Goals

The girls were 1-1/2, and I was desperate for an overhaul on my life.

For people reading this who have never been a stay-at-home parent, let alone to multiples, I don't think it can ever be properly explained. I knew I was doing a good thing by raising my girls and saving our family money, and I loved being around them (I still love being with them every day). I started to feel my "life" disappear - you know, that dream that you conjur for yourself about where you want to be in five, ten, twenty years. I was involuntarily distancing myself from every friend and neighbor who had a job outside the home and a social life, while I sat obediently in my four-walled prison cell with three screaming orangutans.

I felt alone. I slaved my butt off around the house every minute of every day until the girls went to bed at night, and then I worked some more until I was exhausted. That's how things got done around our house, and that didn't even keep the house clean! I had no motivation and felt like no one understood what my life was really like. The highlight of my day was seeing Mike walk through the door, and if he was tired and fell asleep on the livingroom floor, I felt disappointed and had to wait 24 hours to have another chance at conversation.

There were days I fantasized about buying and swallowing a whole bottle of sleeping pills. Not because I was suicidal - seriously, I wasn't - but because I was just so tired and couldn't get the motivation to get up every morning. I wanted to sleep forever. The only thing keeping me going was the fact that my girls needed someone to care for them.

I desperately needed an outlet. I resumed my college education, and my life only got better and better. I felt more satisfied with my life and happier in general. Then when I started going to a "real" university this past fall, it felt amazing! I was interacting with other adults my age (well, almost) and had access to a life I had only ever dreamt of. I can't even explain the difference it made in my life.

Yesterday in class, we discussed the Women's Movement. I sat silently and listened to the teacher read an excerpt from a woman named Betty Friedan:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"

- "The Feminine Mystique" (1963)

Tears welled up in my eyes, right there in the back of the classroom. The professor noticed but thankfully didn't say anything.

The first semester that I went back to classes, I remember getting ready for midterms. I was a little stressed out because I was studying until two in the morning, then getting up and taking care of the girls at six.

Mike noticed that I was stressed. He doesn't handle tension well, and I knew he was thinking college was a bad idea at that particular time in our lives. The girls were only 1-1/2! I mean, I had years before the girls would be in grade school. I laughed when he said to me, "Are you sure it's really a good idea to be going back to school right now?"

My reply: "Hell yes."