Personal Essay: Learning to spread my own wings as the daughter of a UMW alumna and professor

by CLAIRE MARSHALL WATKINS

Opinion Editor

I grew up on the University of Mary Washington campus, more or less. For the first eight years of my life, my family and I lived within very close walking distance of it. My father, who now holds status as professor emeritus, taught at the university until I was nine. Once I was old enough, he took me to class with him a few times each term. Before that, and before I could even walk, my mother often walked with me in a stroller down Campus Walk. She recently told me that she remembers those walks and how surreal it felt to walk down campus years after graduating as an outing for her kid.

My mother graduated from Mary Washington College in 1993, before the university was renamed in 2004. She attended MWC in the era of The Dismemberment Plan—before they toured with Pearl Jam—when they performed in the underground in Lee Hall. RFK Arena was still a music venue, and she and her friends made the trip to D.C. to see the Grateful Dead there a few times. Despite her semi-frequent concert attendance, she still made it back in time for every softball practice. She remembers passing time with her roommates in Virginia Hall, looking out of their window and watching people walk by, observing them while listening to the Grateful Dead or The Doors. 

My mother was an English major, student-athlete and student journalist. Back then, The Weekly Ringer was still called The Bullet, where she also served as a news editor her senior year and loved it. She made an admirably successful career as a journalist and I am proud to say that she inspired me to entertain the idea of becoming one myself. I remember going to work with her in the newsroom at the Free Lance-Star before its old building was demolished. I begged to accompany her when I didn’t have school, and she often said yes. I spent hours writing all over empty notepads and pretending to be a reporter myself.

As a child, I was very imaginative. When I was very young, I believed that Peter Pan lived in the amphitheater between Lee and James Farmer Hall. Specifically, I believed that he lived by the stage, in the big tree with dozens of initials carved into it. Some days I brought him chocolate milk and cookies. I left them on the bench right next to his tree and came back later that day or the next to retrieve his dirty dishes. Somehow my father always managed to sneak around me and enjoy Peter Pan’s dessert before I caught him. Eventually, I discovered that he was the imposter when I compared his handwriting from a grocery list to one of “P. Pan’s” many thank-you notes.

It is just like my father to entertain my childlike wonder. Every night growing up, I listened eagerly to him come up with a new part for one of his stories. He told these stories to my sisters and me, and our cousins, too, if they were around. He built worlds that mimicked our own, with us kids as the characters. It is no wonder he taught English for so long. 

I particularly enjoyed the days when he brought me along to sit in his Vietnam War Literature class as a kid and I think my little sister did too. Each time he taught the course, he led a field exercise final. It was an activity where the class was divided into squads, and each squad had to go from one campus to the other and try to find the enemy. He had volunteers, who acted as the enemies, stationed around campus and they would hold boom cards and enemy cards. If the squads asked them if they were the enemy, the squad would get a point, but if the volunteers could get up to the squad first before being asked if they were the enemy, they would hand the squad the boom card and the squad would lose a point. Students were not allowed to interrupt any classes or touch anybody, and they had to stay together the whole time. They started by Combs Hall and ended up at the gym where my father would wait for them. 

“Some years I’d have several enemies stationed around campus. One year I had no enemy stationed around campus. But they never knew. We did the field exercise final rain or shine. Afterward, each squad had to write an account of the day modeling their account on one of the literary works that we had read that semester,” he told me.

In high school, I was lucky enough to have him as my IB Literature teacher. We read Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” where I got another glimpse of my father teaching Vietnam War Literature. He assigned a creative project along with the book in which our class divided into groups to select and perform a song from that era. My group performed Sam Stone by John Prine, a song my father has played on his guitar every Christmas since I can remember. The goal of the assignment was to relate each song to the book and examine the anti-war sentiments these pieces of literature shared. I was just as engaged with his teaching and the material then as I had been at UMW years before. 

While at UMW, my father also served as a faculty advisor for The Bullet from 1990 to 2010. He passed along the journalism gene just like my mom did. In The Weekly Ringer newsroom today, there is a copy of an April Fool’s Day edition of The Bullet hanging up from when my dad advised it, and the whole page is purely satirical, with him as its subject. 

My father graduated from Florida State University, where he began his career in journalism, but his mother graduated from MWC in 1952. She graduated the same year that she and my grandfather got engaged. My grandfather visited her as often as he could while she was in university, and one weekend, he hitchhiked from Blacksburg to Fredericksburg to see her. One night that weekend, he got down on one knee and proposed to my grandmother, on the bridge between Seacobeck and Campus Walk. She said yes, of course, and my father was born two years later. 

Before my grandmother passed, I remember spending as much time as I could with her. Every day during my first semester at Mary Washington, I wore her MWC class ring for good luck. Sometimes I climb up and sit on one of the walls of that bridge to read under the lamplight. It’s a very quiet spot, and I like knowing that my family existed there before me.

Now that I attend UMW, I’ve regained some of that wonder for the campus. I had forgotten the patterns of brick along Campus Walk where my sister and I used to play hopscotch. Before I enrolled, I never spent more than a few minutes on campus below the Spirit Rock. Now, I spend most of my free time studying at Simpson Library or the Hurley Convergence Center.  I don’t leave milk and cookies for Peter Pan at the amphitheater, whose benches have since been renovated, but I do sit there to read, chat with friends, or call my little sister on the phone. 

I used to feel as though I could never get far enough away from my parents’ careers, and that I never wanted to do anything remotely related to either field, English or journalism. Merely four years ago, I doubt I ever could have anticipated following so closely in their footsteps while feeling such joy and honor. Like my father once did, I spend hours each week pouring over language and literature in Combs, and, like both of my parents, I spend hours each week working on the newspaper. Since returning to Mary Washington, I gained a new sense of self. It just so happened that I was lucky enough to explore the opportunities that led me to it in an environment that feels like home again.