Tomorrow I will load up my backpack with sharpened number #2 pencils and brand new textbooks and head off, once again, to begin yet another semester of university learning. It will be the 8th semester, remarkably, in a row, that I have made this trek without interruption. Fall, Winter, Summer. Rinse. Cry. Repeat.
The thing about going to college at the unimpressive age of 36 is that the process changes very little. The backpack feels a little heavier (or is that the beginning of osteoporosis?), the professors seem a little younger (but then again, most of them are my age now), but in general,"going to college" now, in 2015, is much like it was when most people my age were supposed to attend, back in the late 90s.
I should know. I went to college then too.
In total, my journey of higher education has spanned an impressive 18 years. 18 years of work for one Bachelor's Degree. How is that even possible? I wouldn't have thought it could be either.
Trust me, though. It is.
Truthfully, it's been a struggle to keep going all this time. For almost all of my twenties, I peppered classes in between babies. Studying away among c-sections and plugged ducts, reading Yeats after I read the children Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, writing annotated bibliographies while my (ex) husband played Call of Duty in the next room. One class here, three classes there. Another kid. Back at it again. It was a cumbersome process and I had very little in terms of long term plans.
When I got divorced, three years ago, I had an unimpressive 30 credit completed.
But as I look down the barrel of Summer 2015, I have only 5 classes left. You would think I feel a sense of momentum that would propel me into this first week, knowing that I am a (very large) handful of classes away from graduating.
But mostly I just feel like quitting.
The wanting to quit could be just exhaustion. It's been the same thing, year after year, for so long, it's just getting old. Or I'm getting old. And tired.
But I think it's something more than that.
I still hear my exhusband's voice coming in waves, shoreless echoes as I consider another semester of going. Or not going. "You quit everything." Angry words from someone angry with me, but stinging words because from somewhere organic, they ring true. I did quit.
I quit playing the piano. I quit going to the gym. I quit sharing my world. I quit wanting that life.
I quit loving him.
And now, I consider quitting again, in the way he probably still expects me to do.
I sit at my desk in the morning today and make lists of Pros and Cons with the monogrammed ink pen my mother gave me for my 36th birthday. "Writer's need beautiful things to write with.", she wrote in the attached card. The faith in her sentence is breathtaking, it should be enough to drown out the cacophony of angry words.
But it's not.
I register for classes. Replace them, switch them. My schedule doesn't ever seem quite right, never manageable enough to make going seem finally palatable. I add and subtract credit hours, figuring out requirements and 'must takes'. It seems so overwhelming.
"You have no idea what it's like to work for a living." I see those words floating in the air around my desk, repeat them back out loud in my own voice, now. These children, that house we lived inside. The things he asked of me, while he went to work and went to school himself--a Bachelor's Degree, a Master's. Was I not working beside him? The studying in miniature chairs in a school front office, waiting for an IEP for a disabled son, the nights I feel asleep over a volume of Shakespeare. That was not work? "You never finish anything."
And now, here at the desk, those words are why I still don't click "drop". It would be so much easier to quit now.
I close the laptop screen and sit back in my creaking chair. I stare at the list of Pros and Cons, inked with my "Writers Pen", in the penmanship of the messy child I have always been, written with the hand of the woman I have become.
"You'll never finish." he spat out angrily, as I plodded through the years.
I want to laugh out loud at my desk now, the sheer absurdity of it all. He didn't know it then, but all those years, with those words, he was teaching me something about following through.
Wait, be quiet, if you must, but go on. Even if the time wears at your bones and makes you question the process, go on. Turn around and look at where you once were. See how far you have come, how different you are now? The end is surely more near than the beginning.
Let people think they know you. Let him think he knows you. Be whoever the fuck you want to be and just go on.
This is what I eventually started to hear, in between the words he said to me.
And so this is what I did when I learned how to leave that man for good: I learned to be brave, but quietly.
I kept going, figuring out who I really wanted to be, for myself. I stayed too long, but I kept going. I was someone else for a long time before I finally showed him.
Before I finally quit him.
"I don't want to do this anymore." I said to him, one Spring morning.
"I'm finished." And I think we were both surprised that I could say those words.
But once I said them, I couldn't forget how wonderful they tasted.
I can quit any thing I want, any time I want to, I have nothing to prove to him anymore.
But I've stayed so long, I've been going so long. It's why I'm tired, but also why I have to keep going. The end is nearer than the beginning, now.
I want to see my name in embossed letters on a thick cardstock diploma. I want to walk across the stage, turn my tassel, throw my hat.
I want to say, "I'm finished" again and again, louder and louder until the doubting sound of his words drowns in the liquid pool of my own voice.
So I can want to quit school, because quitting school is easier. It's what he expects me to do. What I half-expect myself to do.
But instead, without listening to that voice that finds me still. Without questioning the reasons why, I push ahead. I wait for the end, knowing the end will come.
It's what broken people do, once they have learned how strong they really are.
We know that quitting isn't always easier. And we know that other times, quitting is the best thing we can do.
We bide our time. We do our best.
We just go. We just go on.
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