Me, that’s who. Today, Saturday June 7, is my 40th birthday. (This is being written before Saturday because I don’t want to spend my birthday doing this.) I was born in 1968, one of the most turbulent years in recent history. The Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy (who died the day before my birth), protests and riots, the Chicago Convention, Nixon. “Sympathy for the Devil” and 2001: A Space Odyssey were both released that year. Those two pieces of popular culture neatly encapsulate both the darkness and the hope of the year of my birth.

Hope was abundant that year in the Apollo Space Program. Apollo 7, in October, was the first manned Apollo flight and a welcome success after the tragedy of Apollo 1. Apollo 8, in December, was the first mission to leave Earth orbit and travel to the moon. Humans left the relative safety of Earth’s orbit and traveled to another world!

I decided to look up other people who share my birthday. Here are some of my favorites:

• Beau Brummel, 1778
• Paul Gauguin, 1848
• Jessica Tandy, 1909
• Dean Martin, 1917
• Tom Jones, 1940 (yes, that Tom Jones)
• Liam Neeson, 1952
• Prince, 1958 (yes, that Prince)

Thanks to Brainy History for some of the dates.

I grew up in Claremore so I was literally steeped in Will Rogers lore. The Will Rogers Memorial Museum was not far from my house and every time we had out-of-town visitors, we’d drag them there. Heck, I even had my formal wedding portrait shot on the museum’s wide veranda. I don’t think I’ve seen any more of Will’s movies than the snippets they played in the exhibits, but the title of one really stuck with me–Life Begins At Forty. I remember thinking how impossibly old forty seemed even as my parents neared (and passed) forty themselves. How could life begin at such an advanced and decrepit age?

Well, now that I’m here, forty doesn’t seem so advanced, maybe just a tad decrepit. But I get the title, I finally get it. At the time that movie was made (1935) people tended to marry and have kids fairly young. My own great-grandmother got married at 13 and had my grandmother at 15. So if you get married, say, at 18 and have kids in your early 20’s, then by the time you turn 40, the kids are grown and gone or nearly so. The next phase of your life (one sans kids) would indeed start at 40. Now more people are holding off on having kids, waiting until their mid-30’s to mid-40’s, much like I did.

Even though I got married at 23, Monkey wasn’t born until I was 34, then Pumpkin came along right before I turned 37. I had plenty of time to live one sort of life, one sans kids, and get thoroughly set in my ways. Parenting infants can feel like a kind of timeless limbo, but things start to pick up once they become toddlers and preschoolers. So it does feel like a different phase of life is beginning. Plus, I’ve only got two more years of school then I will re-enter the working world. I finally feel like I have a concrete direction for my life, not just nebulous wishes.

Even though I live in same old ghost-ridden house, I am still married to my best friend after all these years, and I’ve decided to keep at this whole motherhood-thing, I feel like I’ve been given a fresh start, a do-over. Maybe life really does begin at forty after all.

I was never much of a diarist. Even as a self-absorbed teenager, I was no Pepys. Well-meaning people would buy me those little locking daily diaries as birthday presents. They all held such promise, and with each new one would come a resolution to write in it every day. Their pink or red or blue covers, their gilt-edged dated pages, and shiny brass locks with the minuscule keys beckoned me, “Write me, write me!” And I would dutifully answer, “Of course, of course!” I would pop the clasp and open the book, the sharp tang of vinyl newness filling my nose. The pages were so white and crisp with the barest hint of roughness at the edges. But I could never fulfill the promise of each new day, a fresh new page. And what to write? At 12 years old, there was precious little to write about. Nothing I cared to set down for posterity anyway.

I still occasionally find these pathetic relics, discarded like half-chewed bones. I read through them, hoping to find some kind of keen insight into the child I was, but they are void of any meaning. At 12, and 13, and 14, well, pretty much every year of my life ending in -teen, I was a sad specimen. Tiny, pasty, weird, clumsy (but you knew that), adolescence was hell. And I sure didn’t want to write any of that crap down. What was there to say, “Got tied to the jungle gym by my shoelaces, again.” “Told a really funny joke, nobody laughed because I was the one who told it.” “Got picked on for being me, again.” “Ate lunch with the pathetic little band of other outsiders that have become my one refuge in an increasingly hostile environment.” “Mom told me how awful my skin is, again.” (I wish to state for the record, Mother, that I have always had nice skin, teenagers get zits. I still get complements on my skin to this very day, little thanks to you. Yes, I’m bitter much.) “Dad gave me another book on how evil everything I want to do is.” “Am considering a descent into madness to stave off the rising tide of desperation.”

