of poetry is done and out for editing.

Now let me ask. Whose story are you walking in?