The Return of the Student: Part 1

I earned my degree as a returning student at age 30. Now, at age 38, I am going back!

Graduation, 2014

I am thinking about going back to school in the fall. My youngest, Gryffin, will be starting kindergarten in August which means for the first time in twelve years I will have large chunks of the day all to myself. I am hoping to fill that time in a meaningful way, rather than the usual endless housework. It also happens that this year marks ten years since I went back to school the last time and earned my undergraduate degree. Going back to college at twenty-eight and finishing the degree I had started right out of high school was one of the best decisions I ever made. I have no doubt that dedicating this time to my own personal goals and potential achievements is the right decision. I am just slightly more apprehensive about taking this leap because so many more humans now depend on me than the last time I went back to school as a mother of one. But then I remind myself of that first day I walked into the Anthropology department at the same school where my mother earned a degree as a returning student while I was in high school. I took one look around and knew it was where I belonged, in a way I had never quite felt before.

Aria and Heather, Graduation Party, 2002

Up until that point, I had been an English major. I chose to major in English because I did not have a solid grasp of what I wanted to do after college, thus I figured one should choose to study the subject at which one excels. In hindsight, I can think of several helpful suggestions I would like to give to my college freshman self, but time doesn’t work like that. I had been praised and encouraged by my high school teachers to keep writing, so I assumed that meant I was good at it. Oh, the adolescent ego. I suppose it did not help when my first college English professor, a hilarious petite, British woman with long, dark hair, creamy skin, and red lipstick named Jacqueline, used my first ever assignment as an example for the class on how to produce a “perfect” thesis statement. In doing so, she unwittingly intensified the expansion of my unchecked teenage ego but also solidified herself as a lifelong friend and mentor. I ran into her many years later, when she came into the restaurant where I was waiting tables, and she immediately offered to write a letter of recommendation to help me get into grad school. I am so grateful for her faith in me, but I have yet to take her up on that.

The truth is, the last time I saw her I had not written creatively in many years. After my first two years knocking out general education requirements, I felt no more certain of my academic trajectory than I had when I graduated high school, and I was losing interest. My very last undergrad English professor noticed this, and took me outside in the middle of class to let me know just how he felt about that. He was an extremely slender man, reminiscent of an aging rockstar, Tom Waits crossed with Ringo Starr. He dressed head to toe in black denim with a dangly gold earring, and rolled his own cigarettes that he then trimmed with tiny scissors in the middle of class. He wore sunglasses while discussing Kafka and Dostoyevsky with us a in a shaky, gravelly voice. Once during a break, I heard him mention his wife, “Karen, man. I’ll never stop reading that woman,” and to this day I remain intrigued by who in the world she might be. He was entirely unimpressed by my lack of effort and let me know as much, while we stood on the outdoor second-floor landing just outside the classroom. Without even trying to lower his voice or hide his exasperation he half-shouted, “What the fuck is going on with you?! YOU’RE MY BEST WRITER! You should be getting a goddamn ‘A’ and you’ve given me NOTHING!” I was so shocked I’m pretty sure I just nodded numbly while we arranged some sort of schedule for me to turn the assignments in late, which I did. I did not enroll in classes the following semester.

For five years, I took a hiatus from academia. I worked full-time selling supplements and body care at a major natural foods retailer, surrounded by peers with varying levels of interest in higher education. Once in a while I considered going back to school but I never took the necessary steps to dive back in. Then I became pregnant at twenty-five and had Alako when I was twenty-six. We took our allotted family leave time and returned to work what felt like immediately after he was born. For a while I was just trying to stay afloat, getting used to being a working mama with a little baby, adjusting to our new family life. Then Adam tore his ACL. Adam was in incredible soccer player. Watching him on the field was like watching someone dance with a ball attached to their foot, or like watching a being with wings fly around the field. He was weightless, fluid magic. Like those fairies in Fantasia who run across the water. Then one night he planted his foot, turned, and collapsed on the ground. He tore his ligament so badly it broke off a piece of bone. His injury and subsequent surgery meant he was on disability leave from work for several months, receiving only a fraction of the pay our little family depended on. I needed to find another way to support our family.

Aria and Heather at the absolutely stunning baby shower H threw for A, 2014

I am forever indebted to my darling, Heather, for introducing me to restaurant life. It was exactly the level of flexibility and added financial security I needed to keep our family going at the time, and has continued to be so all these years. Within six months of working there, my life started to change. Surrounded by an entirely new group of people, most specifically the women I worked most closely with, I started to feel inspired to make subtle changes in my life. Although I had worked in the natural foods industry for so long, I had never taken a solid interest in my own health and wellbeing. Then something changed. I took home a free exercise DVD from my other job and committed to completing it, which I actually did, with fantastic results. I started doing yoga regularly. And it was at that point I finally realized I was capable of achieving goals I set for myself. I was capable of showing up for myself in order to get what I wanted. Up until that point I had labelled myself as a lazy person with no willpower, but I realized I was exactly the opposite of that. I decided it was time to go back to school. I applied and was immediately accepted as a transfer student at the college closest to where we lived.

Headed to class, 2012

I returned to college the Spring Semester of 2012 and attended for five semesters total, before earning my B.A. in Anthropology. I had every intention of continuing on, possibly applying for the internship at the sheriff-coroner’s office, as I was particularly impressed by the amazingly gorgeous goth-girl coroner, who wore platform Mary Janes, a mini skirt, and forest green fishnets that matched the streak in her otherwise jet-black hair, the time our class was there on a field trip. I also considered applying to one of several field studies, one being the excavation of a “vampire” cemetery in Poland, the other tracking orangutans through the peat bogs of Borneo. The details on the latter were: “Six to eight weeks. Extremely remote. No cell phone or internet service. Many bugs. Small food budget. Wading through peat bogs in the wee hours of the morning to collect “samples” from the subjects of our study.” And by “collect” and “samples” I do mean standing beneath a tree in which an orangutan happens to be, and hoping to collect any liquid biological material it happens to rain upon us. The glamorous life. Had I not been the mama of someone very small, not to mention considerably pregnant when I graduated, I might have applied to both with equal enthusiasm. Instead, I accepted my diploma with the deepest pride, and then set aside until I could revisit it later.  And I’m almost certain that “later,” is now.  

To be continued…