Hump Day Hmmm - Learning from Challenges

Emily from Wheels on the Bus is subbing for Julie Pippert today. Her Hump Day Hmmm assignment is to write about a challenge we have faced and how we have learned from it. Before I turn to that... Jenn, at Serving the Queens, has asked for help in sending words of support to a family that desperately needs them. Go here to help.


Knowing the challenges that Emily has overcome in her life, any challenges I have faced seem lame, tame and totally inconsequential. Still, I'll try this one...


My parents separated for the last time when I was four years old. They had managed, in those four years to separate thirteen times and to produce three children. They had a head start - I was born (two months early) five and a half months after they were married. We were all so little when they stopped living together that I don't think we sat around longing for reconciliations. We couldn't remember them ever being happy to be in the same room together. For various reasons, I usually lived with my dad. My mom had me from 6th grade until 9th grade and then I moved in with my dad semi-permanently.


At that time, when I fourteen, my dad was a one year survivor of lung cancer (which included the removal of most of his right lung). He was working again then. He worked nights. The first year I was there (it was still the summer before tenth grade) he told me that money was tight and if I wanted any new clothes for school I'd need to get a job to pay for them. I don't think he was being mean. I was a smart girl. I lied about my age and became a telemarketer. I earned my school clothes money and started 10th grade pretty happily. Over my 10th grade year things changed a lot at our house. My dad was declared permanently disabled and quit working. He took a lot of medications to help with his pain, he wasn't shy about sharing his medications with his friends, and our house became a sort of party place. My dad was only 34 or so at the time. He developed a frugal but fun life of lying in the sun, having friends visit constnantly, and partying. He didn't become a "bad" dad but he was different. Dinner was still made every night but he seemed to want playmates more than children. And there began the challenge... He didn't care if I went to school or not. He never graduated from high school and he'd lived a perfectly nice life (he never paid a dime in child support but he usually had a nice apartment with nice furniture, cool clothes, etc.). Maybe it had to do with the grim statistics at that time for surviving lung cancer. I don't know. In any event school was no longer a priority in our home. My only requirement for 10th grade was to pass driver's education. I had occurred to him that having a driver would be handy. I passed with a D and never really attended after the second semester.


So, as you can see, initially I failed the challenge. I did not insist on getting even a minimal education. But, like I said, I was smart. I passed the California equivalent of the GED without studying for it when I was 16 (the minimum age). I was free from any fears of truancy etc. By the time I was sixteen I had a job that paid more ($8.00 and hour) than many of the adults I knew (it was, by the way, the job my Dad had been too disabled to do anymore - data entry in a hospital on the night shift). I moved in and out of my dad's house a few times (with roommates and once, as a protest that he wouldn't make my youngest brother go to school, back to my mother's where there was a new step dad in residence - that didn't last long).


I enrolled in Community College several times (it is so cheap in California that you really don't have to have a comittment you can just sort of try it out when you feel like it). I never finished a course until I became pregnant with R. My dad had died by then. I was working full time and paying the rent and I had a paid off car and I decided to have the baby. Knowing I would be completely alone. And then I became serious about Community College. I took a couple of accounting classes (to help with my then job) and got As while pregnant. When he was a baby and I was on unemployment (my company fired me during my extended maternity leave) I passed a math class.

So after way too much introduction - my challenge was this. How do you a) value and b) achieve an education in an environment where it is not a priority, or a necessity, or even a goal?

I overcame this challenge by not really trying until it was important to me (ie. until I had kids to raise and finally realized that $10 an hour wasn't going to cut it). When it became important to me I did lots of things I would never have suspected I was capable of:
1. Collected welfare for two years while the State of California put me through my lower division college classes;
2. Resigned from the pilot welfare program that guaranteed my four year degree at no charge (including childcare expenses for both kids - with an allowance for study time) because I met a too young man who wanted to be a husband to me and a father to my fatherless children;
3. Left my kids and my husband to fend for themselves every Friday night and all day Saturday (after working full time Monday through Friday) while I pursued my paralegal certificate (BTW my husband learned to cook something other than mac and cheese from the blue box during this time - for that alone it was worth it);
4. Found a "lifetime learning" degree program from an accredited university that would help me to achieve a bachelors degree without too many attendance requirements;
5. After coming within 9 units of the bachelors degree described above just stopped caring/attending;
6. Entered law school (sans bachelor degree the very last year that was allowed in California);
7. Scored high enough on the LSAT to win a scholarship which covered 2/3 of my first year tuition in law school;
8. Took out a total of about $160,000 in student loans anyway;
9. Here is the big surprise (the only thing I really ever finished in my life) I graduated from law school and PASSED the California bar exam the first time I took it;
10. Nearly two years later (I am, after all, still the same person) filled out the final paperwork and was admitted to the State Bar of California.

So, here's the thing... if the challenge was overcoming any value placed on education in my home when I was a teenager did I really overcome this challenge by deciding (in my latish 20s) that an education was in fact extremely valuable? Usually I think so - and then my good friend LawyerMama will reference an author I'm unfamiliar with and I have to confess that, given my unorthodox education, I have absolutely no Humanities and have therefore never read said author. She usually replies that it wasn't a class assignment but LawyerMama was raised to be an overachiever. She is brilliant. When I first knew her I was certain that it was only a matter of time until she saw through whatever she thought I was and realized I was the uneducated girl I am. (She isn't at all like that but I didn't know it at first.)

At any rate, I am probably still overcoming this challenge, and failing to learn enough from it, since I have yet - four years after moving here - to successfully sit for Virginia Bar Exam. In the meantime, I am reasonably content in my work, I love my unexpected Pumpkin more than anything, and I am very happy in my home life. If that isn't overcoming a challenge I don't know what is... I just can't think of an adorable picture to go with this post so I'm afraid its all words tonight...