Having a baby delayed my teaching degree — what I learned when I finally went back
The first time I tried to finish my teaching degree, I sat on the living room floor with my laptop balanced on a stack of board books. My daughter was four months old and asleep in the crib, which meant I had maybe twenty minutes before she would be up again. I read one page of an assignment on early childhood development, underlined two sentences, and then she cried. I shut the laptop. I did not open it again for almost three years.
That is the honest timeline of what happened. Before the baby, I had a plan, and the plan was neat. I was twenty-eight, working as a teaching assistant at a small Montessori preschool, halfway through a master’s degree in early childhood education. In three years I would be a lead teacher. In five years, I would have a published curriculum guide. My planner had color-coded blocks for class time, observation hours, and study weekends.
The pregnancy was planned, but the end of the semester was not. I remember sitting in my advisor’s office at five months pregnant, trying to act like deferral was just a formality. She told me I could take a leave. She said, “Some people come back. Some don’t.” I nodded, but in my head I was already coming back. I thought I’d be back in eight months, maybe a year.
Then the baby arrived, and everything about that equation changed. She did not sleep in the bassinet. She cried on car rides. My husband worked evenings, so I handled the long stretch from dinner to midnight alone. My brain, which had previously been good at remembering deadlines, started losing track of days. The degree lived in its folder on the bookshelf. At some point I stopped opening the university emails. I told myself I would get back to it, but I was making a different choice every night when I collapsed on the couch.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me during that year: you might not have time for the goal, but you’re not actually wasting time. Those first two years taught me more about child development than my first two graduate courses did. I learned to watch my daughter’s cues—the particular angle of her head, the exact shape of her cry, the moment she looked at a toy and then looked at me with the question are you watching this? That kind of attention, the slow and repeated kind, turned out to be the real basis for the classroom work I would do later. But I didn’t know that then. I just knew I was tired and static.
When my daughter turned two, something shifted. She started a morning playgroup at the community center, 9 to 11:30, three mornings a week. I signed her up hoping it would help her learn to separate from me. It did. But what it also gave me were small, predictable windows of quiet. That first September, I signed up for one graduate course. Just one. I warned my husband I had no expectations.
Two years later, I finished the degree.
The return required a few very specific adjustments. I took one course at a time, and I chose evening sections whenever I could. One course only ran in the morning, so I emailed the professor and asked if I could submit drafts and participate by email instead of attending in person. I expected her to say no. She said, “Send me a plan.” I sent her one. It worked. That moment taught me to ask one clarifying question before assuming an arrangement was fixed. I now ask families in my classroom similar questions—can you pick up early on Tuesday? what time actually works for you?—because so many parents sit in silence waiting for permission.
For the actual work, I had to make it small. I stopped thinking in terms of reading a chapter and started thinking in terms of reading a page. I put PDFs on my phone so I could read at the playground. I kept a voice-memo app for recording observations, because you cannot write a field note and push a swing at the same time. On Sunday afternoons, my husband took my daughter to the park for exactly forty-five minutes, and I used those minutes to write a paragraph. Most weeks it came out to a terrible paragraph. But a bad paragraph was still more than the nothing I had been writing all year.
A friend in the program kept asking why I was doing everything so thin. “You’re still capable of a full course load,” she said, and she wasn’t wrong. But the context had changed. I told her my new metric was the minimum sustainable dose of work. If I could do one small thing every week without breaking the rhythm of our home life, then the semester was a win. The degree folded into the life we were already living instead of demanding a life we no longer had.
I also stopped comparing my timeline to my cohort’s. That comparison did the most damage in the beginning. Other students were finishing in two years, getting internships, presenting at conferences. I was rereading the same paragraph three times before bed because my eyes couldn’t focus. I was not falling behind in any meaningful sense; I was just moving at the speed of a household with a small child. The speed was not a moral failure.
I realized, eventually, that I was applying the same logic to myself that I had used when my daughter was learning to climb stairs. We did not expect her to do the whole flight at once. We celebrated two steps. It took a long time to give myself that same patience. I had wanted to be the version of myself who could do everything fast, and I had to let her go.
I finished the degree two years after my daughter turned three. I kept my job as a teaching assistant until the very end, partly for the benefits and partly because the preschool let me observe children during my breaks, which turned out to be richer than any textbook chapter. I walked at graduation with a toddler on my husband’s lap in the second row, eating raisins out of a snack cup.
Now I am a lead teacher at the same school. The curriculum guide never happened. That goal quietly disappeared, and I know enough now to see that it was more of a daydream than a direction. I used to think not finishing something meant I had given up. I now think it means I updated the plan based on new information.
There is still an email from my advisor sitting in my drafts folder, the one she sent during my leave. “Many people don’t come back,” she wrote. “That’s okay, but if you do, you’ll be a different kind of teacher.” I think about that line on the hard days. I don’t know if the delay made me a better teacher or just a slower one. It also made me more able to sit with a child who is struggling with a word or a shoe or a feeling, and to know that some things cannot be rushed.
I still have days when the work feels too slow, and I still wish my energy came in bigger blocks. The degree did not fix that. But the daughter who made everything take longer is now the person who says, “Mama, let’s read one page,” and we do. One page counts. It always counted. I just didn’t believe it at the time.
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