All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [202]
A few days later, when my work was handed back to me with A’s, I had Percy, along with Graeme, Rachel, my economics tutor, and my classmates to thank for how far I had come. I knew when I held my work that I had learned it. I had a newfound, strong confidence in my math ability, I actually found it intensely pleasurable. I had at last exorcised the demons of high school math, so implicated in the debilitating shame I experienced as a kid living on her own, with no one to help me in school.
Soon I was doing original math in further quant classes, for example, bringing together my deep interest in family planning, field experience in Congo, and new confidence in my abilities. In “Population Changes and Consequences” at the School of Public Health, I showed, using the 2008 Demographic Health Survey and modeling software called Spectrum, that by 2050 an astronomical 89,847,607 million babies will be born in Congo to women of reproductive age who have a desire to plan and space births but who do not have access to family planning. I also showed reductions in these unintended births, as well as reductions in maternal mortality, by making family planning available to increasing percentages of women of reproductive age. It was a powerful way to bring home the statistic that though 63 percent of women in the global South use a method family planning, in Congo a scant 6 percent do. I was in wonk heaven!
After the grueling intensity of the summer term, I settled into the marathon of my fall semester. In spite of stern warnings, I was carrying more than the recommended number of classes, and even at this fullness, I mourned the courses I could not take and the extra activities I had to skip. On a daily basis my “HKS Today” email invited me to talks, seminars, brown bag lunches, and forums that were enormously appealing. I spent most of my time in study, with every spare moment hanging out with incredible people, students and faculty whom I admired, which was pretty much everyone, but I narrowed it down by field of study, mostly within human rights, social justice, feminism, moral leadership, and spirituality.
Feeling initially like a hopelessly incompetent dork who could never get it—I had been out of college for twenty years, after all—I was amazed at the ease of the uptake and how in no time at all I was a high-functioning graduate school student, reading up to a thousand pages a week and turning in long papers with confidence—by tricked-out course page websites, no less.
Although Dario supported my efforts and recognized that the health of my soul was linked to my service work, he found that living full-time in Cambridge didn’t appeal to him: It was too crowded, school and the happenings there weren’t interesting to him, and he was taken aback by how class work devoured my time and attention. He likened my summer semester to what his schedule is like when he competes in the Indianapolis 500: totally consuming. And yet I sustained that not for three weeks, but for an entire degree. Not to mention those Yankee roads—those, he really didn’t like! We did memorably experience Concord, Massachusetts, and the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in October and coastal Maine in March, but for much of the time, I found myself going it alone. I also had a series of unfortunate studentlike encounters with sickness: I had a rotten, Centers for Disease Control–verified case of H1N1, complicated by a wicked sinus infection, followed by two post-flu infections, all of which made my life wholly inoperable for a few weeks, even as I maintained the improbable wish that I could keep it all going at such a high level. When my dad came to visit, I took full advantage of his late-blooming, prodigious nurturing abilities.
Dad visited no fewer than five times during the school year, including being there to drive me my very first day of summer semester. He had his own guest room on the second floor of the house, and he would