My Mom Pressured Me To Take A Leave From Harvard Because My Sister Struggled To Finish School. I Refused — So They Told Me To Move Out. Years Later, When My Mom Faced A Serious Health Diagnosis, She Asked Me For Help With Treatment. I Only Said:

Pick your degree or pick your family.
I said, “No,” not dramatically. Not with some big speech. just no.
I wasn’t dropping out.
I thought that would be the start of a long fight, a messy compromise, maybe some cold calls for a few weeks.

Instead, it was the last normal conversation we ever had.
I didn’t know yet that saying no that day would get me pushed out of my own house.
Or that years later when my mom was sitting in a hospital waiting room asking me to help save her life, those exact words would be the only thing I could think about.
If you want to know how I got from that dorm room to that waiting room and why I answered her the way I did, you’re going to have to hear the whole story.

Before that call, before withdraw from Harvard became a phrase I couldn’t hear.
Without flinching, my life was split between two very different versions of home.
There was the actual house in Los Angeles, a rented one-story place in a neighborhood where you could hear other people’s arguments through thin walls on hot nights.
And there was the idea of home my mom kept selling to herself and everybody else.

Loud, close, loyal.

The kind of family that always sticks together, even when sticking together mostly meant pretending things were fine.

I’m Ava, 19.

Continue reading…