When my husband would approach me in the writer's corner of my daughter's room, I felt guilty for just 'sitting there'. He wasn't saying anything, but I self-condemned. The unspoken sentence was that I needed to get off my duff and get back to work.
During my absence from cleaning, property managing and all things manual-labor, I found that to have my mind stimulated was huge for me. The intellectual part that had awakened wasn't about to take a snooze anytime soon. Seeking a way to honor that,I signed up for some courses at the local community college. The last time I'd attended school had been two decades earlier, and I'd stopped taking classes as a young married expectant mother. I'd been too pregnant and morning-sickness riddled to want to keep getting up early for a course. Once my son was born, I had no desire to leave him or the home, and luckily my first husband financially and morally supported me in that decision. My education was put on hold and basically forgotten about, with an occasional 'I want my degree someday' uttered from time to time, a bucket list item.
Seeing being a student as a way to accomplish validity, I enrolled in school, going back to college after over twenty years. I registered, bought the books, waited a week for class to begin and in the meantime frequently thought, "What did you just do?"
Back to having school days, I was in school while my children were not. I could have planned that better, but I was anxious to have a goal that didn't involve all-purpose cleaner.
I remembered myself as an average, if not below-average student, due to my short attention span (and distracting things going on at home when I was a child). I expected to make the usual mediocre marks.
On the first day, the classroom was full and our Psychology professor was late. I wasn't sure what to expect. I only knew that this woman had a PhD behind her name. It both intimidated me and made me envious, thinking of those that had both the time and opportunity for such an education.
Another student walked in, very tall, slim, with long blonde hair and youthful. The student took her place at the front of the class and proceeded to teach. She was the Dr., twenty-six years old. She might as well have been wearing a t-shirt with the words, "If you're over forty and in this class, you're a loser." I tried to put those thoughts out of my head.
I immediately liked her teaching style and the course content. I looked forward to going to class three days a week, for a full three hours each time. The biggest thing I had to get past was the fact that my college professor was almost young enough to be my child. Her age put an exclamation point on the nagging phrase that ran through my head all the time:
"You're wasting your life."
I aced every test. The online school account said I was well on my way to an 'A'. I poured through the thick textbook as I sat in a lounge chair on the back lawn, soaking in the summer sun and drinking in knowledge with a brain that had been left dormant for far, far too long. I could not believe I was actually getting this stuff, the one who'd been called a 'poor learner', and more than once. Several more-than-kind grade school teachers had the nerve to pen that very phrase on report cards over the years. Now I was taking a college course and it was invigorating; there was no 'work' involved, it was pure joy. Like a hobby, but I got credit for it.
The young Dr. proved to be an 'old soul', and verbally talented. Anyone who could keep a roomful of people entertained and interested for three solid hours surely knew their stuff. She did warn us that those studying psychology were prone to thinking they had the abnormalities talked about in class. It was apparently a well-known hazard among psychology majors. When the Dr. told us about 'the woman who couldn't forget', I worried. I still remembered the names of my acquaintances' mothers' pets...what could that mean? 'The woman that couldn't forget's' fate was that it drove her up the wall, having facts and figures in her head that never flowed back out.
I fretted about that for months afterward.
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