Tajana Schneiderman struggles to live up to the expectations and sacrifices of her brilliant scientist mother.

Tajana Schneiderman is a PhD student in planetary sciences at MIT. Although she thought astronomy would be a career that let her look up, she finds she spends a lot of time reading papers, writing code, and analyzing data. She’s interested in detecting and characterizing exoplanetary systems to better understand the way systems form and evolve. In her free time, she knits, reads, and goes on backpacking adventures.

This story originally aired on August 9, 2019 in an episode titled “My Parent's Child.”

Story Transcript

The room around me is white and shiny with chrome finishes and there's the dull hum of scientific equipment running in the background.  I’m standing on the steps while pipetting water from a glass beaker in these tiny little tubes and the sleeves on my oversized lab coat are rolled up way too many times.  The safety goggles keep on slipping down my nose and yet I have the biggest grin on my face because I’m six years old and mom gave me an important job to do. 

She's busy preparing chemical samples to put into a machine that spins around really fast and she's talking to me in Slovak about how cool atoms and molecules are.  When she finishes up, she gives me a high-five and a hug and tells me what a good little scientist I am. 

This was my normal.  I never thought that math and science were just for boys because my mom was a scientist and she was pretty cool. You see, she started her second PhD program when I was four and she finished when I was eight.  There usually wasn’t money for a babysitter so she’d take my younger sister and I in the lab.  The baby would be napping in the carriage and I get to play the role of senior pipette specialist. 

I still really don’t know how she did it.  She was working full time and she was also getting a PhD and she was raising two little girls whose father worked hundreds of miles away from home.  She was amazing.  She would write these little notes and put them into my lunchbox every morning and she would read me the book about space as many times as I asked for it, which was a lot.  And I never knew how hard she worked because she made everything into a game. 

Toast with canned tomatoes was a special celebration we got at the end of the month and not the only meal we could afford to have.  My mother is brave and she is stubborn and she is the hardest worker I know and I was perpetually in awe of her.  All I wanted was to make her proud so when I was little I did everything she asked of me.  I swam competitively and I played piano and I started volunteering at a nursing home at the age of seven.  When I was in the fourth grade, I decided I would do the hardest thing I could think of doing, which was learning Chinese, so I spent every Sunday for the next four years in Chinese-as-a-Second-Language classes. 

But I also started to learn what it meant for my mom to not be proud of me.  When I was in the sixth grade, I overheard my parents arguing about whose fault it was that I got a B-plus in math on a midterm report. 

At some point in time, my motivation shifted.  I wanted to do more than just make my mom proud of me.  You see, I hadn’t realized everything she had gone through to get to where she was.  Sure, I knew that she came from Slovakia three years before I was born to start a PhD program and I also knew that she left that PhD program shortly after I was born but I didn’t really know the details of the in between. 

Around the age of 12, I asked her about it.  My mom’s first PhD advisor liked to hire Czech and Slovak students who couldn’t speak English.  That way he could abuse and exploit them.  When my mom got pregnant with me, the unplanned oopsie, he told her he would never grant a PhD to a mother. 

When it came time for her qualifying exam, the rest of her committee thought she should pass but he stated that she didn’t meet the internal standards of his research group.  The three deans she talked to, all old, white men told her that there was nothing more they could do for her.  My mom couldn’t face the prospect of going back to Slovakia without a PhD so she decided to stay in this country, something she had never planned to do. 

This revelation shocked me.  All of a sudden, I felt responsible, I felt responsible for her delayed success and I felt responsible for the pain that our entire family felt at being separated by an ocean.  I resolved myself then and there that I would do whatever it took to be worthy of that sacrifice because my mother had chosen me.  She dropped out of graduate school to have me.  She left her entire family and friends and country behind to have me.  I would do whatever it took to be worthy of that sacrifice and to honor her. 

At that point in time in my life, honoring her sacrifices meant getting into the best college I possibly could.  So what did I do?  I took every AP and Honors class I could and I aced them, and I started volunteering more.  Became president of a service organization and I became an executive committee member of a citywide high school tech alliance.  I even interned at a Fortune 500 company in high school.  I did everything I could possibly think of in order to get into the best college I could and honor the sacrifices she made and make her proud. 

But it seemed like whatever I did, it was never enough.  My mom was always asking me why I wasn’t doing more, why I wasn’t volunteering more, why I got a 93 on that exam instead of a 95.  She would chastise me for being moody and tell me that I was setting a bad example for my younger sisters.  It seemed like no matter how hard I tried, how much I did, it was never enough and I got depressed. 

I applied to eight undergraduate institutions.  The first rejection came in the parking lot of my fencing gym.  The second and third rejections came at home.  Then I got into my safety school so, yay, I’m going to college.  But the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh rejections all came in on the same day.  I very rapidly felt my entire sense of self go away. 

At first, I was devastated and crushed, but then I got angry.  I didn’t get angry at the schools.  I could rationalize and justify and explain all of that.  I just hadn’t done enough.  I had an endless, soulless litany of accomplishments and awards and there was no passion and no drive behind them.  I just wasn’t good enough. 

I wasn’t angry at the schools.  I was angry with my mother.  I was angry because no matter how much I had sacrificed, giving up sleep and friendships and my own sanity, no matter how much I had done, I hadn’t been enough, I hadn’t done enough to be worthy of the sacrifices she made.  And I was angry that I felt my entire value and worth as a human being were tied up in my success as an academic.  I was just very angry. 

So I started doing everything I could to get back at her.  I wore black because I knew she hated black, and I wore makeup everyday because I knew that that would get under her skin.  I even started dating an unkind boy who encouraged that anger, unfairness and resentment.  Every time I came home from college, there was a war waged between us. 

There was this one time we went on a hike and we had an argument because my mother threatened to financially cut me off unless I majored in something more practical than Physics, like Engineering.  I refused because I’m as stubborn as my mother is.  And we spent the next several hours arguing about whether or not Physics was an appropriate major for me to have.  Two hours later, neither of us had budged and we were lost in the middle of the woods without a map and very sharply dwindling water supply.  We spent the rest of the day in this tense, angry silence trying to find our way back to the trail head. 

Things escalated between us.  Slights from one of us turned into escalations by the other until we were fighting and arguing about silly, meaningless things until, one day, I went too far.  In my senior year of college, I told my mother that I didn’t want her in my life anymore.  The truth is, I just didn’t want the relationship we had and I didn’t really know how to de-escalate it or make it better and the only thing I could think to do was to end it. 

I changed my phone number and I didn’t give her the new one.  I hoped she’d ask me for it but she didn’t.  So as the days passed and the silence grew, I had a lot of time to think.  I had a lot of time to think about the fact that the obligation and duty I felt to her was an unsustainable force that was eating me alive.  I had to begin to learn how to live my life as more than just a reaction to my mother.  I had to start framing things in terms of ‘I want’ instead of ‘she’d hate’.  I’m not going to lie.  It was a huge relief but there was also this deep sense of loss because there is a gaping, raw wound where I needed her love and I didn’t think I could get it back.

Seven months after I cut my mother out of my life, I was sitting in my college kitchen with some friends baking and making stupid jokes when I heard a knock on my door.  I was quite confused.  I wasn’t expecting anybody else but I went to open it. 

She's standing there with tears in her eyes and I flinch expecting her to yell at me.  There's an endless pause as she's struggling for words.  “I just needed to see you to know that you’re okay.  I wanted to give you a hug.” 

In that moment I knew that I had been enough from the beginning.  Thank you.