Football is the closest thing to God that you can find in our house. I am a Philadelphia Eagles Fan, way back to the days of Ron Jaworski. The most foolish question my very tolerant partner has ever said to me in all our years together was “Are you really going to watch football ALL weekend?”
While I was in between finals and folding wash with my eight year old, we were watching the NFL today. (What else, I ask you, do other mothers and daughters do when folding wash?) I heard them announce that Joe Namath graduated from college this year. Broadway Joe was a member of the class of 2007. He finally went back and got his degree.
I was struck by several things, first the normalcy in the simple act of watching the NFL channel and bonding that was occurring between mother and child and second, that Joe Namath was a nontraditional age college student and if he could do it, so could I. (I was as I said in that land that exists between finals, Christmas break and the land of “next semester has got to be better then this”).
As older students, we face many more challenges then our younger counterparts. We have our baggage, that includes families, jobs, impossible time schedules and real life (that whole laundry thing would fall here). We also bring with us our emotional struggles.
Why is it we say we are “going back” to college to get our degree? It is as if we are leaving something else. Are we perhaps abandoning our roles as partners and mothers and fathers to become students? Why did the announcers on the NFL Channel really focus on the fact good ole “Broadway Joe” went back to school and got his degree, at his age?
Why don’t we ever say “yes, I am moving forward with my plans to become an English teacher, and have begun my quest towards a degree at USM”, rather we say “yes I have gone back to school” (what have I left?).
School, to me, always seems like a guilty pleasure. Maybe I should start admitting it. Yes, it’s a balance, yes sometimes my eight year old reads my history to me as I do the wash (bonding and studying its 21st century multitasking, not slacking if you ask me).
We older types need to focus on what we are so good at, and not what we are not doing. Yes, we may miss a few basketball games, and I do admit to not knowing some of my high school junior’s teacher’s names, but let’s look at what we are giving our families in return.
My eight year old can read history, which in my opinion has so much more merit then the Babysitters Club. She has seen me study, work hard and she has seen me achieve things I never thought I could. I think it makes me a better parent. My 17 year old son is a heck of a cook, and is a better student from having coached me through all those early semesters of math and history. He too, enjoys his history.
It is quite an unusual fraternity my children and I belong to, you can find us conducting organizational business during that break in evening classes, out in the hall, on the cell phone: “Good night sweetie” or “Oven to 350 degrees, for 45 minutes” or the ever popular “Were the dogs fed?” is our creed. Perhaps the greatest gift I think we as parents who are also students give our children is that of a sense of humor, and an acknowledgement that our children are loved and not absent from this equation.
As we begin this spring semester, we should try to leave some of the guilt that seems to come pre-packaged for us non-traditional aged types behind. When in the course of life that happens around studying and home, lets try and focus forward: we have not gone back to school. We have moved forward to our future.