While I'm Falling Read Online Free PDF

with her, exactly; it would be more accurate to say she overwhelmed me from the start. She overwhelmed a lot of people. When she was in high school, she won the state championship for speech and debate two years in a row. She was class president. She was valedictorian. The summer before she left for college, she went to a town hall meeting and argued with the mayor about curbside recycling, and ended up giving such a passionate speech that it made the local television news.
    She didn’t overwhelm my father. But she could more than hold her own with him, which was enough to impress me. If he got loud, she didn’t care. Sometimes she got loud, too. They argued about everything—her boyfriends, Tibet, the wisdom of a property tax hike, and whether my father should keep using so much butter. They were both fast thinkers—neither required much time between hearing a point and refuting it. At the dinner table, my mother and father sat at opposite ends, with a daughter between them on either side. If we had ever changed it, and let Elise sit across from my father, my mother and I would have been like spectators at a tennis match, silently watching the volleys go back and forth.
    He sometimes seemed unnerved by his inability to intimidate Elise in any way; but for the most part, he seemed very happy to have a sparring partner, and also to have helped create a younger, prettier version of himself. When Elise got into law school, he walked around the house whistling “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” for days.
    So of course I wanted to try for something equally impressive. I didn’t want to do what she was doing, or even anything like it. I wanted to try for something different, something I could be better at—my own thing.
    The trouble was, I didn’t know what that thing was. I had good grades. I liked to read. I could do a backbend. As a girl, I had entertained the usual career fantasies: marine biologist, horse trainer, dolphin specialist. But my parents had each, in their own way, discouraged me from a career involving animals. My father’s concerns were pragmatic: “Goofball,” he said. “Honey. A vet is one of the worst jobs you can pick. You’ve got to have all the school that a doctor has, and you make about a fifth of the money. Sweetie. Why do that to yourself?”
    My mother agreed that I should consider a different path, but for a very different reason. She pointed out, repeatedly, that I didn’t take care of my own dog. “You promised that if we got you a puppy, you would take care of it,” she reminded me. “You whined. You begged. You said you would walk it, you would feed it. And now who takes care of Bowzer? Who walks him when it’s five degrees outside? Who feeds him? Who makes sure he has clean water? Who cleans up after him?”
    The answer, of course, was my mother. Bowzer was a cute dog, a bouncy little schnauzer mix, and in his youth, my sister and I had been happy to play with him in the yard on sunny days and to snuggle with him at night. My father used to watch the news with Bowzer on his lap, holding him like a baby and rubbing his belly. But it was my mother who truly took care of Bowzer, even before he got old and stinky. By the time I left for college, he was deaf, and somewhat blind, with a fat pocket sticking out of his back like a handle. When my parents separated, my mother got full custody of Bowzer, pretty much by default.
    It wasn’t until my sophomore year, not long after my parents’ separation, that I started thinking about going into medicine. I had aced my freshman biology class. I liked the idea of helping people. I had always admired our family physician, a quiet, thoughtful woman who took an annual break from her middle-class clientele to vaccinate refugee children in Kenya. She rarely erred with her hunches and prescriptions, and even my father spoke to her with deference. I thought I might be good at medical research. I saw myself in a quiet room, doing something important