Finding Courage to Begin College

My treasure! They helped

me survive college.

Happy Mothers’ Day, everyone!  I wish you smiles and sunshine, love and laughter.

My memoir is a story about believing in oneself, of finding the courage to begin a dream and then discovering the strength needed to see it through to completion.   The perspective is an older student beginning college, one with no college preparatory foundation.  A person with children to raise, a home to maintain, and a college curriculum to understand.  It’s supposed to be a humorous journey of a mother of five through college: how I coped with both motherhood and college.

I don’t know if I was afraid of academia, afraid of going to college exactly.  I think it was more like I was nervous about embarrassing myself in front of other adults and people I didn’t know.  But aren’t most people worried about that?

            Compounding this was the fear of looking bad in the eyes of my children.  Let me explain.  I was the head of my household.  Okay, I shared the duties with my husband, but I was in charge of the home front.  I did the homework and projects with the children.  I retaught my learning disabled firstborn each day.  I was their entertainment more often than not.  We were a tight family unit.  [God blessed us for sure!]  If I did poorly at college, I thought, it would be like I failed my family.

            These are some mental issues I address in my memoir.  But I need to go deeper.  I need to explore this idea of finding courage.  And then maintain that courage to gain that degree.

            Now because I lacked the courage to begin college, I feigned bravery to be able to register, to take the basic skills test, and then the basic skills math courses.  Because I was afraid and dressed myself in a false front, I became edgy and started lacking in my attention to the children, their antics, their well-being, the home, meals.  These anecdotes fill the pages of the memoir.

            If I think about it, it was more a feeling of being unprepared for college.  Other college students, younger college students, had a preparatory foundation that I lacked. 

            Not having this college foundation tied into my next obstacle attending college:  a feeling of inferiority.  And it intensified once I gained entry to University of Pennsylvania.

Framing the Memoir: How Does Motherhood Fit into the College Experience?

Fall frames the world in color.

A writer friend asked me if my memoir was about how motherhood influenced me as a college student or was it how college influenced me as a mother.  While I realize that this is just one aspect of the memoir, it is a good question for it helps to frame the memoir. 

I think the memoir is more about how motherhood influenced me as a college student.  Yet the reverse can also be true.

            Let’s take the first part of the equation.  How did motherhood influence me as a college student? 

            Parenthood is a lifetime career.  It’s not something we stop doing once the children become adults—even if we wanted to.  At the time I started college, I was the primary care-giver to children in grades 2^nd through 8th.  It was my job to help these children become successful in their education and any life obstacles they might encounter.  This was no easy task with my oldest daughter having learning and social problems.  I needed to be there for them. 

I took the parenting job seriously, maybe even obsessively.  I wasn’t free to think only of my own trials in education.  I had to be home for them in the beginning.  This is what made attending college so difficult in the early years of my ten-year journey.  After devoting my life to my children, I needed to allow time for college work.      

            Yet motherhood affected my college journey in other ways, too.  Because I was older, because I was a mother, sometimes I saw the wants and needs of my fellow students at the community college.  I would ask their questions in math class, study with them, help them with their essays.  My husband said that I had gained more children going to college, and perhaps he was correct.  I didn’t mind.  These young students helped me with technical difficulties and math or science concepts I hadn’t experienced recently in the basic skills classes I needed to supposedly bring me up to college entry.  My children were too young; hadn’t had this upper level education. 

           

            And because I was a more mature student, running her own home and family, I brought a commitment to my college education that a few of the younger students may have lacked at the community college level.  My fellow students permitted me to be the group leader in projects.

            Now because I was a mother, I brought home my newfound knowledge to my children, not that they always appreciated it, of course.  I took the notion of parents being the first teachers of their children seriously—again obsessively.  It was my job to be sure the children could survive in today’s world.  I also wanted them to be properly prepared for college as I was not.  I demonstrated time and again what professors were looking for in essays, what was necessary to study to do well on a college exam. 

            Wow!  When I look back on all this I can see why my family is glad that I graduated.  Hopefully the children will see my mothering skills as a good thing in their lives.  Only time will tell.

            What do you think?  Did I answer my friend’s question completely?  Do you have any questions for me about my journey as a mother of five attending college?         

Make Memoirs Unique



Hush, the writer is thinking.

What makes my memoir different?  A very good question. 

If you’ve been reading memoirs, you’ll notice that each experience is unique, whether the memoir is about childhood, death, surviving divorce, or even surviving college.  Through specific details, the memoirist achieves universality. 

 

            Of course universality is not enough.  I need to show my hard-won epiphanies through self-reflection.  This is the difficult part for me.  I’m a scene writer.  I need action.  I enjoy the comic moments of raising a family in all their hilarious detail. 

 

“You need more internal dialogue here, Victoria,” my critique partner told me.

And of course she was correct.  But to look inside myself?

 

Perhaps I had been too busy raising that family of mine and hammering away at my bachelor’s degree to pause and reflect about how I felt when my children constantly interrupted my studying time or when I was attempting to make study tapes for various classes.           

 

            I need to fill my memoir with self-made maxims and self-wisdom learned, not so much the subject matter learned.  My college memoir is a candid story of self-improvement through the college education of a mother.  My children’s presence punctuates my college experience.

I remained their primary care-giver and continued to teach them from my newfound knowledge base.

 

            Are these maxims easy to find?  No.  In fact, I find myself spending whole days trying to figure out “how I felt” or “what I learned” at a particular time during my college journey.  It gets to the point where I need to convince myself that it’s good enough for the first revision and then move on.

 

            How do you get past a sticking point in your manuscripts?  Please offer some tips.  

What to Include in Memoir

Hard-working mother in college

Memoir isn’t a life story.  That is autobiography.  Memoir is one particular period in a person’s life, one instance or one experience in which the memoirist has come to an epiphany or several epiphanies from that experience and wishes to share that insight with the reader.  Memoir provides insight not merely facts of the experience. 

 

It is not necessary to include everything that happened in the particular period which the memoirist wishes to share and elucidate to the reader.  The memoir would be too long and rambling if I included every class taken.  After taking over 40 college courses, I decided to write about my experiences in approximately 25 of them.  Of course that’s not all I wrote about.  I focused on the trials and tribulations of raising a family of five children while attending college for ten years, ten of my children’s growing-up years, ten years of assisting my special needs child to achieve her educational goals.

 

Memoirs encapsulate the important moments, the “aha” moments in the slice of life the memoirist decides to share.  The general, the sameness in experience has no place in memoir.  Memoir needs to be poignant and full of meaning, and in my case, humorous.  For that was a way to cope in the daily grind of going to college as a mother of five.

 

Has anyone read a good memoir lately that I could add to my reading list?