What I ended up writing were things like: what kind of underpants I had on, and how I wished I could be taller. Or the elaborate fantasies I built up about the incredible, graceful, beautiful girl that I wasn’t. As I got older, I would fill little notebooks with pieces of the real me. I realized the diaries were too obvious, too cliched. And as a writer, I despise cliche. And my mother was not to be trusted. She could’ve searched my room for contraband all she liked and I wouldn’t have cared, but there was no way I was going to expose my thoughts to her. The notebooks were nondescript, no one could’ve guessed the tortured thoughts they contained. Just the usual teenage angst, I suppose, but as negative emotions on my part were not tolerated, doubtless those writings would’ve gotten me a visit with a doctor. And to be honest, I was pretty harsh on my parents in those notebooks. These blogs of mine, these are now my little notebooks. But now, I don’t care if my parents read my writings, not that I think they do.

I have said before that my parents made many mistakes with me, all parents do. It’s truly unavoidable. The only thing we can do for our kids is try to learn from the past and not make the same mistakes our parents made. We need to make all new ones. My father was stern and scary and not very involved in my activities. He was, however, overly-involved with the church (and as scary as Daddy seemed, I was jealous of that stupid church!). So I joined in a lot of church activities myself, thinking that maybe he’d find some worth in me. That is a mistake I will not make; if you put religion before your children, you’re doing it wrong.

My mother, a captive of her own miserable upbringing, could not bring herself to be supportive on a day-to-day basis. I can count on one hand the times that I felt she was actually “in my corner”. I think it all goes back to my great-grandfather. He died well before I was born, but by all accounts, he was a vicious, brutal man-at least to my grandmother. My grandmother, in turn, married perhaps unwisely to escape. There weren’t many options for poor women, during the 30’s and 40’s, in rural Oklahoma. Maybe she shouldn’t have married, maybe she wasn’t particularly suited to mothering. Whatever it was, my mother never learned how to be nurturing or supportive.

After she finished high school, my mother wanted to go on to nursing school but my grandmother wouldn’t hear of it. Gammie didn’t have a very high opinion of nurses; actually, she didn’t have a very high opinion of anyone. At her mother’s insistence, my own mom went through some kind of clerical training, which she hated. When I was younger, there were two possible tracks I wanted to take for my future: writer or doctor. My parents never took my writing seriously, never encouraged that talent. When I wanted to go into journalism, my mother insisted that I take typing class, because I would never be able to support myself as a writer.

So, when I wished to pursue my other main interest, science, and go into medicine, my mother informed me that my high school grades weren’t good enough. I would never get into medical school. Because my high school GPA was only 3.2. The sad thing is, I listened to them, to her. I let them affect my future by believing in their low opinion of me. After years of feeling like a constant source of disappointment to them, I managed to disappoint myself.

I get it now, my grandmother signed up for a life she didn’t want to escape her childhood. Maybe to punish my mother for that life, Gammie thwarted her hopes for the future. My mother, having never been taught how to be a supportive parent, and having never gotten over what Gammie did to her, thwarted my hopes for my future. I do not, for one minute, believe that she did this on purpose. But, since she had never been encouraged in any way, she didn’t know how to encourage me. Perhaps she thought her words would spur me on to do better in school, but they didn’t. I gave up on what I wanted and sort of drifted through my first attempt at college.

Now, here I am, finishing college at nearly 40. I will have achieved my goals by the time my children are old enough to begin exploring their own futures. My mother could not reach beyond the mistakes her mother made and be supportive of me. I will not repeat that mistake, I will not drag this grievous error into yet another generation. My children will have my full support in whatever careers they choose to pursue. Oddly enough, it was having children myself that helped heal some of the dings to my psyche.

By the way, my mother went back to college when she was older than I am now. She’s a successful R.N. and I couldn’t be prouder of her. Way to go, Mom!

As a nursing student, I am taking a lot of science classes. Mostly life sciences, to be sure, but science none the less. And one thing, in all my studies, that I have noticed is how all life is intimately tied together in evolution’s intricate dance. Just look at mitochondria. Another thing I’ve noticed is that my science professors either side-step this entirely or refer to it only obliquely. Yes, this is Oklahoma, the buckle of the Bible Belt, but still. I wish that at least one professor would come out and say something along the lines of: “Life on this planet, over the course of billions of years, evolved from single-celled organisms to the myriad life forms we see today.”

