To Whom Much Is Given

In 1989, you were born into the most diverse generation in American history. Both sets of grandparents, Silent Generationers taught to scrimp, save, and shush as their Greatest Generation forebears fought the Great Depression and World War II, chipped in so you could arrive on the Millennial scene at a private Hospital Corporation of America facility bereft of charity black, brown, yellow, and jaundiced infants, whom your insurance-challenged Boomer parents frantically sought to avoid at all costs.

Early on, you were parked in front of Sesame Street. Later, with elementary school looming, Mom and Dad supplemented televised babysitting by reading flashcards to you at night.

"We didn't have your advantages," said your parents upon tucking you in. "To whom much is given, much is expected."

At the advent of first grade in 1995, you solved two plus two and other problems faster than the hoi polloi during math bees, collecting scads of gold stars on the class tote board in the process. What's more, on account of your numeric renown, you scored the female lead as Tick opposite Tock in the religiously correct Winter Solstice play.

"That will look good on an application to college," said your parents.

As a third-grade Brownie, more promise was shown, even in the absence of purple food coloring, when you arranged peanut butter paddies, caramel chocolate chips, do-si-dos, toffee-tastics, shortbreads, and thin mints into an embodiment of Barney the Dinosaur. You then sold more Girl Scout cookies than your older sistren.

"That will look good on an application to college," said your parents.

Like it or not, 1999 was a hard year in which to party. Having paradoxically worn out your welcome in scouting circles, you were further chastened when cast as the dodo instead of the lead in the fifth-grade production of Alice in Wonderland. But you were plucky, plucking opportunity from crisis by making friends with the duck, the lory, and the eaglet, other female cast members consigned to run in circles. Your subsequent sleepovers featured a parochial-school-clad Britney video-mouthing, "Hit me baby one more time," as an invitation to puppy love in lieu of abuse, exploitation, and conservatorship.

Naturally, the most significant consequence of the year 2000 was neither the fizzling of the Y2K scare nor the dawning of the new millennium but your friends' transformation into middle-school girlfriends, putting up little if any resistance to being groped by boys beneath desks. Branded undesirable by good grades, you passed a note to one of the newly minted cool kids, the former lory, professing admiration for "The Real Slim Shady," a rap persona revered for fair skin, as well as disparagement of Will Smith, in the fading glory of MTV. Your boomer English teacher, meanwhile, was more attentive to papyrus than pussy-grabbing, so she made an example of you with a week of detention.

"That won't look good on an application to college," said your parents.

You made good use of CliffsNotes and your time in custody, however, reading up on Pip, the orphan of Great Expectations. Then you typed—make that keyboarded—a liberally spaced, two-page treatise (asserting to whom much is given, much is expected), for which the astute English instructor awarded an "A."

"That will look good on an application to college," said your parents.

From 2004 through 2008, many an adolescent mastered flipping Motorola phones and circulating STDs. You, on the other hand, padded your acne with Retin-A and résumé with a flashcard-channeled service project that added two spaces to the high school parking lot until an hour of wear-and-tear whisked the painted gravel, like those long-lost Twin Towers, away.

"That will look good on an application to college," said your parents.

By the spring of high school's senior year, you looked good. Six out of the seven destinations to which you applied, including one Ivy, offered admission. And all but one of your zits had cleared.

"That doesn't look good," said your parents. "From the get-go, we made it clear we gave our blessing to an application to college, singular not plural."

Although they had magnanimously sprung for a new SAT prep book after a price drop at Amazon, the heads of your household hadn't set aside anything other than a Great-Recession-ravaged home equity line of credit toward your higher education. Hell, the roof over their heads nearly fell into foreclosure.

"We've got 18 years invested in you," said your parents. "When you get to State, use your student loans to do what you love. The money will follow."

There was either something or nothing to be said for such received wisdom, lifted from a book with a similar but shorter title earning somebody other than your begetters a fortune. Buoyed by the financial support of their frugal parents, your boomer parents met at a protest against racial inequality at their small, white, private liberal arts college. With a degree in sociology, your father initially hit upon the idea of manning a sushi food truck at construction sites, after which he transitioned to a career touching the lives of more workers as an agent for American Family Insurance. With a degree in public health, your mother initially threw herself into running workshops revolving around Our Bodies, Ourselves, after which she transitioned to a career touching the lives of more women as an agent for Amway's bath and body products. When work-life balance was threatened, Dad underwent a vasectomy and Mom underwent an equally insured tubal ligation, ensuring you would be an only child.

