Fluffernutter asked me a few weeks ago what I do to have fun, what I do that’s enjoyable to me, apart from anything or anyone else.
I really have no idea.
Between school and work and the boys, it’s very rare that I get to do anything fun. I haven’t seen the Castration Committee in months. Every time there has been an offer for girl time, I’ve had to decline because of other commitments. I am constantly in process of writing some paper or doing some homework—obviously I haven’t written here (or for my own enjoyment) in months. Stories and characters I’d like to be working on sit impatiently in the back of my mind, frozen mid-thought and waiting for the spare time I will need to devote to them.
I’ve been sick. It took months to get over my thyroid debacle of last year. I blew the discs in my neck again and am eight or more weeks into another herniation. The muscle spasms and nerve pain can be enough to stop me dead in my tracks, or to wake me from a few hours of sleep.
It’s not just that I’m physically sedentary; I feel emotionally sedentary, too. I love my sons. I love Rango. But I seem to spend a lot of time on my own, waiting for responses and engagement and activity to get me moving again. They spend a lot of time waiting for me to finish whatever I’m working on.
I told Jinks that I feel like I have worked my way deeper into the Great Rut I started crawling from in 2010. I have no idea who I am outside the constraints of mother and student and employee. I really have no clue who Stephanie is, and it sometimes freaks me out when I hear someone call me by name.
I am 2 ½ classes away from graduation. By the end of July, I will have completed my bachelor’s degree after years of trying to get my act together. Until then, there is one more exam, a 15-page synthesizing paper about my degree in Liberal Studies, and two more classes that haven’t started yet. And there’s still work and home and my sons who need an active, engaged mom to help them navigate their own lives.
I am trying just to get through. The best I can do is to keep plodding away, to ignore the dirty house and the clutter that seems to multiply every week. I am resigned to the fact that this will continue to be my life for a while longer.
After graduation? I have no idea.
I hope to have some time to breathe. I hope to have time to figure out what it is that I want to do, not just what I need to do. I hope to find the part of me that will enjoy whatever that is.
But for now, I’m still plodding, methodically trying to keep a handle on everything and not lose myself completely in the process.
Last fall, I was nominated by one of my professors for the Georgia Occupational Award of Leadership. According to the Technical College System of Georgia:
First launched in 1971, GOAL focuses on student excellence in technical education by focusing on academic excellence and personal achievement. A panel of judges selects one student, the state GOAL Winner, to serve as an ambassador of technical education in Georgia.
GOAL winners represent the “new image” of Georgia’s technical colleges. Students must recognize technical education’s critical impact on Georgia’s overall economic health, have a strong work ethic, a dedicated sense of loyalty, and a healthy enthusiasm for promoting technical education in Georgia.
GOAL winners are the best possible advertisement for technical education. They prove every day that the best technical education consists of more than manipulative skills. Technical education prepares us for the world of work. GOAL students are an indication of what technical education at its best can achieve and of the caliber of individuals who are choosing Georgia’s technical colleges.
The winning GOAL student serves as an ambassador for technical education in Georgia and makes many public appearances throughout the year including addresses to the Georgia General Assembly, Governor and TCSG’s Student Fall Leadership Conference to name a few.
34 of the 4,000 students at Georgia Piedmont Technical College were nominated for the 2015 GOAL award, which can most easily be described as Student of the Year. I was honored, but I was also nominated with at least two of my classmates who I felt had a much better chance of winning this award.
The process started with an early-morning interview before a panel of five faculty and staff members of GPTC. I had three minutes to tell them—with no note cards or visual displays that weren't permanently attached to my body—who I was, why I had chosen technical education, and how it was impacting my life and my life goals.
Three minutes.
If you've ever spoken with me in person, you know that I talk a lot, I talk very quickly, and I tend to gesticulate wildly while speaking. More than one boyfriend has been nailed in the jaw when they ventured too close to the Exotic Wild Glamazon while she was hyper-excited about the influence of Greek mythology on the DC comic book universe... or shoes. So it took a practice session with my professors and others to help hone my speech for both content and style.
