your life on you?”
“I was stunned, I guess. What I remember most was that my mother was strong, but she followed dad blindly. And dad, he had his views - he was a political scientist - but no one took him seriously because he didn’t have the background. He wasn’t in the right circles. I just remember dad saying to mom, ‘if only I had a different start, things would be different.’ In essence, he wanted to be someone he wasn’t. He failed because he wasn’t who he needed to be.”
“Did it hurt you to see your father think of himself as a failure?”
“He had the choice. He knew what he wanted to do all of his life. He knew the conventional routes to achieving what he wanted - he knew what he needed to do. But he chose to take a different route, and people thought he didn’t have the training he needed, that he didn’t know what he was talking about. But he made that choice to take that different route. He could have become what he needed to in order to get what he wanted. But he didn’t, and in the end, he never got anything.”
“But you, you got what you wanted in your life, right?”
“Yes, but that was because I made the conscious choice to change into what I had to be in order to succeed. If I didn’t make those changes, no one would have accepted my theories on human relations and no one would have listened to my speeches on women’s rights.”
“How did you have to change?”
The interviewer finally hit the nail on the head.
“I’m not ready to answer that question yet. Ask me later.”
The interviewer paused, then continued.
“Okay, so your parents died and you had to move in with your aunt and uncle. How well did you know them?”
“Not at all. In fact, they didn’t even know I existed. You see, my father had no family in the States, he moved here from England, and he lost contact with all of his family. Mom’s family didn’t want her marrying dad, I still don’t know why, so they disowned her when she married him. She never spoke to any of them. In fact, my mother’s sister didn’t even know my parents died until the state had to research my family’s history to see who I should be pushed off on to. When my aunt and uncle took me in, it was the first time they ever saw me. It was the first time the even knew I existed.”
The interviewer could hear the water moving behind the curtain, and then Chris continued.
“My parents were in New Jersey, and my aunt and uncle were in Montana. It was a complete life change for me.”
“How did you get along with other kids from school?”