Independent children are difficult for jewish mothers. Growing up in upper-middle class suburbia, most children fall prey to a lack of determination and the persistant coddling of their parents. Even when I was little, I always had a tendency to refuse the easy path and strive for something greater. As the parents of all the children who surrounded me had to push their kids to complete even the most effortless school assignments, I was always the one to go further, faster, driven by my own determination.
With a jewish mother who would appear to be the living incarnation of her own stereotype, and a businessman father often out of town, my family could quite possibly have been imagined by the writers of Seinfeld. I always tended to be the problem child for my mother, in the least traditional sense of the phrase. My mother would’ve loved the child who needed help on their math homework, or the one who always forgot the big test was tomorrow, but alas she got the kid who led the parent-teacher night presentation and never had homework because he already did it all at school.
I believe my mother reached the height of her annoyance with my independent tendencies during
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This was due to the fact that that accolade was awarded to another student who had found a better way to transport cancer cell cultures between labs, reducing cell membrane breakdown. I’m certain that this student’s win had nothing to do with the fact that both his parents were cancer researchers, of which one of their PhD dissertations was on the exact same topic. I had no hard feelings, as we both moved on to the regional next round, but the student couldn’t describe her project further than rehearsed answers which were blatantly not her words. She took the easy path, and it’s especially tough to be beaten when you were the one who put in the time and