My mom didn’t seem all that impressed that a grad school accepted me for the highest possible degree for fiction writing after I sent them some of my fiction. Which is odd, actually, because she shows how proud she is when I do something simpler like graduate high school without needing a GED. (Congrats if you’ve done that, too!!!) Or that one time I did that research project on a grass that only grows in woodlands here and no where else on Earth, but was getting suffocated out of existence along with the very particular pine because wild fires had been suppressed for one hundred years. (Before then, the train used to start massive fires because of its coal ashes. They thought it was humans only who were hurting the old growth, which was bad because this spot is one of the only places left in the United States with old growth forest. In conservative minds, it put us above European nature. There was no way to know that the fire was necessary or that the forest was used to disaster.) So a group of peers (me included) had done experiments on the grassy areas over a several-year period, but one patch we set on fire (with firefighters’ help — when it’s been a really long time between birnings, especially longer than a hundred years, then there is a LOT of fire fuel and it can get a bit frightening for good reason). Then they left me to show the results in a conference, trying to raise awareness about these beautiful for-once-not-European-or-African grasses.
Anyway, my mom came to that and called me “my concert” (my entire family is musicy and she goes to see all their performances even if she has to drive five hours, she’s dedicated).
So I’m sort of wondering if she was just expecting me to get in, which spooks me a bit because it might be best if she keeps her expectations lower. But maybe there was just too much happening. Three of her four kids are married now. According to my little brother, that’s a passing grade :p
So I’m trying to not overthink anything but clearly in doing so I’m still analyzing it which might count as overthinking.