Something stuck, though, because I made it to the second round of interviews, which meant I'd placed in the Top 10, along with my two classmates and seven other very talented, deserving students.
The second interview was just after Thanksgiving, by which time I was sick with an upper respiratory thing that we later realized was likely Whooping Cough. I appeared before the selection committee, a panel comprised of local business leaders and last year's GOAL winner for GPTC. To make sure I didn't start coughing on anyone, I loaded up on cough medicine and my inhaler.
Three more minutes.
During this three minutes, being so loaded on cold medicine, I think I told them who I was, why I had chosen technical education, how it was impacting my life and my life goals, a brief history of my children, what I'd had for breakfast, and as much as I could about the influence of Greek mythology on the DC comic universe.
I might have discussed my shoes.
But, again, something stuck. I was named to the Top 4 finalists. I was the only student from Paralegal Studies to make it that far, and I was thrilled to be able to represent my department. Now I had to wait over a month to find out who actually won GOAL for 2015, but I was offered a table for 8 at the awards luncheon on January 22nd.
I know I'm smart. I know Queen Frostine was right in pointing me toward being a paralegal. It is an excellent fit for my skillset, and I am thus far very good at what I do. That's really very difficult for me to say, as I discussed prior to the GOAL competition. It feels strange to me to openly discuss my accomplishments, as if I should be far more modest about what I've done.
But even with everything I've worked so hard to do over the last year and more, I honestly didn't believe I had any real chance to win this competition. The school GOAL winner goes on to compete at regionals in March, and the top placers at regionals compete at a state level in April. The state winner spends a year traveling Georgia and speaking as an advocate for technical education, which includes appearances at the 25 technical colleges in the system and addresses to the Georgia General Assembly, the Governor, and the Technical College System of Georgia Leadership Conference. (To help facilitate this, the state winner also gets a new car.) So the winner effectively acts as an advocate for technical education.
They have to be able to tell people their story and exactly how and why technical education is working for them, how and why it can and should work for others.
I have very well-developed thoughts about technical education, with a ton of data to back it up, but I will save that for a future post. I don't want to give away Glamazon trade secrets, and I need to protect my work product as I move forward into the next round of competition, because I won.
No one was more surprised than I was. According to my mom and stepdad and dad who'd all driven over from Alabama for the luncheon, plus Rango and the boys who were there, and my classmates and my professors, no one but me was surprised I won.
Mom hates that she didn't have her camera trained on my face when they announced my name. My mouth and eyes flew open. I had even whispered to Rango just seconds before that I thought the winner was a finalist from the Criminal Justice department.
I was wrong. Wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong <insert wild, accidental whacking of my son>
The GOAL coordinator had told the finalists to prepare a short speech of acceptance. I'd made a mental note of who to thank if it happened, but I didn't expect to win. I had to wing it, but apparently I did okay. People were nodding and clapping. I didn't throw up or fall down.
Lots of hand-shaking, lots of nodding and thanking people whose names I hope I don't forget, and lots of smiling until my face hurt. But I won. I worked my ass off for this, and I continue to do so every day, with a 15-hour class load this semester including my internship at the ACLU of Georgia, which puts me at the state Capitol at least one day a week to speak with legislators directly about proposed legislation and how it would directly impact me and other Georgians.
Me. I get to do that. I get to make a difference in my world and someone else's.
Selfie with Button Gwinnett at the Georgia State Capitol
I've worked so hard. So very, very hard. I have faltered at times, and I have wanted to quit, so sure that I just couldn't scale the daunting mountain of work that was before me. It can be exhausting, and it often keeps me from the boys and Rango when I want nothing more than to curl up on the couch with them and binge watch Netflix.
Now I'm six months away from finishing my associate's degree, and I should graduate with honors. I won a $26,500 scholarship to finish my bachelor's degree.
So, for once, I'm going to say something I rarely do: I did good.
I'm taking a moment to congratulate myself and recognize that I am doing a good job, no matter how hard it is sometimes. It may or may not ever get any easier, but there is more reward than just knowing I worked hard. There is knowing that I worked right, that I worked well, that I am worth this reward.
