Why I gave Up on Student Loan Forgiveness — $101,500 later

I graduated from college in 2002 with a degree in English and French. I went to a state school and received scholarships and grants; I worked my way through college and didn’t have the ‘college experience’ promised on the glossy brochures colleges furnish to prospective students. No dorm room, decorated in the school colors, no sorority, no long breaks between classes, spent playing frisbee with my equally carefree peers on the grassy quad. College was a grind and I’d expected it to be. I came from a low income family and was happy just to be in college. I worked; I studied; I borrowed $60,000 in federal student loans. I didn’t know there was any other way to do it until the first of my three sons turned seventeen and started receiving the aforementioned brochures in the mail by the bucket load, dozens a day, from what seemed like every college and university across this great nation. It baffled me. How had they even found him? Had he been on a registry somewhere since the day of his birth, colleges and universities biding their time until they could get his tens of thousands of dollars in tuition?

I was not a traditional college student living the brochure lifestyle, and I was also not the typical graduate. When I walked across the stage to collect my diploma, I was a married 29 year old mother, hugely pregnant with a second son who would be…