Of course, as of 2008's matriculation at State, you were no longer a child. Before long, some fellow millennials, jarred into adulthood by accelerating tuition, room, and board, adopted disciplines they neither loved nor liked, like economics, engineering, and pre-med. On the other side of the coin, other fellow millennials opted to wing it. You had, after all, designed a killer Barney and brought life to Tick and Dodo. Despite losing out on the lead and any other performing role in the theater department's revival of Romeo and Juliet, you maturely did your bit with lighting and lost your virginity to Friar Lawrence, for whom your appetite had been whetted via a new device known as Blackberry, a new medium known as Facebook, and an old facilitator known as reefer. Alas, betwixt spreading your wings with an upper classman, a graduate assistant, and an assistant professor, the only orgasm to be had occurred when you flew solo.

"You are hereby launched," said your parents at graduation.

Doing what you loved from 18 in 2008 to 22 in 2012 at a public university proved its worth. Instead of the $62,500 now owed in student loans, $125,000 in debt would have accrued had you attended a private institution of your parents' ilk.

Even so, a sheepskin in Fine & Studio Arts meant your best post-undergraduate options entailed enlisting in the military or pursuing an Mrs. degree. Because you hadn't inherited your mother's fear of success, which equated pursuit of a career with loss of femininity and marriageability, you gave the boot to your most recent likable but unlovable boyfriend and took on Teach for America. In so doing, you raised the reading of inner-city seventh-graders from third- to fifth-grade level, presided over detention, and dodged gangs. After school, at the two-bedroom apartment shared with five TFA colleagues in a safe but correspondingly pricey part of town, you scarcely had time to ingest cold pizza, relieve yourself, grade papers, scrounge school supplies, construct lesson plans, and contemplate lessons learned. All told, you toiled for what amounted to less than minimum wage from five in the morning till eleven at night on weekdays, with weekends reserved for catching up on work, sleep, and such serendipity as falling in love with a Nigerian roommate, and he with you, while being unable to wed because your combined income failed to dent your combined $125,000 of state-school debt.

Two years into teaching for America and studying a preowned LSAT prep book purchased from a local store, you received letters of acceptance from a plethora of law schools. Given that alternatives exclude, you agonized over your decision but ultimately chose to enroll in what a New York magazine touted as the most prestigious, albeit ivy-deficient entity from which most graduates found employment within a New York minute. Such a favorable verdict following three years of instruction at $45,833 per annum portended a big boost in salary, a better standard of living, the prospect of marriage and family, and the rapid retirement of new and old debt. Surely, there had to be an endless supply of people, who, when in doubt, sought professional help.

All the same, the lawyers on retainer to represent the law school left something out: Most who found rapid employment post-graduation did so via non-legal work. Disingenuous but legal hyperbole thereby glossed over what you, a 27-year-old 2017 law school graduate, instantly presided: "Will that be short, tall, grande, or venti?"

Although Starbucks paid better than Teach for America, you still had to share two bedrooms with five roommates. Like you, your comrades-in-arms passed the bar, tended bar, and remained bedeviled by statutes making it difficult, if not impossible, to pare down debt. Consequently, what was the point of falling in love with a Dominican roommate, and he with you, with no means to marry due to your combined income's impotence at the hands of your $137,500 of law-school debt combined with your $62,500 of state-school debt combined with his like mountain of $200,000 in debt?

At any rate, after a year of lattés and LinkedIn, you landed a job in your chosen field as a junior associate with an undermanned law firm in a bayou. Because the practice specialized in workers' compensation, you would get paid only if a client got paid out of the goodness of a conservative judge's heart.

Despite 2018's glad tidings, you weren't freed from struggling, yet again, with fear of lack of success. Concurrently, your 28-year-old ovaries, mocking a once-cherished elementary school play, began to tick. To make matters worse, the headset playing MisterWives through your iPhone barely broke your estrogen-kindled fall against a frozen sausage ball display in the wake of a barely legal, baby-hipping mother gliding by at Piggly Wiggly.

No worries. Your luck changed, courtesy of the son of a crawdad dynasty during a drunken blind date.

"My pleasure," he bragged after ejaculating quickly.

"I'm pregnant," you sighed after stick-testing swiftly.

With no time to think, your first thought was pro-choice; your second thought was when, if ever, would you get a second chance to bear a child?

Beau's boomer parents, without borrowing a page from yours, attended to financial matters. In return for your maternal and conjugal responsibilities, the prenuptial agreement (drawn up by a lawyer unaffiliated with the cerebral field of workers' comp) stipulated your future in-laws would pay for the wedding, a new Ford F-150, a new GMC Yukon, a new 3-bed 1-bath 1-carport 1300-square-foot cabin, and the interest plus $250.00 per month in principal on your student loans, thus assuring your $200,000 in debt (apart from any conjoint contributions from husbandly hunter-gathering and wifely lawyering) would be whittled to zero in a maximum of 66 years. Beau and you would be designated, on the side, to pay for such incidentals as food, clothing, and maintenance of your new free-and-clear log shelter.

You got married beneath the limbs of the same live oak where you got fucked.

"To whom much is given, much is expected," said both sets of parents of parents-to-be.

