Parenthood juggle: A view from 50 years out…

My mother’s graduating class.

My mother and I started school in 1965. I went off to 1^st grade at our little town’s three room elementary school, and my mother went off to college, at the ripe old age of 31. She’d come to realize, after 11 years of marriage with only one child, that no more children were likely to come along, and that after I started school, she wanted to do more than stay at home or go back to work at the optical shop where she had worked before I was born.

My mom was lucky enough to have a strong support network.  My father’s parents were farmers and their house was a few hundred yards away. My mom’s parents lived 8 miles away, along the 15 mile trip to USU, and her aunt, who had no children of her own and doted on me, lived next door to them, so child care was not a problem. Still my mom worried about how she’d make it through the next few years, and dealt with a fair amount of guilt about leaving her husband and only child to go pursue her own interests. She also had different ideas about how old was too old; in 1965, it was definitely odd for a woman of her advanced age to begin a degree.

 I used to walk to my grandparents when my mom left for school in the morning, and I’d wait for the bus with my grandmother after she had finished milking her dairy herd. She always had a quilt on in the living room, and loved to knit and crochet, so we’d usually work on one of her projects.   I loved digging around in her boxes of family photos and papers and hearing her talk about them. I learned how to garden from her.   Despite this idyllic situation, I felt keenly that my mother wasn’t around all the time, and that much of her focus and attention was directed elsewhere. One day after she’d been going to school for a few months, I told my mom that I wasn’t going to go to college-“Why not?” she asked. “Because I’m not going to go off and leave my kids.”     Did I hear that somewhere at church or from our neighbors? Wherever I got it, I remember that I meant it. I always felt different from my friends. I clearly remember being very excited one day when it was snowing at school, and my mom showed up with my snow boots, just like the regular moms of my friends.

I had started out to write about my own parent juggle, but realized that my mom’s was a big part of my story. My mom went on to graduate from USU with both a BA and an MA in Early Childhood Education. She taught at the lab preschool there for awhile, then taught elementary school for 30 years, and won an award for being the outstanding teacher of the year for children with disabilities in Utah.   She’s retired now, and has a comfortable retirement made possible by her extra income, higher social security and her pension. But the best thing that came out of it was her education. My mom was the first of my family to go to college. As I watched her go to school and saw her excitement over the geology and music and literature, I decided that college was the place you went to learn everything in the world, and I was so excited for my turn. She read The Old Man and the Sea to me as a bedtime story (it was great for putting me to sleep) and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (not as good at putting me to sleep), took me to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and concerts at USU.  Sometimes I went to class with her, which was sometimes very boring (statistics) and sometimes pretty interesting (geology). She took me to the houses of her faculty advisors for her thesis, and her professors and their families were always kind, and very, very interesting with souvenirs of far away travel and art that kind of scary and incomprehensible. They were people with experiences vastly different than ours, and I got to see intelligent people who were intensely interested in things I’d never dreamt of.  I attended summer sessions in the Edith Bowen Lab School in its comfortable midcentury modern building filled with art supplies and books. I absolutely don’t mean for this to denigrate the world I came from. I went to a tiny rural school but it was staffed with loving people who worked hard to give us all they could. But they had so few resources. Our library was two coat closets at the front of the building, and one of the books had my grandfather’s name written in it in a child’s handwriting. The Edith Bowen had a huge room with low bookcases full of new children’s books and big windows with seats overlooking a garden.

I’m sure that when my mom started the five years ahead seemed very long. I’m sure my mom had some big doubts and fears, but from the perspective of 50 years (50 years! How did that happen so fast?), it’s clear that her decision changed our entire family for the better.  I’ve made a mid-life career shift and thought of that shift as just a normal thing to do because of her example. I had the financial resources to make that shift because of help that she and my dad were able to give my husband and I through college and grad school.   She’s got two grandsons, who never questioned that an education was worth the time and effort and who grew up with questioning curious minds because of her example. Those grandsons are used to women who work hard, manage their own lives and can think for themselves, just fine.  They both are training in fields that were in their infancy when I started kindergarten. She couldn’t see it then, but her example prepared the rest of us for a world that was only just a bit imaginable in 1965.

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