Real? Or Memo-Chantix?

The other day, I was ruminating about how my husband found it odd that I wasn't pushing my alma mater on my daughter.

See, Emily, my daughter, is almost ready to go to college. This is so mindboggling, I can't even begin to blog about the enormity of it. I mean, it was just last week that Em was a sweet little cooing baby in soft cotton pajamas, playing happily on a baby blanket that I laid out for her.

Now I have to contemplate the reality that she will go to college.

Soon.

Anyway, I could have sworn that Wesley commented on my lack of pressure to send Emily to the same college from which I graduated.

This train of thought had me looking up all sorts of things online and thinking, "No, I really am not being a snob. I'm just being realistic"

I mean, my BA came from TWC -- Tennessee Wesleyan College. I pursued some hours of a graduate degree at the University of Tennessee/Chattanooga -- for one semester. Then I got pregnant with my second child, and my mother had cancer, and I didn't finish my graduate degree.

The thing is...

I'm not a big fan of TWC.

I wasn't a big fan of TWC when I was in high school.

I think every teenager thinks that she is going to break out of the mold, escape from the hometown sameness, and become something incredibly special.

I started out my college career at Hollins College. (Now it's Hollins University, but it's still a same-sex school.)

I didn't thrive at Hollins. Parts of that school definitely contributed to the adult I've become. But probably not in the way that Hollins intended.

But the fact is, I only went to Tennessee Wesleyan because it was the college at home. My college experience wasn't so much a part of who I was destined to become, but a part of the fact that it was at home.

It was at home.

It turned out that -- a semester and a half into my freshman year of college -- I discovered that I didn't really belong that far from home. (OK, really, I was bawling my eyes out just a few days after my freshman year started, so I should have figured it out sooner.) I would have gone anywhere if it meant being closer to my mother. If I had lived in the same town as Brown University or Harvard or Cornell of Southern Cal -- that's where I would have gone.

It just happened that the town I lived in had a small Methodist college named Tennessee Wesleyan. My mother worked there. And it was a nice enough school. I got my liberal arts education, and that was important to me. I wanted a BA, not a BS.

But -- I'm sorry -- here's the thing: I'm looking at schools for my daughter. And I thought my husband asked me why I wasn't pressing to send her to my alma mater, which I clearly am not doing.

It turns out that he never questioned that. I can only guess that I dreamed it in one of my vivid Chantix dreams.

How weird is that? I don't know. I just know that it is -- to date -- the most vivid dream/circumstance of my Chantix/quitting smoking experience.