One of my professors, who happens to be demonstrably conservative, very nearly came close to acknowledging this, but stopped short. He was discussing the harmful effects of artificial fats, like partially hydrogenated fats, on the human body. He told us that naturally occurring animal fats were more easily processed by the human body because…..then he stopped himself here. What he didn’t want to, couldn’t, acknowledge was that humans process animal fats more efficiently than laboratory-created fats because we evolved on this planet eating the other animals that also evolved on this planet!!!!!! But his conditioning could not allow him to admit to this simple truth. (I am in no way advocating the eating of animals or animal by-products to my readers that might have a problem with this, I am simply illustrating a point.)

But I have to say that I get it. I know why professors are reluctant to state the facts of evolution, a lot of christians get all bent out of shape and scared by the very thought of evolution. For folks that frequently decry “political correctness”, they sure are hypersensitive about this; and they stamp their widdle feet and get all pouty when presented with things that don’t fit into their neat little packages. To me, this speaks of a very childish kind of faith. If a person’s faith is shaken and devastated by learning about The Big Bang and evolutionary fact, well it wasn’t much of a faith to begin with, so he or she isn’t out much.

As a Christian, my faith is in no way threatened by evolution, or the Big Bang, or the true age of the Earth or the Universe, heliocentrism, and that the earth isn’t flat. But I don’t find it necessary to completely segregate faith and science. For most other christians, I would have to say, please separate science and religion, you aren’t any good at mixing them. Setting aside the fact that I do not hold with biblical literalism, the bible is not a scientific text!

So why do people want to use the bible as a science book? That’s easy: fear. Let’s look at the number 2 billion, that’s about how many years multi-cellular organisms have been on earth. 2,000,000,000. Looks harmless enough, right? But that is not an easy number to truly contemplate. Once a person starts really thinking about how many years that is compared to the 80-odd most people get, well, bless their pea-pickin’ little hearts, they just can’t abide it. 80 (one zero) to 2,000,000,000 (nine zeros), not really a fair fight is it? Don’t even ask most people to start thinking about the age of the universe. Which is, according to Cosmology 101, 13.7 billion years old! If we were to state that comparing the age of the universe to that of a human, with 1 year=1 billion years, then the universe is a teenager! And multi-cellular life on earth, at 2 billion, is but a mere toddler. As for homo sapiens (that’s us!), according to The Smithsonian Institution, we’ve been kicking around for only 130,000 years. If I’m figuring right, we haven’t even been conceived yet. This is where the analogy breaks down, I tend to think of humanity as in its toddlerhood. Currently raising toddler number two, I know how destructive, selfish, and unthinking toddlers can be. And yep, that’s pretty much us as a species: given to tearing stuff up and throwing temper tantrums when we don’t get absolutely everything just the way we want it and in a timely manner.

Seems like a lot of people have a real problem with not being the biggest grown-up on the block. How many among us would be comfortable admitting how scary everything can be? This fear of fact, fear of the astronomical, is a form of agoraphobia, some people have it and some people don’t. I can stand under the big, Oklahoma sky and love it, not fear it. My physical position on Earth is much like that of a microbe clinging to the surface of a soccerball, but I never fear that I will loose the bond of gravity and go spinning off into space. While I can’t truly grasp the enormity of 13.7 billion years, I don’t fear it, I don’t have to deny it. I embrace it in whatever dim fashion I can.

As for faith and science, I see the Hand of God in the majesty of the Big Bang. I cannot claim to know the mind of the Almighty, but it seems more probable to me that He is more present in the terrifyingly large number of 13.7 billion than in the mere 6000 or so that young earthers want to grant Him. As if we could box God into a less fearful package for our own comfort! The sheer sacrilege of such a thought is undeniable.

And why should my faith be threatened by the notion that my ancestors were much hairier apes and didn’t just spring from the mud wearing the latest style hat, as it were? Please don’t burden me with the “In His image” line. Here again, people want to limit God, make Him just like us, only older.

And to those who don’t want their children to learn about anything that isn’t in the bible, like dinosaurs (I’m not kidding), well don’t come crying at my door when your precious babies finally learn the facts for themselves and hate you for deceiving them. Didn’t God give us these questioning minds? These searching souls? If so, why would He want us to freeze our knowledge base at that level more suited to a nomadic, desert tribe 5000 years ago, at that time void of education and rife with superstition? The Creation Story is just that, a story, presented to a people with no scientific knowledge, in a manner that was comprehensible to them at the time. Humanity has matured in the intervening years, even if only a little and only in some ways.

