flowers for sale.
cold hard cash in the age of student loans.
$0.00 is the amount I have left to pay on my student loans. Bizarrely enough, a ticker-tape parade was not thrown in my honor when my very last monthly payment came out of my bank account. Indeed, I'm fairly certain that the only direct acknowledgement of the accomplishment that I did receive was a dip to my credit score. (A scam if I ever knew one.) To see the balance for myself, I needed to open a new online account with the latest servicer in a line whose count I've lost track of. This loan is paid in full.
It's maybe gauche to write about, but it's not every day that the monthly debt I've paid for the last twenty-one years gets whittled down to zero, so here I am, throwing my own parade. My student loan story is one born of privilege. I'm a kid from a family whose parents couldn't afford to send me to the fancy colleges they were proud for me to attend, but there was a big old house and an equity line that could be leveraged to pay for the portion they did cover. There was a generous private scholarship and the mantle of generational wealth, no matter how piddling, that gave me the confidence to take out the loans in the first place, the assurance that I wouldn't be utterly crushed by the weight of what I was signing up for. There are two fancy degrees with my name on them.
Over the weekend, my kids sold flowers on the side of the road at my parents' house. They used the same rolling cart I used as a kid and gleefully pedaled flowers they didn't grow from a garden that's not theirs. They stuck stems into old glass jars—jam and honey and maple syrup—that my mom saves for the purpose. Customers stopped to hand them flurries of bills wet from the beach; more than was expected or really deserved. They sold a dozen bouquets and in an hour of waving beatifically at strangers and squabbling with each other over seating arrangements, they'd made enough money to buy their very own banana yellow kayak from eBay, sized for kids and poised for delivery next week.
Maybe I should have made them put the money into a college savings account. Faye tells me she wants to go to Harvard, and I'm not sure which hour of utterly unmonitored television she's watched this summer that I have to thank for the idea. For my part, I'm not sure how to feel about the debt that I accrued and slowly, often painfully, paid off for the privilege of going to college. I have no idea how I might afford for my own kids to follow in my footsteps. I can’t imagine looking them squarely in the eyes and encouraging them to take out the same kind of loans that have saddled me for the last two decades at the same time I can’t imagine telling them not to.
For now, I'm a 39-year-old mom who just finished paying for college and graduate school and decided to let her kids buy a kayak. Taking things one paddle at a time for the foreseeable future.
Congratulations!
I feel all of this so very hard. I have 0 college degrees and work in project management in an industry where I began in a unionized manual trade. Because of coming up on the fabrication side of things, people often assume I am part of the current pro-trades, anti-college zeitgeist, where we all heckle millennials for being so stupid as to believe the chorus of adults who told them, “Study what you love!” I am not on that side. Missing out on going to college (due to caring for a sick parent) is one of the great griefs of my life. I enjoy what I do and I'm good at it, but it wasn't what I dreamed of doing. I have been successful beyond what I deserve to be, and work at the national (international, to some extent) top tier of my industry, and lots of people go to school many, many years in the hopes of getting the kind of jobs I have worked. I am very lucky. But I am also trapped. When I had children, I could not – as so many other women I know in this industry have done – switch careers due to the punishing hours and male-dominated bias, and become a teacher, for the summer breaks. When I have a really rough stretch of weeks and want to indulge in a revenge fantasy of just quitting and finding a new job, I kind of can’t – I couldn’t even get an interview as a receptionist without a bachelor’s 15 years ago and it’s only gotten harder since then. My fantasies have to be fully off-grid to work out, even in fantasy-world. My reputation and network is all I have, and while it is healthy and robust, it's also exclusive to the microcosm of this one industry, and that’s a scary feeling. It’s not what I want for my own kids.
Those kids, they are 6 and 9, and also my step-children 14 and 17. So we are neck-deep in college tours and admissions data even while still in the "learning to read" years. And it is so hard, to speak realistically to these wonderful kids about all the things we cram into college education – hopes and dreams and self-fulfillment, self-betterment; but also livelihood, financial security, the job you will have four decades from now; and also, enormous debt. My older step-son wants to minor in theater and I am aware that many would expect me to recognize this as the cultural trope it is – the quintessential worthless waste of money – but if I’m being honest, I can think of few better things to spend your young adulthood doing. I think about what you get from a deep experience with acting, especially onstage – you get teamwork and work ethic, physical agility and movement, the ability to summon confidence on command, public speaking experience, a deep understanding of emotion (yours and other people’s) and how the emotional context of a situation matters, history, art, literature, design, a basic understanding of technical concepts (as many programs do require you to learn basic stagecraft as part of a theater degree). Is that really so much worse than a deep understanding of chemistry? He’s unsure of his intended major yet and we encourage him to wait on that if he doesn’t feel strongly about anything yet – he just knows that he loves being involved in shows, and he wants to do more of that in college, and I think that’s all pretty great, honestly.
This reminds me of my parents putting the letter that said my braces were paid off on the fridge. My mom wanted to frame it.
I had student debt and no degree (ended up in a trade). It's all so messy and heavy. There's no way to tell someone they don't deserve an education, or that it's unwise.