It was an awesome day today! Grades were released for the previous semester and it was another 4.0 semester for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had perfect A’s in past semesters and each time I’ve been just as happy. The difference this time was it finally hit me that I’ve actually earned awesome grades, I’ve made an awesome accomplishment! I guess I should let you in on a little bit of my education past. This is gonna be a long one!
This isn’t a pity party but just an explanation of where I’ve been and where I am. I began college many, many years ago. I had a free ride almost, but frankly even though I truly wanted to be in college and my hope was to become an elementary school teacher I never quite felt that I belonged in college. I felt unworthy, inept, and basically I felt I was not good enough to be there. I never quite mastered algebra, I truly felt that I was “socially promoted” in the twelve grade because I don’t remember doing any homework or taking any tests in my mathematics courses in the last two years of high school. When I signed up for the placement test, I tested into the lowest remedial math courses and I still quite “get it”, I still don’t get it.
I registered and dropped the course before I finished, the feeling overflowed into my other courses. Even though I was doing well in English or history or any given course, I simply panicked and dropped those courses as well. In total, during my first round at college I earned a 2.0 GPA and countless W’s (withdraws) on my transcript. I stopped attending college with the mindset that college simply wasn’t for me, more importantly, I wasn’t for it.
For the next years that feeling stayed with me, I tried to do other things, I tried to do different professions but I never felt competent enough to stay with it. Something has always felt wrong, it didn’t help that some friends whom I attended high school with used me as their punch line for their “stupid” jokes. One particular time I remember always is when I was with a group of friends out having dinner and drinks; we were having a good time joking and laughing about our high school years. Someone brought up the subject of GPA, our number in the graduating class with one of them saying he was in the top 10 percent and another saying he was probably closer to the 20 percent. As I wondered out loud what my number was, my friend cuts me off to say to me/about me, “You know, they lined us up in class order and when they called Mari’s name, they just asked her to close the door behind her before she crossed the stage.” I froze; I was in disbelief that he said that about me. Yeah I guess it was funny to them, they laughed even harder than before. To me that only cemented my belief about my school ability.
Fast forward some ‘almost 20’ years, after contemplating for a long time whether or not to go back to college to finish my degree; since everything I’ve tried didn’t work for me, I finally went back in the summer of 2009. Sad and truly depressed because of recent events in my life I began school again. Still with the same feeling from 20 years back but with the mindset that this was it! This is the last ditch effort to do SOMETHING! This was my second chance to do what I was supposed to do way back then. The biggest difference, the biggest reason “why” I was doing it was: Here goes the cliché; I was doing it for my children, to give them a better life and at the same time do something for me but they were the REAL REASON I returned and why I tried/try as hard as I do in school.
So today when grades were released and my GPA is still on the rise, I am truly, truly exuberant! This is MY accomplishment. For the first time in a long, long, long time I feel proud of myself. It's like I’m seeing myself for the first time. I feel more sure of myself and happier. I hope my children will look back one day to the “crazy days” when mom went back to school and smile and feel a little proud of their mother. :)
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