For weeks I've been thinking that I need to write a blog post. I knew it had been far too long, but I was shocked this morning when I realized it had been six weeks since I'd last posted here.
For the most part, I have been silent because I've been busy. The boys are constantly on the go, and it seems half my waking hours are spent transporting them from school to an appointment to a team practice to an event... assuming I'm not in class or doing homework or working. Emotionally I've been pretty even-keeled, which is in-part attributable to Rango, who brings far more romance and comedy to my life than drama. Sometimes I freak out about the stress of it all, but he and the Castration Committee are always available sounding boards when I need to vent.
Last week I sat in on a series of paralegal continuing education sessions. While I don't need the CLE credits yet, I knew there would be useful information and excellent networking at the all-day event.
The day was filled with talk of entity management and legal investigation of security breaches and e-filing processes. The last speaker of the day, though, made me come home and cry. (Yay, networking.)
Mr. Worthington is a senior human resources manager at a law firm. He manages paralegals and sometimes teaches through a local paralegal education program. He spoke about appraising your value in your job. Value, he said, is derived from the benefit you provide to your client, whether they may be internal or external. I'll go further to add that the value is benefit net of cost. He asked each of us to examine the services we provide with a series of threshold questions:
What do I do?
How do I do it?
Why do I do it?
There is the basic description of your job, then the mechanics of how the job is performed, and finally the beneficial applicability of the services provided by the job you do.
"If you're doing something and you find yourself thinking, 'No one cares that I'm doing this,' then stop doing it."
I spent years doing shit no one but me cared about. I am a perfectionist who is prone to overachievement. No one but me gave a damn that I perfected my bathroom cleaning skills and kept my CDs alphabetized and sub-categorized by genre. It didn't matter to my family how I folded the towels; they just cared that there were clean towels when they got out of the shower. All that homemade chicken stock in the freezer will make delicious soups, but were the hours spent making the stock instead of playing video games with the boys of more benefit than the cost?
How I took care of my family and managed my household was the entirety of my value for a very long time. Three years ago, I wrote about how I was a financial liability to my family, given the fact that I didn't work outside the home. According to the LIFE Foundation's Human Value Calculator, I am now worth about $232,490, though that's subject to change now that I'm working one unpaid internship instead of three part-time paying jobs.
Much of the last four years has been about assessing my personal value, both to myself and to other people. Now that I'm transitioning from stay-at-home mom to full-time student to gainfully- and professionally-employed, I have moved from the red into the black. Hopefully I will continue to appreciate over time.
Even three years ago I knew I was worth more than the laundry and the cooking and the dishes.
Given the self-exploration I've written about, Mr. Worthington's words were fodder for thought. What is my job? How do I do it? Why do I do what I do?
The job for my external clients—my family, my professors, my employers—is easy to address. I take care of their needs with the skillset specific to each job, in a way that it fulfilling to me. I get personal satisfaction from taking care of my sons and Rango, from apply my critical thinking and writing skills to an excellent case brief or legal document.
But for me, the internal client, these are harder questions to answer. My job is to hone myself into the best possible version of me that I can be. I do that by applying my natural skills and talents—analysis, resourcefulness, creativity—to everything that I do, whether it be caring for my family or writing an essay that only I will ever read. I do this, because I am not content to be stagnant, because I am driven to explore and experiment and test myself. I am determined to shine my own light into every darkened nook and cranny of my soul, to shatter every warped looking glass, and to shape those pieces into the unique mosaic that can only be Stephanie.
And that is my job, to create something beautiful from something ugly, to use it to reflect light back into the darkness for those who need it, not to be the spotlight but to use the spotlight to be brilliant and kinetic, even if it is me who needs the light to dance by.
I am a disco ball unto myself.
The past couple of weeks have also included prepping for an interview for a Student of the Year award. I had to appear this week before the judging committee, to tell them my story in three minutes. While practicing with my advisors prior to the interview, I teared up again.
