A Degree, Two Kids, and a Dacia

A bachelor’s degree in mathematics was once my definition of success.

Before research and the people I would meet through it, finishing university was already a future I had very little reason to assume I could reach.

I have to remind myself of that now. I can spend time around people for whom a bachelor’s degree was an expected step before the interesting part. After a while, I can start looking at my own earlier ambition through their expectations and wonder why I ever thought it was so much. But the boy trying to reach it did not know what they knew. Getting there changed what I could imagine afterward. I owe him a more honest account than calling his destination obvious because I eventually reached it.

The certificate does not record that difference. It has a qualification, an institution and a date. It does not tell you whether the student was following a path already familiar to the family or making decisions nobody at home could help with. I wrote about being generation zero because I wanted somewhere to put that part of the account. I cannot keep asking a university document to explain what the degree meant to me.

A degree, a job as an elementary school teacher, marriage, two children, a Dacia. That was a version of success I grew up around. It was easy to describe, and people knew what each part was for. The degree led to work, the work paid for a home and a car, and the life became something your family could recognize without asking too many questions.

The rest of the familiar future was harder. I understood why people wanted it for me. A dependable salary means something when an ordinary expense can become a household problem. A car gets the family somewhere without waiting on somebody else’s schedule. Marriage and children are things people can be glad about together. There is dignity in wanting a life that feels less precarious than the one you have known. I can see the Dacia in that picture without laughing at it.

What I could not accept was that wanting the degree meant I had chosen all the things expected to follow it. I wanted to keep studying. I was beginning to find questions I could spend years with, and looking for work that would let me stay with them. To people who thought the degree should end the uncertainty, this could sound like moving the finish line just as everyone was ready to be relieved for me.

When are you going to settle down? When will you get married? Why are you still doing this? I could hear the care in those questions and still get tired of answering them. Research could be treated as the thing I was doing before I got on with life. Meanwhile it was taking up my days, making demands on me, giving me things I wanted to understand. I was already living. I did not know how to make that visible in the expected sequence.

It also becomes difficult to explain a different choice without sounding as though you are looking down on somebody else’s. If someone has worked for years for the job, the children and the car, saying I do not want that exact future can sound like saying it was not worth wanting. I understand why that hurts. I also cannot live their life as proof that I respect it.

“More” is often the wrong word for what I want. It makes research sound like a more advanced version of getting married, as though all these things sat on a single scale and I was asking for a higher score. I want different days. There are uncertainties in them I would not ask somebody else to choose. I do not know whether they will make a better life, but I need to have some part in choosing them.

I might want something later that I do not want now. Children, a routine, a particular kind of work: none of these should become forbidden just because I once had to defend not wanting them. Refusing a ready-made future would be a fairly pointless kind of freedom if I then had to spend my life avoiding every object that appeared in it.

And I can carry the same habit into research. It would be flattering to say that leaving the expectations of home left me with only curiosity. It also put me near people who have other things they know how to celebrate: another qualification, a paper in the right place, a title that changes how a conversation goes. I can learn that sequence too. Something I once wanted can become the minimum I allow myself almost as soon as I have it.

Some of that is curiosity. I do want to understand the mathematics, and there are questions I would return to without anything to announce at the end. Some of it is wanting to remain impressive to the people I am now near. Those motives are inconveniently mixed. The fact that people at home would not recognize a goal does not make it entirely mine.

I am wary of turning this into another exercise in judging whether my ambitions are pure enough. Mostly I would like to notice when I am borrowing one before it takes a few years. Would I want the ordinary days involved? Do I like the work, or do I keep imagining how I will feel when it is recognized? I cannot answer once and be finished with it.

I do know that the mathematics degree still counts. I am allowed to learn more mathematics without treating the boy who wanted to finish university as embarrassingly easy to satisfy. He had the view he had, and he kept going with it.

I think I could look at two lives with the same car outside, the same qualifications and children of the same age, and know almost nothing about how willingly either person arrived there. A degree, two kids, and a Dacia can be a beautiful answer.

I wanted the degree. I earned the right to discover what I wanted after it.

The rest of the life was still mine to choose.