Graduate Student Again?

In my mid-forties, mid-life, mid-way, not full or empty, not young or old, just mid, middle, half there, I find myself a student again. I drive to a big university and nose my whale of a mini-van into parking spots wide enough for a generous sized motorcycle. I wait in line to pay tuition fees, mug myself for an ID card and stake out the black market for used books. I squeeze my mother friendly hips into tiny desks with fold-down tops that force anyone with a BMI over 20 to become play dough flattened by a hammer. I contemplate posters hung on campus that invite young coed females to donate their eggs to needy couples. This last one catches my breath.

How did a minor mid-life crisis following the birth of my second child land me back in graduate school? I ask that question after everyone in our house is in bed and I’m still studying. I ask that question when I watch moms sip lattes and push swings or saunter into Google headquarters.  Did everyone make the right choice but me?  And is this choice the right one, finally?  I put a lot of thought into going back to school for my teaching credential, but what I didn’t anticipate was how much I would feel, gut level, about being on a college campus again.

Who among us doesn’t have rousing memories of college? So maybe I was a late bloomer, but some major things happened for me in college, not the least of which involved resources from Planned Parenthood, a first true love relationship and minor rants against Ronald Reagan. Then there were the friends, cram sessions, midnight runs, dorms, freak professors and every other lofty memory that comes with being twenty years old and full of yourself. College, to my self-absorbed mind, was made for people just like me, young people on the brink. The brink of what I had no idea. But college was a place to get your start, find your niche, become your own person. Brink into something.

So what has lead me at mid-life back to the brink? Why stare into the precipice once again? Especially after I’ve already jumped in, found it wanting and managed to climb out? It’s not like I needed twenty somethings as friends again. They dominate conversations in my classes, beg for rides home (and don’t pay for gas), bemoan how they stayed up all night to write a paper and flirt with whoever walks in the lecture hall door. Last week our professor mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall (just yesterday, right?) and classmates talked about being in diapers. No wonder the professors all like me…I’m the only other adult in the room.

Of course there’s another, more positive side to starting all over when you’re already half way through. College in mid-life offers tired corporate dropouts or parents crawling out from years of sleep deprivation a chance to find their brain again. In my case, the fear that all the neurons and dendrites have become permanently mis-wired is not without merit. My memory retreats more each year, a sort of Mono Lake in my head. This is why I take copious notes and tend to finish assignments ahead of time. My fellow students think I’m type-A, a controlling mother from Palo Alto. If only they knew. We mid-lifers are so afraid that we’ll forget the deadline or never find the syllabus again that we do everything way ahead of schedule.

When I think about my big “pressing” issues in college over twenty years ago I want to cry or laugh, depending. What was I so worried about? A C on the final? That I had been dumped? Whether I could bare one more minute of those sorority sisters I was supposed to like living with? Yes, they were real concerns, but they were all about me, a college student therefore I am.

Now I explain to classmates that I can’t attend a study group on Friday night because I’m cutting up ties with my son for the 3-legged races at his birthday party. When professors give assignment deadlines I compute them next to Pump It Up party invitations, pick-ups, drop-offs, little league bat-a-thons and maybe my husband's schedule, if the poor guy even manages to come up on the radar screen. It’s not a matter of cramming for the test, it’s a matter of cramming my school work into an already brimming, insanely busy life!

I have one more year, at least, before I earn my credential, graduate from college and enter the next phase of life. Just one more year. Enough time to roll over, crawl and walk. It feels like an eternity sometimes, but then I remember that starting over and doing it again begins anytime we want. I’m living proof.

An original post to Silicon Valley Moms Blog.