"It seems almost... dirty," I croaked. "It feels unnatural and uncomfortable to toot my own horn, to tell people all the ways in which I am good. I'm supposed to be quiet and modest, not boastful."
"That is a woman thing," one of my female professors replied. "That's also a Southern thing. You're taught to smile and nod and be quiet in the corner."
"We know how to put the lipstick on the pig," I said.
Screw that. The pig is a pig; it's going to wallow in the mud, no matter what I do. The pig is not my client. No one cares if I make the pig look pretty.
But me? Stephanie?
I nailed my interview. Even if I don't move forward in the judging process, I've won a lot over the last few weeks. I've decided it's time for a raise.
So now I have to touch up my lipstick. It's time to go dancing.
"Maybe it feels the same way," my 13-year-old son math genius said, when I lamented outloud.
"I wouldn't blame it," I replied. "I've done nothing but badmouth it since I was 12 years old."
That's about the time it started. Pre-algebra. I'm okay with arithmetic, even solving for basic variables. But give me rational expressions, and my brain just kind of shuts down. I'll struggle through the homework, think I have it, and totally bomb a test. The problem is that I never really seem to get why I was wrong. For years my math grades were comprised almost entirely of partial credit.
College algebra is part of the reason I never graduated. Only part, I stress, because I know damn well that my choices had a lot to do with it. But when I was already inclined to blow off class and get into some other trouble, it was all too easy to blame my mutual hatred of algebra for keeping me from doing what I needed to do.
I was complaining on Facebook about my hatred of polynomials. I have three friends who are both geniuses (truly) and math teachers: Moonshine, Boogie Shoes, and Mathilde.
Mathilde, who teaches college math, had this to say in the course of our discussion:
It's true that there are many different levels on which one can "get" it, and you can feel like you've gotten it when you still really have a fairly superficial understanding. (It's a bit like the difference between being able to drive a car vs. being knowing how to fix the engine when it breaks.)
Of course I have some professional expertise here, but lately I've been thinking about this on a whole different level as I watch the different ways that my son and daughter approach math. They're both good at it, but they have totally different reactions when they hit a wall. It's really driven home for me how important it is to PLAY with it, look at a problem from all different angles, see what you CAN figure out even if you don't know how to get all the way to an answer. Don't be afraid to fuck it up, because you learn the most from coming to understand HOW you fucked up, and how to fix it. There are a zillion different ways to approach any particular math topic, and the more of them you explore, the more solid your overall understanding will be. I really believe that that willingness to get your hands dirty and engage with it is far more predictive of success than whatever your innate talent may or may not be.
Don't be afraid to fuck it up, because you learn the most from coming to understand HOW you fucked up, and how to fix it. I really believe that that willingness to get your hands dirty and engage with it is far more predictive of success than whatever your innate talent may or may not be.
Best. Advice. Ever.
It's how I try to live every other part of my life, so why the hell would I let this be my undoing? Why would it be okay to let a required math class or two be the one thing that could stand in the way of completing the degree necessary to move my life forward?
Had I graduated from college in 1994 as originally planned, I would've likely gone on to work in my originally-chosen field—Mass Communications. I would probably have still married DH, though we would've been living a different life. I very well might not have had the boys I have, who could only have been who they are because they were conceived in their respective moments. I might have something different and just as wonderful, but it wouldn't be Max and Tricky, without whom I can't imagine my life.
Just because I didn't get what I'd planned, just because my journey took a different path than anyone anticipated for me, that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile or in any way less than what I'd envisioned. In so many ways, I am more fulfilled as a woman and a soul than I ever thought possible.
I have the very real task of learning the skills necessary to get a real job, to take care of me and my boys. I have to relearn a lot of things I should've mastered a long time ago. To choose not to do it is to be ungrateful, again, for the opportunities I've been given and have made for myself.
So I can't be afraid to fuck it up. I will likely fuck it up. But I will choke down the disappointment and dust my hands off and try again. I will look closely at what I did wrong, which variable threw me off, and I will try it again and again and again until I can pass these tests. Maybe not with flying colors, but certainly with far more knowledge and insight than I had when I started.