I have my Truth, you have your Truth, everybody has their own, individual Truths, but facts are the same for everyone, whether you like it or not. My challenge to other Christians, heck to anyone who needs to grow a little, is this: don’t try to make God, or your Truth, more manageable by trying to shrink Him down to your size. It won’t work. Grow in your own faith, or Truth, until you can accept that others might not share that Truth or faith, but that the difference doesn’t lessen yours at all. And try not to fear the astronomical, it can’t hurt you. The only thing that will weaken your faith is fear-fear of the unknown, fear of the different, fear of feeling insignificant.

But science, science is not to be feared, but embraced. The God of Abraham, the God of Jesus, the God of the Big Bang, the God of evolution, He gave me a scientific mind and I won’t deny His gift.

Cross-posted

First, lest you begin to think otherwise, my husband is a wonderful father. Second, the kids adore their time with Daddy. Third, I love my children but I have no illusions about them, they can try the hardiest of souls.

As a SAHM (stay-at-home-mom), I spend an inordinate amount of time with them, by myself. Weekdays, from too early in the morning until Hubby gets home in the evening, are my shift. Weekends and evenings have always been our tandem-parenting times. But for much of the last two years, I have been going to classes on Saturdays. This semester I added some evenings to my class schedule. I happen to think that these alone times with the kids are good for Hubby, but I think it’s getting to him. Poor man.

You see, he’s outnumbered. There are two of us and we have two kids, so we’re even. Status quo, dead-lock, tie, draw, stand-off. If this makes parenting sound like a battle, good, because often it is. No, more like a thousand little battles. With two parents in the House, we can divide and conquer; when there’s only one of us, they sense the shift in the balance of power. And then like cheetahs cutting a wounded gazelle from the herd, they attack. Now I don’t mean that literally, but they sure do pull out all the stops on the bad behaviors.

The evening class times seem less trying for Hubby, maybe because the cheetahs are exhausted from a full day of cutting Mama from the herd. But he gets the full-on naughty treatment on Saturdays, he literally does not know what to do with them all day. So he comes up with some creative ways to kill time.

While Night School is at the campus closest to our house, my Saturday class is at the campus all the way across town. Hubby and the kids drove me to class (well, Hubby did all the driving) and he told me his plans for the day. First, after dropping me off, they were going to drive all the way back to our part of town to go to his favorite Starbucks ™ and then, drive all the way back to the other side of town to go to the donut shop before heading back to the House. As often happens, plans changed. But he did get the donuts.

I called home during a break, only to hear all hell breaking loose in the background. They were both hopped-up on donuts and the mere act of Hubby talking to me on the phone sent them into a sugar-fueled frenzy. He couldn’t do it, I was talking in one ear and the kids were yelling in the other. He made some noises like trying to get another word in sideways but finally gave up and said he had to go. They cut him from the herd because they had him outnumbered, poor gazelle, I mean guy.

Night School is a haven of working adults and parents, a time to spend with other adults, learning exciting, new things. Last night was our first test and some of us finished very early, including me. We gathered upstairs outside our locked lab to wait for the rest of the class. Another mother of small children and I were trading war stories, much to the horror of a couple of the younger women. After several rounds of “terrible pregnancy”, “horrific labor”, “destructive toddlers”, “crayon-eating”, “feces-flinging”, one of the young women told us, “I’m afraid to have kids now”.

We tried to tell her that it’s not as bad as it sounds, but it is. Not that having babies isn’t worth it, it is. But, seriously, only have kids if you have a very strong stomach, it’s not for the timid or the queasy. This is what happens any time two or more mothers, who live in the reality-based community, get together. We bitch about the kids, it’s inevitable.

And my school-mate and I definitely live in the reality-based community. No “it’s always peace, light, and joy in my house” or “my kids are perfect angels, who never talk back or disobey or poop their pants” for us, we tell it like it is. I believe that more people should be able to say that having an infant in the house sucks for just about everyone, or that two-year-olds are tyrannical little monsters with no bowel control, or that pre-schoolers have pretty salty language and bad attitudes, or that sometimes, the lovely man you married makes you want to scream. Marriage and motherhood are hard, trying, and, sometimes, smelly undertakings that take fear-inducing amounts of difficult, unpaid labor. But that’s just on the bad days, there are actually good days, and sometimes there are transcendent days that make everything else fade to almost nothing. It is those transcendent days that keep me going, that keep me from wandering off to become a hermit.

