“I’m not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”—Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes
Okay, folks, if you have eleven kids, you are probably not working on a college degree. And if you are going to college you probably aren’t raising eleven kids. But I’ve been doing the college-mom thing for a long time, since way back when I only had eight kids, so that makes me some kind of expert, and qualified to offer all kinds of advice should you ever find yourself in a similar predicament.
I can tell you what you need to do to earn that college degree while living with twelve other people whom you can’t evict for non-payment of rent, or for late-night jumping-on-the-bed parties, or for neglecting to help with chores. (Twelve? Didn’t I say I have eleven kids? Oh yes—I’m counting the husband, too. Technically, I am not really raising him, but I am trying to recondition his responses to stimuli like “The garbage needs to go out.”) Embarking on this journey is best done with a boat load (no, make that a fifteen-passenger van load) of courage, but one way or another you have to …
Just do it. Going to college and changing diapers don’t traditionally go hand-in-hand, and for good reason. Perhaps more mothers are attempting to combine the two since diapers have been made to go into the garbage can instead of the washing machine, but not because disposable diapers have turned child-raising into child’s play. Babies still need to be carried in utero for nine months, delivered obstetrically, fed, burped, cuddled, and nurtured thereafter for at least eighteen years, if not eighty. (If you’re lucky, you can turn your baby over to someone else to nurture at about the age of twenty-five, but if you wait to start your post-secondary education until your last child is married, you might need to use your Social Security checks to pay for tuition.) If you are thinking about going back to school while your kids are still at home, you need to close your eyes, plug your nose, and do a big fat cannonball into the nontraditional student pool. If you think about it too much, your teeth will start a-chattering so much you’ll chip your porcelain crowns, and you’ll never work up the nerve to even get your feet wet.
Let go. First you just do it and let go of the diving board. Then what? There are a lot of other things you have to let go of too, or you are going to drown. For example, sometimes I let the laundry go, which is why the clothes I wear to class might have baby snot on the collar or barbecue sauce down the front (that would be from the Rodeo Cheeseburger I ate on the way to school because I was too busy to make supper because I was finishing an assignment at the last-minute because I slept until noon because I was up all the previous night giving kids drinks of water or Tylenol for teething pain). Occasionally I let go of the housecleaning. If you visit my house, you will keep your shoes on so the socks you go home with are the same color as the ones you came with; otherwise, they might be transformed from white to strawberry-jam red or chocolate-milk brown or dirt black. (Hey, if you had come to my house before I started college you would have done the same thing; at least now I have an excuse.)
Establish a support system. This will not include your three-year-old or your fifteen-year-old, and maybe not even your forty-eight-year-old. (Oh yeah, that one is your spouse.) They don’t have your academic success at the head of their priority list. They want supper, and not PB&J again. Your support system might consist of fellow classmates, or instructors, or kind, sympathetic, encouraging friends who don’t realize that you are daft to be attempting this in the first place. They will cheer you on when all your family can say is, “We’re out of strawberry jam.” You need someone to turn to when you are afraid to make the initial plunge, someone who will push you back in when you try to climb out of the water and say, “I quit.” I do not mean to disparage your family; you need them, too, for hugs and kisses, if they'll give you any after so many meals of legumes and berries smeared on bread. Just don’t expect them to be excited about your spending five hours on a Saturday night writing your latest English essay.
