A week after my books were in place on the newly installed shelves, I returned home in the middle of the day to find my mother in my room, surrounded by them. They were spread all around her, some half open, some sprawled across the bed as though they'd been thrown. She was crying-- my mother who never cried in front of me. I stood at the door of my room, too stunned to speak.

We stared at each other and those books, not talking, her crying. And finally, she turned toward me and said, "I don't understand any of these books, nothing that's in them, nothing they say. How can you read them, understand them, if I can't? How can you still be my daughter and have these on your walls? Who do you think you are to have left these in my house?" And then, she left. I have never put together an office when I haven't fought against the sense of betraying my family. My mother's terrible pain when she sat on the edge of my bed envelops me whenever I try to start. I see her grand intelligence and the terrible price she was forced to pay to offer me hope. I feel her wounds at being so cheated of any chances of her own. Her only hope had to rest in me and what her determination could wrest from a poor start. I see her face, the slope of her shoulders, as she cried and touched the books around her and faced the difference she had helped foster between us. It is a terrible thing that the world is so weighted on the side of wealth and privilege.

This is a pain I cannot avoid each time I sit at my typewriter or assemble my office. The ghost of her narrowed options and all the dreams she had to defer to me, the confusions and the bitter separation between us are shapes which hang in my house now and live with me. In order to give me a chance, my parents had to create a child they did not understand; they had to endure my shame of them. The pride we carry about each other is surrounded by a sadness none of us can dissolve.