And on the other side? There's an entirely different life ahead of me. It's not where I thought I'd be, not where I originally dreamed of being. But it will be goddamn good, because I got dirty and fought like hell to make it that way. I'll still struggle with math. I'll still catch my breath at the sight of a polynomial, and sometimes it will remind me of what my intentions had been when I was 20.
Then I'll remind myself that here and now is the only place I can live—not then and certainly not when. And I'll know that I can, because I bulldozed my own walls and powered through to an unexpected and promising future.
I don't mean in the connoted sense of criminal or sexually degenerate—though there's certainly a story or two about that. What I mean is, I violate social norms.
What is "normal" is determined by every society, big and small, for that culture in that time. I am generally law-abiding and productive, but my personality—the persona of Stephanie—is often camped firmly in the fringe of normal.
Pretty much everything falls onto a bell curve. If you classify virtually anything and rank and sort it, then graph it in that mathematical way that has eluded me for years, it makes a pretty, curvy shape, in which the majority of "stuff" is in the high center and the extremes are on the low sides.
I'm almost always on one of those tapered ends.
Doing my neverending homework this week, I was reading about social deviance. My textbook was talking about different sociological viewpoints of deviance. Emile Durkheim's structural-functional analysis says that deviance is a necessary function of society. What is unnormal is defined by what is normal and vice versa—there can be no evil without good. How a society responds to deviance clarifies its moral boundaries and brings people together in the process, sometimes encouraging social change.
Robert Merton goes on to purport his strain theory, which basically says that some deviance may be necessary for society to function but that too much, especially when caused by a lack of means to help members of a society achieve cultural goals, places a strain on that society. Conforming to cultural goals through approved means can become difficult, if not impossible, when there are no opportunities to do so. This points to why street crime is so prevalent in poor neighborhoods, where people don't have the educational and socioeconomic means to provide for themselves or further lives outside of the poverty and circumstance they've been socialized in.
Eventually, deviant subcultures can form: criminal, conflict, or retreatist.
Walter B. Miller adds that subcultures have certain characteristics, no matter their underlying cause:
trouble – frequent conflicts with authority figures
toughness – especially value of physical size, strength, and agility
I've always been at odds with authority figures. I've never been inclined to listen to someone just because they were in charge or I was supposed to do so; if they could give me a reason to respect them, I would. If not, I would question it and fight back. I am certainly taller and bigger and larger, both physically and mentally, than most people. All that testing when I was a kid proved I was smarter than even the above-average bear. I'm easily bored and constantly shifting gears to the next adventure. I have a strong belief in both fate and Fate. And I want nothing more than to be free to live my life as I see is best for me.
As ridiculous as it sounds to say I rebelled and formed my own subculture, that's kind of exactly what happened over the last four years. I was unhappy—fat, in a crumbling marriage, unfulfilled in most aspects of my life, seeing no way out—and I fought back. I had everything everyone says they want, and I was miserable. I bucked the norm and started to live as Stephanie, more than Wife and Mom and Daughter.
I am finding more opportunity now, because I am making more opportunity for myself. Working three part-time jobs and being in school full time, plus being a full-time mom, is hard as hell, but it was my choice. More than a couple of people have suggested I should find another husband to support me and pay for my life. Fuck that. If I can't rely on my own talents and worth, no one else should be able to, either. (Conflict subculture.)
There are days I want to run away and leave it all behind. (Retreatist subculture.) I often talk about living on Glamazon Island, where men aren't allowed to live—unless they're a Hooha and only then until they grow up. (Hoohas are the general name for children of inhabitants of Glamazon Island, 'cause that's where they came from.) Eventually Glamazon Island will just be me and my girls, having tea parties and craft time on the beach every afternoon, before our daily walk.
(There are all kinds of secondary plans, involving whose daughter is in charge of defenses and ninja skills to protect us from the ousted Hooha forces that invade on giant, flying Death Chickens.) (This is also why someone recently told me that my mind is like a playground for adults.)
