~from Jill

I’ve stopped having those dreams. You know, the ones comparable to the “naked-in-class” dreams. For me, the venue is finals week, and I’ve (silly me) forgotten to attend classes all year. Often my car has broken into bits on the drive to reach the building, and I look down to see that I’m wearing a swimsuit.

It’s always been hard to wake up and convince myself I didn’t really forget to attend all those classes, it just felt so strongly like something I had done.

Last fall, I returned to college after a 12-year hiatus. Although I’d earned my Associates Degree, I had never taken the Math or Foreign Language classes I needed to continue on.

I had great reasons for staying out of school so long; first because I wanted to get married and have children, then I wanted to work on my career in child-care, then wait until my boys were old enough to leave, then worried if we had enough money . .

But after packing a U-Haul and moving to Florida in 2004 it seemed like anything was possible. We got through those hurricanes, didn’t we? So why couldn’t I bust my buns a little, and get through my math requirements?

When I write it wasn’t easy, I mean that there were weekends I actually cried over my Math book, nights my boys hung on my legs and begged me not to go. There were dinners and events I missed with my family, but I gulped down my coffee, and went to classes anyway. I studied hard, giving up time at the beach with the kids, and movies on the weekends, but I learned to do truth tables and diagrams, conjugate verbs in the preterit tense, and read Homer’s Odyssey.

Of course I had compensations -- Steve rubbed my shoulders and fixed me lemon sencha tea. My little boys rallied for me with each passed test, and quizzed me on Spanish verbs, and Greek mythology. They encouraged me by reminding me, as I’ve always reminded them, to do my best.

I learned that I was competent in ways I hadn’t known, and I had under-estimated myself and my abilities. It wasn’t easy, sacrificing family time for night classes, but it was not as hard as being out of school was, and that was something worth learning.

“It’s never too late to be who you might have been.” -- George Eliot