My Aunt Is A Smart Woman

Part of the Archival Series

Originally Written 20 February 2022 for magazine writing course @ UMass Amherst

Me and my aunt, Lina, circ. 1997

“What the hell? Technology has gotten stupid. I can’t do this.”

My youngest aunt often asks me for help. Recently, it’s been editing her papers or navigating Microsoft Office updates to format those papers. She returned to school for her doctorate in education (EdD). For almost fifteen years, she’s been a principal and needs another degree to do something else, something more.

My aunt is a smart woman. Her return to school at the age of 43 inspired me to get a journalism certificate.

And yet.

“What the hell? School’s so much harder now. I can’t do this.”

School hasn’t gotten hard enough to stump my aunt; my aunt has gotten complacent. She has bachelor's degrees in psychology and early childhood education, a masters in education, and a master’s certificate in leadership to be a principal. Now, she’s two years into a three year EdD. She can do this. But does she want to expel the effort?

My aunt is a smart woman. But she forgets all she’s overcome to get to this point.

A 2018 study by the Department of Education found that only 48% of first generation students stayed in school to earn their post-secondary degree. Further, only 4% make it to doctoral or PhD programs. My aunt isn’t even first generation in this country - just the first in her family to go to college.

My aunt is an immigrant. She has no accent in English, but speaks Portuguese with the same fluency as my mother, who was 14 when they moved in the 80s; my aunt was one. My mother remembers milking goats and mean nuns in the village school. My aunt remembers her third grade principal telling her she’d amount to nothing before holding her back a year; she needed ESL classes, of which standards went through rapid changes in the 80s due to the ever-amended Bilingual Education Act. My aunt later replaced this man as the principal of the biggest elementary school in the city.

In the 90s, when I was born and my aunt was 17, she wanted to do what no one else in our family had done: go to college. My grandparents were terrified of Big America, regardless of the fact they had come here for more opportunities; my aunt wasn’t allowed to go far for school and attended a local university. To pay her way, she woke up at four in the morning and dragged herself to a doughnut shop in the city for her shift. She fought tears as she made and sold donuts until ten in the morning, then ran off to classes a town over. In the afternoons, she did classwork. In the evenings, she worked a CNA shift at one of the nursing homes. She went home near midnight, slept, and started over four hours later.

In the 2010s, she paid off her student loans. At 35, she’d already been a principal for five years. I was hanging out with her, and she showed me her final letter. I made a face at her loan amount and asked if it was her only one. It was. In the 90s, CNBC averaged the cost of college attendance at $11,460 per year. In 2018, when I graduated, the National Center for Education Statistics had it at $36,700 per year. When I told my aunt how much I owed, just two years in, she was horrified. It was more than her undergraduate and masters degrees combined.

“What the hell? School has gotten so much more expensive! I couldn’t do that.”

Now she is. An EdD isn’t cheap. I helped her edit her scholarship application essays to pay for it once she crunched the numbers and realized her principal’s salary wasn’t going to cover it. After all, she has two kids and a mortgage to pay. Even I still need financial help; I’m using my AmeriCorps education award to pay for the very course I’m writing this article for.

My aunt is a smart woman. She has three degrees, several certificates, speaks two languages, and was the youngest named principal in our city when she landed her first job. She’s turned two elementary schools around in terms of state benchmarks and cares so much about every child she’s crossed paths with - it’s why she got into education. But she’s had years of high pay balanced with stressful days of meeting district standards and DCF calls for troubled kids. She writes reports, reviews of her teachers, letters to families - not research papers about the effects of COVID-19 on the socialization of elementary aged children.

But she could - is. My aunt is a smart woman.

She is eighth born of eight children, and none have done what she’s done. Now I have, but I had no idea what I was doing, either. Yet she couldn’t help me; she’d been out for so long and had such a different experience. She was able to pay her way; I had FAFSA. She bumbled through awful advisors; I had the First Generation/Working Class club for guidance. She was forced to stay local; my mother grit her teeth and bid me farewell as I flew across the country to Washington. My aunt studied hard for every B she got and celebrated every A; I got one solitary B in statistics and slid through my university days with a slew of straight As without thinking about it.

But.

My aunt bought the duplex we live in with my mother when she was 26 - my age this September. She had her degrees, teaching license, and was thinking of principal school. I was nine and nervous about starting fifth grade. Now, I’m (almost) 26. I can’t and don’t want to buy a house, have one degree, and don’t have a career. Her youngest child is nine and nervous about starting fifth grade. When I was her age, I looked up to her mother so much. She was the only adult I knew who had done this foreign thing called college that was such a big deal in my family - something I wanted to do because she did it first. Now, her nine year old looks up to me, thinks it’s so cool I’m back in school to write. My aunt’s return to school, though, has sparked her daughter’s adoration.

“I want to do school, like mom,” she tells me. My aunt, struggling to format the paper she’s been slaving over for the past fortnight, stills, listens. My cousin tells me she’d go for art, or to learn about sharks, before she runs off to play Roblox with her older sister. I turn to my aunt and show her how to change her formatting. She’s quiet.

“I love what I’m learning; I just don’t have the time,” she tells me, hushed. She stares at her computer screen, face scrunched like it’s personally offended her.

I think of how I work part time in a different city on a farm, go to therapy, struggle to take care of my illnesses, do classwork, and still have time for writing. I think of her, running to make doughnuts, to class, to do classwork, to work again in her CNA scrubs. Just for a chance at something that we love and might make a difference in our lives. Something else, something more.

“We make time,” I tell her.

I see a glimpse of that young woman in my aunt’s eyes.

“We do,” she agrees; my aunt, after all, is a smart woman.