Look: I am as batshit as they come. And it's not that I strive to be substantially different from everyone else. I am not like other girls because I'm just made that way. I don't live in the middle of the bell curve because I'm not happy in the medium. My place of comfort is pretty far removed from most other people's.
And I am happy that way. It can make for some pretty extravagant turmoil sometimes. It can be hard, being able to understand emotional extremes so readily because I have lived them. But I can't imagine being normal. Maybe if I were, I wouldn't really know the difference. What I do know is that my pretending to be normal did no damn good for anyone.
So I embrace my differences and live them as fully as I can. As Queen Frostine joked yesterday, "The standard deviation is not enough for a kinky statistician."
But that gives me hope that somewhere there's a 6'4, 240-pound, dark-haired, blue-eyed, Irish statistician who might be able to keep up with me.
One of the classes I'm taking this semester is an intro to Sociology. In this past week's chapter on social interaction, there was an explanation of Erving Goffman's dramaturgical analysis, in which Goffman equates social interaction to theatrical performance.
In dramaturgical sociology it is argued that the elements of human interactions are dependent upon time, place, and audience. In other words, to Goffman, the self is a sense of who one is, a dramatic effect emerging from the immediate scene being presented. Goffman forms a theatrical metaphor in defining the method in which one human being presents itself to another based on cultural values, norms, and expectations. Performances can have disruptions (actors are aware of such), but most are successful. The goal of this presentation of self is acceptance from the audience through carefully conducted performance. If the actor succeeds, the audience will view the actor as he or she wants to be viewed.
The text for this class, Society: The Basics, goes through several pages of explaining the perspective and then addresses the ideology in terms of gender as a "central element in personal performances".
Demeanor
Demeanor... is a clue to social power. Because women generally occupy positions of less power, demeanor is a gender issue as well. 40 percent of all working women in the United States hold secretarial or service jobs under the direct control of supervisors who are usually men. Women, then, learn to craft their personal performances more carefully than men and defer to men more often in everyday interaction.
Use of Space
Power plays a key role here; the more power you have, the more space you use. Men typically command more space than women, whether pacing back and forth before an audience or casually stretching out on a bench. Our culture has traditionally measured femininity by how little space women occupy—the standard of "daintiness"—and masculinity by how much territory a man controls—the standard of "turf".
Just about everywhere, men (with their greater social power) often intrude into women's personal space. If a woman moves into a man's personal space, however, he is likely to take it as a sign of sexual interest.
Staring, Smiling, and Touching
In conversations, women hold eye contact more than men. When men stare at women, they are claiming social dominance and defining women as sexual objects.
Although it often shows pleasure, smiling can also be a sign of trying to please someone or of submission. In a male-dominated world, it is not surprising that women smile more than men.
Touching suggests intimacy and caring. Apart from close relationships, however, touching is generally something men do to women. [several examples given] The intent of the touching may be harmless and may bring little response, but it amounts to a subtle ritual by which men claim dominance over women.
I say all the time that I'm not like other girls. According to this analysis, I am a man.
In my glamazonianness, I take up far more space than most women. Even after the weight loss, I'm still a 5'11, curvy size 10/12. Hell, I'm larger than a lot of men I know. Now that I'm considered a "normal" size, I'm still often uncomfortable when I see myself compared to other women, including my female friends whom I tower over and dwarf, physically.
I complain all the time that men seem intimidated by me and that it's a special breed who has the balls to actually approach me and invade my personal space—usually the ones who are letting me know all too blatantly that they want to fuck me.
I stare at people all the time, though that has a strange connotation. I'm not staring with the intent to ogle anyone; I am often regarding and watching them to see who and what they are. People fascinate me—the way they move and act as souls but also the structure of different human bodies. I tend to compare female form more than male, but I also have this theory about there being a certain number of combinations of physical attributes that work together to make people attractive, kind of like my own, screwy Beauty Ideal.
