Page 79 of How to Walk Away

I’d been thinking I hated these inspirational stories, but that wasn’t quite right. Iloathedthem. “What is your point?”

My mom blinked. “We think you might need a tutor.”

Atutor? I frowned at my dad. “What is this?” I said. “The SAT?”

“Someone to give you a little extra practice,” my dad said.

“That’s not a thing,” I said.

My dad shrugged. “A personal trainer, then, if you like.”

“Someone to help you—physically—do more than the bare minimum that insurance requires.”

Bare minimumstruck me as deeply insulting. Spoken like a person who had no idea what it was like for the bare minimum to be your own personal ultimate maximum.

My mom went on, “We just want to be sure you’re doing everything—while you still can.”

“Iamdoing everything I can!” I said.

My mom gave me a look, like,Come on. “I saw you study for finals, and the SAT, and the GMAT. I know you’re capable of more than this.”

I heard my voice get very quiet. “You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

My dad jumped in. “I think your mother’s just trying to say that we want to help. However we can.”

That wasn’t what she was trying to say. I suddenly saw it very clearly. She wanted to help—but only in the ways that she had already chosen. My mother was always very helpful—when you did exactly what she wanted.

A lifetime of following my mother’s every piece of advice ticker-taped through my head. A lifetime of never questioning her type-A standards, and working like a dog to meet them, and internalizing them without question. In that moment, possibly for the first time ever, it occurred to me: She didn’t know everything. She didn’t have it all figured out. I’d followed her instructions for life to the letter, and look where it had gotten me: right here, trapped in this bed, enduring stories about ballerinas. She said take advanced calculus? I took advanced calculus. She said major in business administration? I majored in business administration. She said get an MBA? I got an MBA. Top of the class. Always. Every time. Like a chump.

Sitting there, I tried to scan back for even one time—one tiny time—that I’d rejected her “help” and done my own thing. That’s all Kitty had ever done, by the way—reject my mother’s advice—and it had made her teen years in our house pretty miserable for everybody. But had it made Kitty’slifemiserable? Sure, she’d been through some rough times, andshe had a crazy hairdo, and way too many piercings, and a defiantly funky lifestyle—but she was always, unapologetically Kitty. She knew who she was. She did what she loved. Who was I? What was I good at, besides keeping my apartment neat, and keeping myself groomed, and acing tests? What did I like? What was I passionate about? What would it feel like to do what I wanted instead of what was expected?

I had no earthly idea.

“No,” I heard myself say then.

My mother blinked at me.

“No thanks, I mean. I don’t need a tutor.”

“I’m not sure you see the time pressure here,” my mother said.

“I think I do.”

“In exactly three weeks, your window of opportunity will slam closed.”

“Maybe notslam,” my dad amended.

But my mom was irritated now. “Don’t you want to get better?”

“I can’t believe you would even ask me that.”

“Because right now it doesn’t seem like you do.”

I looked at my dad for help.

He jumped in. “Maybe we just need to redefine ‘better.’”

“‘Better’ doesn’t need to be redefined,” my mom said. “It is what it is. It’sbetter.”

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