“As I moved from childhood to adolescence, my mother became more and more worried about how I’d support myself after high school, what I could possibly do in the world to survive. She begged me to study secretarial skills I didn’t want to have—although I did win the Best Typist in Class Award in eighth grade. I refused to take the class about which I write in this poem. It’s not an exaggeration, exactly, to say that my mother thought this greatly diminished my chances of success in life. We’d looked up, together, the requirements for being a stewardess (later to be called 'flight attendant,' of course), but ‘straight teeth’ was another thing I didn’t have. My mother hoped I might consider being a travel agent. We had no way of knowing, of course, how much the world was about to change, how technology would make any stenography skills I would have acquired, had I been a better daughter, more or less obsolete, and how the Internet would have put me out of work as a travel agent just when I’d reached an age that would have made it difficult for me to retrain for something else. She never witnessed any of these changes, but I have. She never knew me as anyone with a career beyond Worst Babysitter in the Neighborhood. Here, I start up this old argument again. I believe it was triggered in my mind by a wall I glimpsed, painted that pastel green I associate with the decade before the one in which I was born—a color my mother must have associated with many of her own life’s successes and failures, and her hopes and fears for mine, with which she died.”
—Laura Kasischke