I do smile a lot if I'm comfortable—it comes with the raucous laughter. But in social situations, especially if I'm alone or somewhere unfamiliar, I tend to lock my jaw and look bored as I stare ahead of me. I don't tend to give other people any noticeable attention until I decide it's time. (That's not to say I'm not paying attention—never make that assumption.) And when I do pay attention to people, I am a very touchy girl. I make a lot of small contacts, in the midst of huge hand gestures, when I'm talking with someone.
Obviously I don't really think I'm a man in ewe's clothing. Hot Pocket and I decided ages ago that we were each men in past lives but that I didn't really enjoy it while she probably did. I am intensely feminine, almost to the point of contradiction at times.
What I am, as I realized finally last summer, is a very alpha female. It may present in a non-traditional way (off-off-Broadway), but it is part of my role, of the persona I constantly craft and refine as I present it to other people in my day-to-day interactions. Interestingly, when I find myself faced by a more dominant male, I often slouch and become quieter in some subconscious attempt to take up less of their space in deference.
In some ways, especially by modern America's statistical and cultural standards, I am a perfectly normal woman—41, divorced, mother of two, middle class. In other ways, I am larger than life, sometimes quite literally. From my perspective, though, I am perfectly normal, which is good since this is the only way I know how to be.
In 1990, I started college on a substantial scholarship. My life choices got in the way of studying, and I blew my scholarship within a year. I tried, off and on, to finish what was originally a Communications degree, but I never quite got it together. There was a lot of wasted time and money before I finally gave up, choosing to live my life with DH. With the divorce came the realization that I would have to take care of myself long past the point of alimony or child support.
So as of last month, I'm back in school full time, enrolled at a local technical college to pursue a degree in Paralegal Studies. Queen Frostine has said for years that I'd make a great attorney. Given my attention to detail and my dogged curiosity, she thinks I'd be especially well-suited for the mechanics of the law life. In my old life in financial planning, I spent a lot of time reviewing complicated estate and human resources documents, and I thoroughly enjoyed that process. Writing Persona Non Grata brought entertainment law into my realm, and I ultimately finalized my divorce pro se (without an attorney).
Being a paralegal seems like the natural and logical next step.
But being back in school is weird. When I was a college student in my late teens and early twenties, work/life balance was about little more than fitting classes in around a boyfriend or getting wasted. Now at 41, I have not only my schedule of on-campus and online classes, homework, and real work, but also my sons' school and social activities to contend with. And now DH has moved 300 miles away, which means I have the boys for the vast majority of their time. Plus somewhere in there I have to take some time for me, to relax and socialize with my own peers and get recentered so that I can take on the constant demands of this life I am trying to rebuild.
The schoolwork thus far isn't terribly hard, though math is kicking my ass harder than it did when I was 18. The courseload for this first semester includes some pretty interesting (and sometimes infuriating) introductions to sociology, humanities, and the law. All too often I am fascinated by some random thought in a discussion group or textbook and find myself off on a tangent, researching the fundamentals of space law or Goffman's dramaturigcal perspective.
And now with a brilliantly gifted 8th grader who is naturally inclined to the same slacking I was in middle school, I am paranoid about his life choices. I've always said I didn't care what my children did for a living, as long as they were happy. While I know that my prior choices led me to the place and time of having my sons when I did, I am also painfully aware that we are in a financial bind in part as consequence of those choices.
Had I applied myself and finished my degree when that was supposed to be my main priority, my life would be very different. I might be better prepared to handle the financial fallout of divorce in my 40s, but I also might not have had these children. I probably would've gone on to have kids, but Max and Tricky could only be who they are because they were conceived and born at their respective moments in history.
I can't get caught up in what might have been or should have been; I live in the here and now, both as a result of and in defiance of my past. All I can do now is work my ass off to provide better opportunities for my kids but also for myself. This is part of learning to take care of myself in a whole new way.
When it feels overwhelming, I have to remind myself that this won't last forever. In the same way that the boys will age and grow—bringing an end to child support and the necessity of complete financial self-sufficiency—I will age and grow, getting through this process and reaping the rewards that I can on the other side.