Marion's Story

Marion's Story

Everyone needs to have dreams and while dreams can be fulfilled, they can also be smashed. This kid needed to have the strength to survive not only the loss of a dream but the loss of a loved one. It is a true story, written in first person. And the kid, my daughter, is now a student at SUNY Morrisville, where after a rocky first semester has been on the dean's list ever since. I submit this as a ray of hope for parents and for children. Maybe you have struggled, maybe you have lost, and maybe your dreams have crashed around your ears, but there is hope and you can survive.

High School is supposed to be one of those transitional phases in life. You're supposed to learn the essentials of each subject as well as many equally essential philosophies to lead your life by. It's supposed to be a get in, get out, and move on with your life sort of thing. But nothing ever goes the way it's supposed to with me.

When I was a freshman in high school I went to one of the top musically inclined public schools in New York State, which was a good thing because I in fact was musically inclined. I took voice classes, music theory, band and multiple choruses as well as the required not so fun courses. All things aside, I liked school. But everything you truly like will come crashing down in the end doesn't it?

After winter break I began feeling weak. I would go to school only to fall asleep. I would often sleep in the hall way outside of the band room for periods at a time. I would sit out in P.E. of course to sleep in the bleachers. Even when I did go to class, I slept. After a while the weakness became so overpowering that it became difficult to get out of bed in the morning. This feeling continued for weeks on end; as I continued miss more and more school.

Finally, after multiple doctors' appointments, numerous tests and many, many weeks, I was diagnosed with benign ovarian cysts. I was told by the doctor that many teenage girls got them and not to worry, they would clear up all in good time. So I went home, still weak and tired. I tried to return to school but I was still too weary. Why was it that so many teenage girls got these but I was the only one struggling and in pain?

A few weeks later, at yet another doctor's appointment, the doctor informed me that the reason I was in so much pain was that the cysts had grown to an abnormal size. He ordered me to a week of bed rest, making me miss more school. While in this enforced rest, I received notice from the school that I had been absent so much that I would have to repeat the ninth grade.

That summer, my mother and I moved to a small town outside of Buffalo, NY. I spent most of that summer reading and watching every movie under the sun, longing to be on that beach just beyond my bedroom window. The crashing waves ricocheted off the cliff as if beckoning me. The loneliness made the days longer and the nights emptier. I knew no one and was still so sick that I couldn't do anything anyway. Sounds of distant parties filled the air. I'd never gone to a real party before. I wasn't allowed. My mother feared that something would happen and no one would notice that I was sick.

We now lived in a run-down beach town in a house far beyond view from the road. If you followed the beaten path further and further into what seemed to be a whole bunch of trees, you would find a small green and white ranch with letters MB stamped on the side. The house felt empty. Not because of a lack of furniture or other home-like necessities but because it was my grandmother's. Every elderly woman's home has this way of feeling cold, empty, and like it's no fun, especially for a sickly 15 year old girl. But, then again, nothing is all that much fun for sickly 15 year old girls. My grandmother, on the other hand, was anything but cold empty and boring. She was character that one. She was always humming some Irish drinking song, reminiscing about her communist days, or telling me some goofy story about my mother's childhood. She made things seem easy and made my life a bit less painful. She was tiny and getting smaller. I hadn't grown that much since I had seen her last but she had shrunk.

When fall arrived that year, and school was beginning, she didn't care how sick I was or how much pain I was in. She would drag me out of bed herself, her brittle bones and all. "You're going to school come hell or high water, Marion-ola, so you might as well do it the easy way." She'd say. Sure enough I went to school day in and day out, the pain becoming less and less controlling over my daily life. After a while there was no pain at all. It made me realize that there might be some truth in that old saying 'mind over matter'.

In January 2005 I stopped fighting and realized that the reason the pain had stopped wasn't that I was ignoring it. The reason the pain had stopped was that I was too busy trying to impress my grandmother to feel it. She was proud of me. I felt like she was my personal cheerleader. My mother tried to be there for me but she was also the "parent" and could not be as unconditionally supportive. My beautiful grandmother died on February 13^th, 2005 and all the weakness was back. I quit my job at Denny's to try and preserve my strength, it didn't work. I stopped going to school again and stayed in bed. Movies and books had become my only connection to outside world yet again, and there were no more brittle bones to yank me back into reality. So there I lay day in and day out until one day an all too familiar notice arrived. My mother was just as depressed and couldn't get me to go to school. She tried but had no strength to fight me. I absented out of all my classes and failed the ninth grade once more.

A few months and many treatments later, the hormones they were giving me had begun to shrink the cysts. After a while I didn't feel as much pain. I felt as if I had been revived. I was strong, ready to learn. Of course, by then it was July and I had to wait until September to return to school, but I was ready and determined. In the fall, I realized that most of my class mates would be approaching their sweet sixteen while I had well surpassed mine and was well on my way to voting and lottery tickets. The material bored me (I was now on my third time learning it), the childish behaviors of my classmates bored me and being treated like an ignorant imbecile because I had "failed" insulted me. I couldn't take it anymore. That's when I realized the GED was a better path for me.

The day I dropped out I realized that my hopes and dreams of being a writer were smashed. No college would accept an average writer, without a high school diploma into and prestigious journalism program. I always wanted to write, because reading always gave me an out. And when I wrote I could pretend that it wasn't me in all that pain but the girl in my story, and I was simply empathizing with her. I loved expressing my feelings, the freedom of writing whatever I want, and the way no one can tell you your words are wrong. I love politics, government, life, and being a critic. What a great journalist I could have been!

After a lot of searching I found a school with a great journalism program that would accept me with only my GED. SUNY Morrisville, the place in which my dreams were resurrected.