Higher Learning

I never claimed to make the right choices in life. Or the healthy choices. But I made some interesting choices, that's for sure.

My grandmother didn't make it through high school. Neither did my mom, aunt, uncle, sister, biological father or myself. Only one aunt and my grandfather managed to obtain a high school diploma.

My mom got her GED in her early twenties. Later, she chose to go to community college, back when we lived in California, where school is--or, at least, used to be--cheap. She got her two-year degree and managed to maintain a 4.0 grade average.

As a smart kid--"You may be booksmart," I remember my mother snapping at me as she waggled her finger and chased me around the dining room table for some infraction likely involving my well-laid-out lawyer-speak to dismantle whatever argument for consequence she was proposing at the moment, "But I have common sense!"--I was dismayed at my mother's ability to manage straight-As. I was the straight-A student. She was disrupting the natural order of things. If she had both book smarts and common sense, where did that leave me? Because, as we all knew in the family, I was rather lacking when it came to common sense (along with patience, kindness and selflessness; let's just say I wasn't exactly a virtuous woman, as outlined by Solomon). I vowed I would go to a four-year university and be the first person in my family to graduate with a for-real four-year degree. And I'd do it with straight-As, to boot.

When I was 17 and in the throes of adolescent angst exacerbated by the lines fed me by my fiance--"Your family doesn't care about you, like I do..." or "They don't love you, like I do..."--I wallowed in my self-pity while drowning in the pleasures of all-consuming infatuation. I ignored school. I skipped class. I got a--gasp!---C in Chemistry. When my mother discovered my transgressions and offered the choice of dropping out and obtaining my GED, I jumped. A C might as well be an F. And I get to be a grown-up already? Let the party begin.

And so, I followed in my mother's footsteps: high school dropout, married at 17, young mother (her: 19; me: 24), early divorce (her: 20ish; me: 28), community college later in life. She did remarry and become a stay-at-home mom, something I didn't--haven't, won't--do.

Why should I let being a divorced single mom get in the way of my college degree dream? Spring semester, 2009, I started at the local community college. Two-and-a-half years later, Friday, April 15, 2011, I received word from the University of Arizona that I'd been accepted for the fall semester. And into the Honors College, no less. (You think I'd do it without a 4.0 GPA?)

Yes, I am an official Wildcat. I can root for the football team and have it mean something. I no longer have to clients who ask what school I went to, "Oh, you know--the school of hard knocks," and laugh as though I have no care in the world. No, I can say, with pride: "The University of Arizona."

I'm the first in my biological family to do so. I may be 33, a single mom who is looking at at least another four years to complete a simple Bachelor's degree and another few years after that for my MFA, but, by God, I am going to a four-year University where I will eventually obtain both my Bachelor's and my Master's degree in Creative Writing.

In addition to learning about literary analysis, rock formations, more higher algebraic functions than I'll ever want to know and how not to get into a workshop fight with a fellow (idiotic) classmate, I learned I'm not going to worry about the 4.0 GPA part. Some things are worth putting an effort into--time with my son, time with my partner, a clean cat-litter box--and other things aren't. I'm damn proud of how far I've come and how well I've done it, and now it's time for a new chapter.

Maybe I learned some common sense after all.