Hope for the Future

Before I can get to the point of this post, let me give you some backstory. One of my nieces has been a source of concern for me for many years. She's willful (which is good) but she lacked direction and she lacked any kind of self-assurance to be able to direct herself. She's smart as a whip, but believed she was stupid. She is pretty, and for some reason believed this was the only good quality she had. She is a good person who basically believed she was bad. The combination of these things is a recipe for disaster, and sure enough, it hit her early. She ended up dropping out of school at the age of 16, and spent a few years being a complete waste.

What turned her around was motherhood. She had a child of her own, and the little light bulb went off over her head. She went back to school. Rather than get a GED (which is fine, IMO - plenty of good men have gone far with a GED), she decided to sign up to complete high school via a correspondence course. She takes classes, turns in her assignments, and gets her grades all via the mail. And from what I hear, she's doing very well.

The other night, she called me looking for assistance with her literature homework. After we spent time going over iambic pentameter and trying to discern the meaning of a line from John Donne's poem "Death be not Proud" (yuck), we actually got a chance to talk. She's become a solid, mature adult in the five years since I've seen her, and I told her how proud I was of her. Then she gave me a bit of hope for the future.

She is hoping to start college in the spring, and she is hoping that by the time her son is old enough to start kindergarten, she will be in a position to homeschool.

You can bet, I'll be over here providing whatever assistance I can to that endeavor. Hurray for her, and hurray for the future generation.