I’m really sorry we scared that young woman, but eventually, should she have kids, she’ll remember that conversation and realize that: 1) we were right and 2) she’s not crazy for feeling the exact same way.

As some of you may know, I am incredibly busy. Just how busy? Let’s see: Monkey is 5 and started school this year, Pumpkin is 2 and the less said about that the better, I’m taking 11 hours in school this semester, I have 3 blogs (how did that happen?), and I have 1 house to care for.

Because of all the different things going on in my life I decided a long time ago that New Year’s resolutions were just not going to work for me. I love the idea of a fresh start every year, a fresh chance to get it right. But we all know that New Year’s resolutions usually don’t last very long. I needed something with more heft, some kind of resolve that I could live with beyond the new year.

A couple of years ago, with a toddler and an infant in the House, I looked at my life and realized that even with all that I had, I wasn’t satisfied. I felt like I wasn’t doing all I could for myself and, therefore, for my family. There was a missing piece, a neglected corner of my life, something I should have done a long time before. I needed a Bachelor’s degree, but saying that and actually making it happen are two different things.

That’s the way it is with most things we want to do, that’s why every year we make New Year’s resolutions and every year we don’t follow through on them. It’s too easy to say, “I need to lose weight” or “This year I’ll stick to a budget” or “This is the year my house will stay organized”. But we never mean it, these declarations are half-hearted at best. They’re the socially expected lip-service we pay to the ideals of positive change. I think the problem is not that most people don’t want to make positive changes, but that people don’t know which are the best positive changes for them. So each year they sit down and write a list totally unsuited to their lives and then, unsurprisingly, fail to follow through.

There are all these things just screaming at us to be done: things we want to do, need to do, don’t want to do, things other people want us to do, things society as a whole tells us we should do. How do we figure out what is right for us? I had to figure out what was right for me, nobody else, me. Like everyone else I had a long list of things to do: lose weight, get a degree (in what?), budget, organize my messy House, quit yelling, be more patient, speak up for myself, be a better mom (whatever that means), dress better, write a book, get it published, eat out less, cook more, try to stay on top of the daily Household chores, quit saving every piece of paper that makes it to my hands.

OK, that’s a long list and I can’t do everything all at once, nor would I want to. How do I winnow it down to just things that are really right for me? The crucial things, the major things, the things that are absolutely essential to my continued happiness. How do I figure out, from the bewildering array of choices, what direction my life should take? Well, I came up with a plan that works for me and I hope that maybe it will help someone else with a bewildering array of choices before them. But right now I have to go pretend I know what I’m doing with this mothering-thingy. More tomorrow.

Just a quick update to my earlier post. As some of you may know, I am gracefulness-challenged. Well, now my entire class knows, too.

With my hip and back issues, I find sitting in school desks for extended periods to be pure torture. I have surprised teachers and other students by bounding up out of my seat to stand in the back of the class, when I just can’t take it anymore. Labs are usually easier on me because I can get up and move around and don’t have to use the rolling, spinning death-trap chairs that typically populate such labs. This evening was an exception, there was more paperwork than legwork to do tonight. So I sat in the rolling, spinning death-trap to fill out my papers and then got up to hand them to the teacher.

Now this is where it gets weird. As I stood, I must have moved the seat a quarter-turn and pulled my jacket of the back of the chair. The seat itself was in the wrong position when I sat down, so I stood on the footrest so I could swing the seat back under me. But my jacket got caught and my purse fell off the back (important in just a second). Somehow I lost my footing or more correctly, my sitting and tumbled backwards off the chair. I could’ve saved myself from complete humiliation, but then I tripped backwards over my purse! I ended up full-splayed, spread-eagle on my back on the floor.

As usual there were gasps of horror and shouts of “Are you alright?!” I said what I always say, “I’m fine, this happens all the time.” And, “My husband is going to laugh when he hears about this.” For the record, there is no graceful way to get up off the floor after you have taken such a fall, not when you’re on your back. Fall forward and you can use your hands to push up off the floor; full-splay flat on your back and the best you can hope for is clambering up. Which is a darn sight better than just rolling back and forth like a turtle on its shell, desperately trying to build up enough momentum to spring to your feet. So I did what any self-respecting klutz would do, I sprung up and put my arms up in the air, just like the gymnasts at the Olympics.

