Going Back to School as a Working Mom: What Actually Helped Me Keep Up
The first time I tried to read a chapter of my sociology textbook, my five-year-old used my arm as a race track. His small hot wheels car rolled from my elbow to my wrist while I stared at a paragraph about social stratification. I had about twenty minutes before I needed to start dinner, and I’d promised myself I’d get through at least ten pages. I got through two, and one of those was just the summary box.
I’m thirty-four. I work part-time as an administrative assistant at a dental office, I have two kids in elementary school, and last September I enrolled in an online certificate program for early childhood education. The idea was that a credential would let me move into a better position at the preschool where I volunteer on weekends. The reality was that I hadn’t written a proper essay since I was twenty-one, and my laptop needed an update that took an hour.
The first two weeks were a disaster. I’d planned to study after the kids went to bed, but I’d fall asleep on the couch with a highlighter in my hand. I’d planned to use my lunch breaks at work, but the office was noisy and I kept getting pulled into conversations about scheduling. I started to think I’d made a mistake, that this whole thing was for younger people without four loads of laundry waiting in the basement.
But then something shifted. Not because I got more disciplined or started waking up at 5 a.m. like all those YouTube videos suggest. It shifted because I stopped trying to study like I used to. I stopped treating it as a block of time that had to be quiet, uninterrupted, and at least an hour long. That wasn’t going to happen in my house, and pretending it would was just setting me up to feel like a failure.
What worked first was small, weird pockets of time. I started keeping a printed copy of my course readings in the car, next to my daughter’s ice skates. When I picked her up from hockey practice, I had about fifteen minutes of waiting in the parking lot. I’d read two pages, maybe three, and mark the margins with a pencil. It wasn’t deep reading, but it made the material familiar enough that when I had a real study session later, I wasn’t starting from zero.
I also had a conversation with my supervisor at work. I asked her if I could take a fifteen-minute break in the middle of the morning, but instead of sitting in the break room, I sat in the unused conference room with my laptop and watched lecture videos at double speed. She had no problem with it. She was even a little interested, because her daughter was thinking about taking a night class. That small adjustment didn’t require me to do anything heroic. I just stopped asking for permission to do things the way I needed to do them.
At home, I had to tell the kids that my studying was not the same as me being on my phone. This was harder than the reading, actually. My son would see me with my computer open and assume I was available for snack requests, fight mediation, or a detailed explanation of why his Pokémon card was less powerful than his friend’s. I started wearing a pair of cheap over-ear headphones when I studied, even if they weren’t playing anything. It was a visual signal. I also taught the kids a phrase I got from a parenting blog, and I hated that it worked: “I’m in class mode, ask me in ten minutes unless someone is bleeding.” It made them laugh, but they also started waiting.
Here’s the thing I didn’t expect: my kids became part of my homework in a way that actually helped me learn. My daughter was doing a unit on community helpers, and I told her I was studying how children learn through play. She asked me what play-based learning meant, and I tried to explain it in a way that made sense to a seven-year-old. That forced me to understand the concept well enough to teach it, which is exactly the kind of retrieval that makes knowledge stick. I also used my son’s LEGO bricks to build a diagram of Piaget’s stages of development. It looked ridiculous, but I remembered the four stages better than if I’d just read the chart.
There were still bad days. I failed a quiz in October because I’d mixed up two theorists. I almost cried in the kitchen while eating leftover pasta. My husband, who travels for work, wasn’t there to help, and I felt like I was letting everyone down. But I noticed something in that moment: I didn’t actually have a deadline crisis. The quiz was worth ten percent of my grade. I could still pass the course. The panic was mostly old habits, the feeling that I had to be perfect or not try at all.
One of the most practical things I did was set up a shared family calendar on the refrigerator, not a digital one, but an actual paper calendar with colored markers. I wrote down all my assignment due dates and blocked off two evenings before each major paper. The kids saw that those blocks were not optional. They knew that on Wednesday nights, I was not available to watch cartoons with them. They were allowed to be in the same room, but I had to focus. We called it “quiet work time,” and we all did our own things. My son read a comic, my daughter drew pictures, and I wrote. Nobody was traumatized. Nobody had a meltdown. The world did not end because I couldn’t make snack-activities every single evening.
What surprised me most was how much space this created for noticing the ordinary chaos of life as part of my studies. For a class on child development, I had to write an observation of a child’s play. I ended up observing my own kids during their normal Saturday morning argument about who got to hold the remote. Watching them negotiate, take turns, and then completely forget why they were angry taught me more about social development than the textbook did. I wrote that observation with a mug of cold tea on the couch, and it earned me my best grade so far.
I’ve got another semester left. I don’t know if I’ll actually move into a better job or if this certificate will change my career in any dramatic way. Some weeks I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water. I still forget to read half my emails. My house is messier than it was before, and I’ve started buying pre-cut vegetables because I don’t have the energy to chop things after putting the kids to bed.
But the other day, my daughter found my highlighter under the couch cushion. She brought it to me and said, “Mom, you left this in the secret place where you hide when you’re reading.” She smiled. I don’t know if she’s proud of me or just happy I’m not absent-minded. Maybe both. I’m learning to be okay with not knowing the outcome yet. I’m learning that the reading sometimes happens in the car, that the essays get written during quiet work time, and that I don’t have to be a different kind of mother to be a student. I’m just a mother who carries a textbook in her bag, and that’s enough for now.
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