I Dropped Out of High School to Raise My Son

I have never fit within the boundaries of expectations required by a woman in society. That lack of fit only became more complex as I stepped into my mid-life years, carrying along all the fringe versions of self that I have embodied in my life.

What kind of woman is sitting now at my island cabin home looking out on the flat water of the bay, the shades of gray and reflected light layering above the rich green of our newly arrived wetter weather?

I'm the kind of woman who got pregnant when I was a teenager. I was the type of kid that, for better and worse, grew up early. I chose to have my baby and to raise him myself. I moved out of my mom's house a few months after he was born and I turned 18.

I dropped out of school—I had been so disenchanted anyway by the hypocrisy of high school, the way they treated people of different backgrounds and opportunities unfairly, the way they treated my brothers with dyslexia and ADHD, the way they treated my friends who had poor grades, poor households, and poor self-worth.

I felt that people with certain types of intelligence were assigned value and placed at the top of a hierarchy. I was the kind of young woman who thought I was better off on my own than in their system, and I was right.

Here on the island, where I have returned in response to the pandemic following my global climate mission, I took my husband to a party populated by old island childhood friends.

One guy there told my husband I was a legend. I didn't hear the conversation, but he told me later. I liked hearing this, but it was a surprise to me. I never thought anyone thought anything about me except that I didn't fit in and was an outsider.

I finished community college, then graduated from the University of Washington, then moved with my son to Seattle. Eventually, painstakingly, finishing the big project of completing my MBA in the evening program while working full-time and raising my son on my own.

He was 13 when I walked that aisle. Around that age, my son particularly resented that I wasn't the Mom bringing afterschool and baking cookies—he went to the Boys and Girls Club after school.

His frustrations were in response to the world's expectations of me, but also his own needs, that I strived to but couldn't fully meet. I couldn't be the family my son wished for, but I truly delighted in raising him.

We had so much fun, amidst all the stress and work and unknown, I tried to always see our life as a shared mission.

I am not the kind of woman who thinks of myself as a legend; mostly I felt scared, unsure, like an outsider, but also defiant.

My defiance allowed me to show up at the center of the circle in business grad school wearing my thrifted sweater chosen specifically to hide the sweat of anxiety I'd be drenched in every class and say I'm here and I belong, even if I didn't believe it myself.

At that time, I felt like I was growing a new self, so different from the rural upbringing or the broke Mom studying at night, a woman with a confident voice and command in the world.

Now, I feel like an octupled self because there are so many versions and experiences of self that coexist in me. Even the way I move through the world adds to the feeling: My deeply rooted and nomadic nature, roaming across multiple states over the past two months; celebrating my 45^th birthday with a party in a Brooklyn park with the same friend I had a joint birthday party at age 10 on Whidbey Island; taking a moment while walking our dog on a Malibu beach for my husband to tell me unequivocally that I can do what I'm setting out to do; arriving with my boldest dress on to the first day of the San Francisco impact investing conference to pitch my fund.

Today I am the kind of woman who looks out on a man in red plaid riding by on an orange lawn mower and has the time to stop and think; the kind of woman who has a cashmere sweater on, though it is a direct-to-consumer discount and also a gift.

I'm the kind of woman who is writing and has completed the writing of a whole memoir but hesitates to say so to others. The kind who takes on big projects that take years and will actively incubate ideas at length before moving them to the outward stage.

Maybe this woman sounds quaint, smug, annoying, boring, privileged, white. Maybe so. If I try to look at myself without the judgements and expectations I'm trained to apply as a woman, what do I find?

I often feel disassembled, like the effort to defy expectations is performed by a strong, outward self, that is then countered by the self that's still constrained by those expectations.

I am the kind of woman who can show up alone to a big conference full of powerful people in positions of leadership and institutional-level asset management representing only myself, my ideas, and the people I'm trying to help and say I have something you're going to want to be a part of.

I am also the kind of woman who will excavate the depths of my energy and soul to do so, and then find for days after that I feel emptied out, like expressing myself fully from the soul requires a period of regeneration.

I don't know where this life and work will take me, or if I will ever be recognized as a writer or as an emerging female fund manager supporting a portfolio of climate-tech companies.

But I know I will not let outside expectations of what I should be limit what I am.

I know that I am the kind of woman who has chosen to do hard things and succeeded before. I know I am motivated to be not what's expected of me, but what I imagine I can do and be for myself, for other women, and for underestimated people in the world—and that I will keep trying.

Lisa Hanson is a writer and Co-Founder of Global Urban Village and Built Clean Ventures, both established with a climate-tech mission. She is currently seeking a publisher for her memoir that expands on the story of her life as a defiant woman.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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