The Clothes My Parents Wore

I was ashamed of how my parents dressed on the day they moved me into college until I learned what it cost them

The first thing I did when my father carried my footlocker up the dormitory stairs was pray that nobody I knew would see him.

I am not proud of that. I have told very few people, because saying it out loud makes my face go hot even now, years later, in a warm kitchen with my own children asleep down the hall. But I promised myself when I finally understood the whole of it that I would stop hiding the ugly part, because the ugly part is mine, and the beautiful part was theirs, and you cannot honor the second if you keep lying about the first.

So here it is. On the best day of my young life, the day I had worked toward since I was a girl standing on a kitchen chair in Corliss, Nebraska, telling my mother I was going to be the first Pelland to finish college, I was ashamed of the two people who got me there.

Let me tell you how they looked.

My father wore a work shirt the color of weak coffee, washed so many times the collar had gone soft and pale, with a tear near the second button that my mother had mended in thread that did not quite match. His jeans were the ones he wore to grease the combine. His boots were his chore boots, the leather cracked across the toe, a rind of dried mud still caught in the stitching because there is always mud caught in the stitching when you farm. He had not shaved that morning. He smelled like the truck.

My mother wore a housedress I had seen a thousand times, a faded print of little blue flowers gone almost gray, and over it a cardigan with a cuff coming unraveled, and canvas shoes that used to be white. Her hair she had pinned back with two bobby pins and nothing else. No earrings. She had a church dress. I knew she had a church dress, a navy one with a white collar that she wore every Sunday of my life. She did not wear it. She wore the housedress to move her only daughter into Weldon State College, four hours east, among families who had pulled up in clean SUVs with bicycle racks and matching luggage.

I remember standing in the parking lot of Harman Hall watching the other cars unload, and I remember the exact moment the shame came up in me like a sickness. A girl two spaces down was lifting a mini refrigerator out of a Suburban while her father, in a golf shirt and boat shoes, directed her, and her mother held a cardboard tray of iced coffees from a place we did not have in Corliss. They looked like a commercial. They looked like the people the brochures had promised me I was about to become.