In seventh grade, my mom bought me a pair of lacrosse socks that reached halfway up my shins. Embroidered on the front of them was a brown mountain hawk, wings spread wide. I never thought twice about them.
When I started high school, I would watch over my mom’s shoulder as she flipped through her college yearbooks from the ‘90s, giving me an abridged story of her experience at a school built into a mountain.
Lehigh would always be embedded in my mom’s history, but it wasn’t part of the future I imagined for myself.
Yet about 30 years after my mom walked across the stage at her graduation, I found myself stepping onto the Bethlehem soil, move-in bags in hand, unsure if this was truly the place for me.
I’ve always considered my mom to be my best friend — a role model who is endlessly patient with me and made my childhood a kaleidoscope of joy, comfort and trust.
While I respected her Lehigh legacy, I desperately wanted to forge my own path.
And now, I have found there’s a way to do both.
Within the beginning weeks of my first year, I slowly navigated the adjustment of living alone, making new friends and building an identity that felt authentically mine.
I remember feeling especially lonely during the second week of school. I called my mom, tears lining my eyes, and told her this would never be the right place for me.
She assured me that with time I would come to love it.
While at first I didn’t believe her, she was right. Within the following weeks, everything began to fall into place, and I finally started to believe I was exactly where I’m meant to be.
I knew I wanted to contribute to the Lehigh community as a way to anchor myself to the school. So I joined The Brown and White, which my mom had written for too, without realizing the connection. Having loved athletics all my life, the sports section felt like a natural fit.
When my mom came to visit on Parents’ Weekend, we strolled around campus as she pointed out classrooms where she once sat, the dorms and off-campus houses she lived in and places where her memories were born.
I visualized her at my age as my friend here, and it made me feel closer to her than I would’ve ever expected.
At the beginning of my second semester, I joined the same sorority she was in.
When I walked into the house for the first time and saw pictures of my mom still hanging on the walls, I began to truly appreciate the connection Lehigh had given us. I recognized the faces of her friends in the photographs, a testament to the strong bonds she made here.
While my mom and I now share multiple communities at Lehigh, my academic path and future goals remain my own. She studied journalism, while I’m pursuing finance — two vastly different subjects, but both important and interesting in their own right.
As the semesters pass, I have become more and more confident in a Lehigh story that is uniquely mine.
I have made lifelong friends, created my own funny stories to tell and have begun imagining the next chapter of my life. But I’m still excited when I find new, small things that remind me of my mom’s time here.
A few weeks ago, I looked through The Brown and White archives to find my mom’s old articles. Seeing her name in the same bylines where mine now appear — hers under news and mine under sports — reflects what our Lehigh connection really means. We are on different paths, but tied together by the same thread.
Now that I’m over halfway through my time at Lehigh, I find myself clinging to that connection.
As I grow up and slowly inch toward graduation day, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I have less time to spend at home with my family.
While I’m increasingly independent and self-sufficient, I’ve never felt like I needed my mom more. Her guidance through the changes in my life have always kept me grounded. I’m grateful to Lehigh for giving us another part of life to share that will last far beyond when I too move on from school.
Most recently, I found some old pictures of me playing lacrosse in those brown and white socks I had unknowingly worn so proudly.
My mom laid the foundation for my Lehigh story with those socks, and the mountain hawk wings gave me the freedom to make the experience my own.