Given Beau's growing absenteeism nine months later, Grandma and Grandpa Crayfish filled the void by frequently visiting their grandson, affectionately dubbed Pipsqueak (Pip for short), and taking naps on premises, thereby preserving the privacy required to lock yourself in the bathroom.

Aside from breast-feeding or passing an irritable-bowel-beset shit or shebopping with a recycled vibrator from SqueakyCleanToys.com, you gave yourself an assignment, not to close unfinished adolescent business, but to open adult self-awareness, namely by reading the full text of a used copy of Great Expectations obtained from a Lakota middle school (in lieu of the shuttered local bookstore) by way of Amazon.

Because nobody depicted imprisonment better than Dickens, crappy craps ruled the roost into 2020, when, at age 30, you finally broke through to the finale:

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Pip and Estella's miraculous rise from the ruins of a mansion in reciprocal love compelled you to climb off the commode to conduct post-fecal research.

With a hand from Google, you discovered Dickens was persuaded by fellow writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton to alter the outcome of Great Expectations in a way that would be more pleasing to the public. Oddly enough, Dickens' confidant—who once began a book with "It was a dark and stormy night"—built a better-known legacy as the shittiest novelist in history.

Ahead of that, the first finish of Great Expectations went like this:

"I am greatly changed, I know," [said Estella upon encountering Pip in London], "but I thought you would like to shake hands." I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that suffering ... had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.

What a happy ending! Pip and Estella reunite not in fortuitous puppy love but in fitting mature insight. A grown-up mutual understanding, born of experience, bonds them, even as they know they must go their separate ways.

Your epiphany also meant the published version of Great Expectations, championed by Bulwer-Lytton and promulgated by Dickens, inflicts an unhappy ending, because "living happily ever" is an oxymoron.

In the mists of 2020, life did and did not go on. You came down with fatigue, headache, muscle ache, loss of taste, loss of smell, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cough, sore throat, and shortness of breath just short of hospitalization just after your asymptomatic husband dined in the conviviality of the hunting lodge and passed COVID-19 around. Nana and Papa Prawn's symptoms subsided tout de suite in the setting of superior health insurance (Medicare primary + BlueCross BlueShield secondary) and superior healthcare at an out-of-state state-of-the-art university hospital after an undocumented Guatemalan, eager to pocket a hefty fare, gave them a Lyft. An undocumented Salvadoran housekeeper (conscripted from the handy-dandy grandparental mansion against your out-of-the-woods wishes to care for Pip's sniffles) died, along with the driver, later. Or was it sooner?

Meanwhile, your mother taught your father how to work remotely from home, where COVID-19 was evaded via the doorbell-ringing drop-offs of Uber Eats. By the end of the year, the once-underwater 3-bed 1-bath 1-carport 1300-square-foot ramshackle rambler that had once been your home sold for $100,000 over its $650,000 asking price sight-unseen in an all-cash deal to someone fleeing someplace else. Straightaway, your parents financed a new Chevrolet Silverado, a new Lincoln Navigator, and a not-old 3-bed 3-bath 3-garage 1800-square-foot age-restricted cottage to ensconce with other retirees enamored with golf cart caravans cruising The Villages.

Although they reluctantly accepted antiviral vaccination with like-minded patriots in order to own the libs and vote for Orange Jesus ad infinitum, your parents weren't completely in command. One caught syphilis and the other contracted gonorrhea in a duel of sexually transmitted diseases, which, for the time being, responded to antibiotics. It was enough to make you wonder what Mom and Dad had been doing with their tubal ligation and vasectomy, respectively, all along.

It was also enough to make you wonder what life would be like were you to reach 65 years of age. By then, your parents would be among the penniless dead, having wrecked their wealth on the shoals of sailboats, speedboats, fishing boats, everglades boats, and houseboats. By then, your parents-in-law would be among the prosperous dead, bequeathing nothing other than the family business in the name of fostering work ethic and team spirit in their eight surviving children. By then, the Medicare and Social Security safety netting sufficient for your predecessors would have long since unraveled. By then, you would have long since been regifted your student loan debt, which, had you been able to continue paying the interest plus $250 per month in principal, would still have $89,000 and 29 years to go.

Trapped in the 2020s in your 30s, you considered your options. You could file for divorce, but you'd lose custody of Pip, because Beau would be deemed a better breadwinner. You could file for divorce and have another child, albeit by way of step-motherhood or adoption, because you'd already undergone a free, pledged-to-secrecy tubal ligation in return for pulling off a carpal tunnel settlement for an OB/GYN's daughter, a former Piggly Wiggly cashier. You could commit undetected mass murder and jump to the head of a line waiting to inherit a seafood empire's estate. You could commit suicide.

No. You won't do yourself in. You wouldn't want Pip to be told to whom much is given, much is expected. You wouldn't want Pip to grow up an orphan, like you.