Student Mom

Having a child my sophomore year meant that I was an anomaly. I was married, but a single mom since my husband was away in the army. I was an undergraduate, but I lived in married graduate student housing in Sachem Village. My friends worried about sorority rush, internships, and dating; I worried about child care,

baby formula, and a long-distance marriage. I loved athletics and travel, but there were no other parents on the rugby squad or French Language Study Abroad program.

Overwhelmed by the competing demands of old interests and new responsibilities, I felt out of place and alone.

That summer Brenda Silver's course on "Modern British Fiction" hit home for me. Reading Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Jean Rhys, we discussed portraits of isolation and powerlessness in wives and mothers. Motherhood and ambition, it seemed, were mutually exclusive, marriage and healthy self-esteem inevitably opposed. I believed that motherhood and marriage robbed me of the chance to fit in with the single, ambitious men and women around me.

Only after a visit from a freshman-year friend did I understand that my isolation was self-imposed. He saw me as the same person I was before I had a child. Slowly my parental responsibilities started to feel less like prison walls as I found that I could devise creative solutions

to meet my needs. I took a job at the Office of Residential Life, doing dorm inventory with my son in tow. I spent a term at another university to be near my husband. Senior year I lived with four other '93 s, sharing rent, companionship, and baby-sitting. I wrote an honors thesis with my son on my lap. I even took him to dinner at the homes of my professors.

I came to see what those modern British writers had been saying all along. Marriage and motherhood do not cause isolation. Rather, isolation results from defining a woman's place by them. When I finally embraced all of my roles, I regained more than my place at Dartmouth. I regained myself.

WILLIAMSON '93, motherof two, works in Sanborn House.

She is married to JohnWilliamson '90, Tu '99