Learned Lesson Number Thirteen: Get Schooled

I started college in 1979. Oldest of nine children, I went off to Brigham Young University with high hopes, in clothes I had made for myself and with money saved from three summer jobs. The eight kids still at home meant my folks could not help much financially. I worked in the college bookstore, and majored in art. This was a poorly-considered choice, but it took me a year to figure that out. Art was a highly-competitive major, and I was just not that good at it. I chose BYU in the hopes of getting into their song-and-dance group, “The Young Ambassadors”, and when I was not successful at this, I decided to return to Arizona for the summer and regroup.

I secured a full-time custodial job at Arizona State University. As an employee, I could take classes for next to nothing, so stayed at ASU. I took French and Weightlifting. I stayed up too late and could not choose a major. I leaned toward Photo-journalism, although music was my first love. After a year at ASU, I decided the 4pm to midnight custodial job was interfering with my social life, so I quit and enrolled in Mesa Community College. Working my way backwards, high school was sure to be my next stop. Instead, I met a drummer. He had a band. I wanted to be in it, and I wanted him. Going back to high school might have been a better idea. But I was sold. Quit school, sang in bars and hotel lounges for a year, and married my drummer. Six kids and twenty-three years of marriage boot camp later, I graduated from the School of Dwindling Self-Esteem and found myself in a world where that particular education held no earning power. I knew I needed to go back to Real College. I had enrolled in a couple of classes at MCC a year or two before divorce, but that was quickly halted. I was “using too much gas” and “neglecting my duties at home” in this silly pursuit.

While working out the post-divorce financial arrangement, I quickly learned how fast $300 an hour in legal fees adds up, so naively settled for only four years of alimony, in spite of the guideline for a marriage as long as ours being three times higher. Divorce Math 101. I knew my soon-to-be ex would fight me on the higher numbers, and I figured I had a year of school under my belt, so I would be done in three, giving me a full year to secure a job, and then I would no longer be reliant upon a man who hated me for my support. It seemed logical, and it speeded up the process considerably, while eliminating legal costs.

I had no idea that I would have to withdraw from two semesters in a row because I could not keep my youngest son in school. Or that my 15-year-old daughter would require major spinal surgery, and that her father would use this surgery to try and take possession of both her and her younger brother. After two years of not sleeping at night because I dreaded the morning, which usually greeted me with a kicking, screaming, anxiety-ridden child who had to be stuffed into the car by his brothers and then relegated to the Principal’s office where he would kick the walls all day, I finally opted for an online K12 education for him.

I found some irony in the fact that twice I enrolled in Psychology 101, and twice I had to withdraw from that class to deal with the real-world psychological issues taking place in my own home. And this was upper-division stuff. But I got no college credit for it. What I had learned in two decades of raising children was only marketable in the form of child care, so I took a nanny job for a year, working for a very wealthy blended family. This was an education in social class and morals, and did not end well. Again, no college credit.

After four years of trial and error, I have become most creative in the balancing of my real-world education with my academic education, both of which are ongoing. As I have learned to navigate the world of Financial Aid and online possibilities, and also with the help of family and friends, I am finally within a year of securing that elusive Degree. If asked to sum up what I have learned thus far, my answer would have to be that I have learned that no one is ever fully educated. The lessons will continue to come long after the cap and gown have made their walk.