Never did I think that sitting with my father at the old wooden table was going to kick start my journey through the arch of Keene State College. I was five years old when I started to realize my father was a great man, but he wasn’t always a good father. He was always making an effort to help other people but it felt like that effort was never directed towards me. I felt like I was always stuck in my older brother’s shadow. Nothing was ever good enough in my father’s eyes unless Peter was doing it. Peter was an example child. I always looked up to him, of course, but I started to feel forced by my father to be just like Peter. This involved putting me in golf camps during the summer with him, even though I said I hated golfing. I couldn’t hang with my brother at camp either because at the time it was “uncool” for an 11-year-old to hang out with his eight-year-old sister. Safe to say I made it only two summers at that camp.
Growing up things seemed to get worse. I wasn’t doing enough so I did every activity there was: Hockey, horseback riding, Girl Scouts, gymnastics and two different choirs. Then, my father said I was doing too much so I quit almost all of my activities. One night in sixth grade, I was sitting with my father at the old wooden table in the kitchen asking for help on an essay when he told me I was a quitter, that Peter wasn’t a quitter and I need to be more like him. I was striving to please him, to get good grades, to work hard but it wasn’t enough.
Yet, I still looked up to him. My father seemed to have incredibly high standards and put so much pressure on me that it was hard to look at him and feel supported and cared for. I know he loved me but there was little love felt.
This went so far to the point where I knew I wanted out of Massachusetts for college and wanted to be unbothered and unreachable in Maine away from his constant pestering. Peter was fully committed to KSC at the time and my father was so proud because my grandfather went to KSC, as well as a lot of our family. This also happened to be when I was blessed with my family’s attention. My family started saying I should look at KSC for college. I couldn’t think of a worse idea than to follow my brother around again, this time not on the golf course. I already chose the same high school he had, now college?
Peter graduated high school in ‘22 and had his grad party in the summer. Things were fine; college was the hot topic of the night of course. Then the next day my life took a turn. My father had not been feeling good for a while and ended up in the hospital and then in a medically induced coma. It was August 22, 2022.
The longest seven weeks of my life went by and the next thing I knew I was walking down the church aisle sitting through the eulogy for my father and listening to people tell me how much he talked about me and how proud of me he was.
Suddenly, I stumbled into the realization that I no longer wanted to leave the familiarity of my home and was starting to miss the high standards he had set for me, the very ones that made me start to hate him in the first place.
I started junior year two weeks after the funeral. I thought, “If I can pass the SATs I can go to Maine.” Except I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Maine anymore. I shut that thought out and didn’t revisit it until senior year when application deadlines sharted to roll in. When 12th grade was around the corner, I took a step back and thought, “Why am I going to Maine?” I thought about my father, my family and my mom now being alone. Still, what mattered to me was meeting my father’s standards. He wasn’t here anymore, but the thought of pleasing him was drilled into my head.
I fell into a state of depression and confusion because I had nobody there pushing me. The pressure was off my shoulders to constantly do my best, but something didn’t feel right. At the time, the only way to fix that was to pick up golfing again, “take another whack at it” if you will. Right then, the summer before senior year I announced, “I am going to play golf on the boys varsity team.” There happened to be no girls’ team at my high school. Golf is in fact one of the hardest sports I have ever played. That being said, the first match was on the first day of school. I had never played a match and didn’t know the terminology, but I joined anyway. Golfing never came easy to me, and quitting crossed my mind over and over again; however, I ended up loving it. The season went by quickly and I was done with sports for the winter. Next thing I knew, I was applying for colleges.
I applied to local colleges first, like Fitchburg State University and Worcester State, then I branched out to Maine and finally, Keene State. Even though I did not want to go. I got acceptance letters from everywhere, and along with those I got scholarships from all the schools as well, but something held me back. It wasn’t until I got an email from the Keene State golf coach that said there was a new women’s golf team at Keene and he was interested in me playing with them. This, to me, was an opportunity. The opportunity. I hadn’t seen it coming, it all happened so fast and I thought to myself, I wouldn’t have this opportunity if it wasn’t for my father.
I never quit anything after that night at the kitchen table with my father.