One lady tried to comfort me by telling me the rest of the class would forget all about it long before I would, but I find that unlikely in the extreme. I told her, “Don’t underestimate the staying-power of being the girl who fell.” And I meant it, do you think you could forget it if someone fell out of their chair in front you? Didn’t think so. Hopefully, next class time won’t be quite so exciting.

Tonight is my second night at night school. Doesn’t that just have the swankest shag-carpeting 70’s vibe? I’m going to night school. There are a lot of people in my class who come straight to school from work. They work all day, that’s why they go to night school. I go to night school, and take internet classes, and take Saturday classes because of my work, too. My bosses are notoriously demanding of my time and undivided attention, I am expected to drop whatever it is I am doing and rush to fulfill their slightest whims. And they’re short. And sometimes they’re smelly and messy. And sometimes they’re pouty and selfish. And sometimes they hit each other. But they sure are cute, and even though the pay sucks and the hours are lousy, the perks are pretty sweet.

This is NOT going to be a post about the indescribable euphoria of motherhood. I love Monkey and Pumpkin with a ferocity that is hard to express; it is amazing how fury and love can go hand in hand. The two of them drive me crazier than you can imagine, but I wouldn’t trade my life now for anything. But…I have worked or attended school or a combination of the two since I was 18 years old, staying home with the kids feels like playing hooky. And the housewife gig? I’m not very good at it, in fact I’m a miserable failure as a housewife. And whoever thought up that stupid term? I am not married to the house, if I were it would divorce me for sure.

There were many reasons why I decided to stay home with the kids: I never cared for daycare myself, we didn’t have family who could look after them, we aren’t wealthy enough for a nanny, and I didn’t really have a career, just a series of jobs. It is that last item on the list that has always bothered me the most. I never finished my degree and have, as a result, always felt as if some piece of me was missing, something vital I had forgotten. That is why I am going to school now. Our lack of reliable childcare is why I am going to night school, and internet school, and Saturday school. During night school and Saturday school the kids stay in the very capable care of their long-suffering Daddy. So, I’m going to take this opportunity to say “Thank you” to my very understanding Hubby, I couldn’t do it without you. And now you see what I go through everyday.

Hello friends, welcome to The House of The Burning Prairie! I started this blog as a record of all our many messes and what we’re doing about them. There all kinds of messes: real, physical ones that you can step in, and less tangible ones that are even harder to clean up.

Today, on this second day of the new year, I took yet another step in cleaning up my longest-standing mess. I paid my tuition and bought my books for Spring Semester. You see, somehow I made it to 39 years of age without a bachelor’s degree. Call it a lack of focus, or a lack of support, whatever you call it, I never finished school. Oh, I have a ridiculous number of credit hours and have attended school off and on for the last 20-odd years at an embarrassing number of schools, I just never could push it over the edge and graduate.

I didn’t come from one of those families where getting a degree is just a given. “Of course you’ll go to college!” “Of course you’ll get your degree!” Never heard those things. And I am the all-time champ of “not living up to my potential”. These two factors make a perfect storm of not-finishing-college. Some people seem born knowing which directions their lives will take-doctor, architect, teacher… Not me. Was the problem, or at least part of it, that there were too many things that I wanted to do, or was capable of doing? I know that when I expressed interest in being a writer, my parents bought me a typewriter…so I could become a secretary when I couldn’t make a living as a writer. When I expressed interest in going into medicine, someone (you know who you are) said that I didn’t make good enough grades and that I should just “go to hair-school”. So I have to lay at least part of the blame at the doorstep of familial support issues. (disclaimer-I did not then and do not now think that going to cosmetology school is in any way “less than”, it was simply not for me.)

But even in environments where parents are totally unsupportive and even completely opposed to higher education, plenty of people buckle down and finish college. So I have to admit that the biggest contributor to this particular mess was definitely…..me. I could not make the decision, and therefore, the commitment to finish my degree. Finally, after years of feeling incomplete and buffeted about, I realized that it was the array of choices open to me that was literally freezing my decision-making processes. What I needed was a new process.

So, I came up with one. My new process helped me to narrow my choices and, thus, my focus. Using my process, I now have a degree goal and a way to achieve that goal. After figuring that out, I also realized that the process could help me with my other messes. But that’s a post for another day.