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| Photographs are necessary especially on holidays when life becomes a blur. |
Did you ever wish there could be two of you? When I was attending college for ten of my
children’s growing up years, I wished I could have been a traditional college
student. Then another part of me wanted
to be that full-time mother of five children.
Obviously, I couldn’t become
two separate people. So I needed to do
the second best thing and perform both tasks as one person.
Many people, especially
women, wish they could be more than just one person in order to do all the
things and tasks that they feel need to be accomplished in life.
There’s the key.
People “feel”
that these tasks need to be accomplished.
Most certainly we have time-sensitive tasks that truly need to be
accomplished. Business and school
projects have firm dates. Novelists,
book publishers have deadlines; essayists, content writers, and short story
writers have deadlines. The list is
endless.
In the
beginning of my college career, I truly needed to return home before my
children. There was no one else to watch
five children—let alone feed them. I don’t
know about you, but my angels came home starving after school. You’d think they never ate breakfast or
lunch. I couldn’t attend activity meetings
or study groups or join events during that time. I needed to be a mother.
Other
deadlines can be made malleable.
Prioritizing
became a way of life. I tried to disrupt
my children’s schedules, in the beginning of my college journey, as little as
possible. This was especially important
for my oldest daughter who is special needs.
Re-teaching her always rested on my shoulders. She was in eighth grade at that time; the
twins, in second grade.
The two H’s were at the
top of the list: health and homework,
there’s and mine. Still, by Christmas
break, I had the flu…each of the ten years attending college. The children were fine. It was just I, the college student/Mom who
wanted to crawl into my room and let Christmas happen on its own. But it doesn’t work that way in families with
young children. Many times, it falls to
the mother to make holidays happen. Yes,
I cut down on the baking. Yes, I tried
to delegate, but there was only my husband, at the time, to delegate to. Hence, some things got accomplished; others
did not.
Attending college when
you have a family, sometimes things need to change. They did for me; however, I made these
transitions slowly, both for the children and for me. Understanding which tasks truly need to be
accomplished now and which can wait, prioritizing your work load. These are some mindsets to help a parent get
through college. How have you mastered
the times in your life when you wished you were more than one person?