DCFYI

Dear Mom,

When I was young, I loved to babysit and was sure I would have 4 or 5 children when I grew up.  Life didn’t turn out that way – but I had good friends and a rewarding job and the fun life of a single working woman in DC.  I had briefly flirted with the idea – in my mid-30s – of having a child on my own.  But single motherhood seemed a huge time commitment and very daunting, so I put that idea aside.

A couple of years ago I read The Allegory of the Cave by Plato. During my readings, I was reminded of my life growing up in one of the roughest areas of Washington, DC: Lincoln Heights. The prisoners in The Allegory of the Cave were blinded from the truth and comfortable with ignorance because it was all they knew. Eventually, once told the truth and set free, disbelief and fear made the prisoners run back to their past lives. That is the only difference between me and the prisoners in The Allegory of the Cave.