Going back to school as a working mom: What it’s really like
The kitchen table had three stations set up on Tuesday night—math workbook on the left, novel on the right, and my open textbook in the middle, still on chapter four. My daughter was working through equivalent fractions, my son had discovered that if he read the football scores out loud, nobody would remind him to get back to his assigned reading, and I was trying to remember the difference between the primacy effect and the recency effect while also checking the clock. The reading check-in for my evening class starts at eight. It’s the only live part of the whole week, and I keep showing up having skimmed instead of read.
Nobody in this family believes I actually study. My daughter walked past me last week, saw my highlighter, and said, “You draw on your papers now?” The image my kids hold of me is apparently someone who does not sit on the floor with binders. It’s still unusual for them to see me learning anything that doesn’t involve their spelling words.
I enrolled in a certificate program in January—family education support, tied to my job at the county agency—eleven years after my degree and six years after my youngest started kindergarten. On paper the timing made sense. The kids are in school all day, my hours at work are more stable than they were in the ambulance years, and I was ready to learn something that wasn’t directly about keeping people alive in the back of a moving vehicle. I told myself it would be easy to fit classwork into the space between drop-off and dinnertime.
I was wrong about the space. There is no space. There is unpacked laundry, permission slips, a forgotten trumpet, a microwave that needs a deep clean, and forty minutes of quiet that get swallowed by making banana bread with a daughter who wants to talk about the playground. School does not stack on top of a household. It spreads out and pushes against everything. Two weeks in, I was putting my daughter to bed, and she asked why I was gone instead of being in the kitchen with her. I hadn’t left the house. I was in the bedroom with my laptop, twenty feet away, but I was distinctly gone.
The turning point wasn’t dramatic. It was a Tuesday that went from bad to worse: a staff meeting ran long, my son had a meltdown about a school project he’d left until the last minute, and I realized at 7:15 pm that I had not opened my laptop once. I drove to the library, sat in the parking lot for an hour, and listened to the entire lecture as a podcast. I cried once. Then I played a second lecture I had already heard, because I could not remember anything from the first one.
That was the real lesson of the first month: audio is the only format I have. I used to read physical textbooks at the public library with a pen in my hand. That person is gone for now. I listen while I drive to work, while I unload the dishwasher, while I wait in the pickup line, one earbud out so I can still hear the teacher.
What I learned beyond that, now that I’m in March and still here, comes straight from the scraped knees of figuring it out. You don’t do the readings before the class. You do them before the quiz. My colleague Dana—who did this exact certificate three years ago while raising twins—was the one who told me this. She did not say you should aim to complete the readings ahead of schedule. She said “I read everything in the parking lot of the testing center.” It’s the most honest educational advice I have ever received. I’ve moved all my quiz dates onto the family wall calendar, and that is the one calendar I actually check.
I also stopped pretending I could keep every household rule the same. For years I cooked dinner every weeknight. Starting in February, my son cooks one dinner a week—Tuesdays—because that’s my class night. His dinner is usually pasta with sauce from a jar and a side of chicken nuggets he microwaves. I do not supervise him. I do not taste-test. He burned exactly one pot of pasta so far, and the house survived. It turns out that when you let a kid hold a wooden spoon for twenty minutes, he gets something out of it too—a taste of ownership, or maybe just mastery of the box of rigatoni.
The household slowly adapted to a new set of small expectations. There’s a binder in the car now. It has my syllabus, some printed article summaries, and a highlighter. I do fifteen minutes of reading when I get to work early, before unlocking the office door. I keep the binder in the passenger seat so I have to physically take it with me when I park. My daughter has started doing her own version of this. Her reading folder has lived in the back seat for a week.
The honest truth is that my grades have been average. I got a B on the first midterm. The second one I only passed because I did the entire unit prep in the waiting room of a dental appointment I scheduled for myself. It was a terrible use of a dental waiting room, but it was twenty uninterrupted minutes with nothing else pulling at me.
The thing I did not expect is that all of this has made me better at sitting with my daughter while she does her own homework. Before, I would look over her shoulder and correct her mistakes immediately. Now I catch myself saying “do the first three problems, and we’ll check them together.” That’s apparently how you have to structure your own attention when it’s being pulled in six directions. You break things into chunks. You make the chunks visible. You check in. You don’t hover.
Last Saturday, my daughter came to me with her own mid-semester realization. She lined up her Lego blocks on the kitchen floor and showed me that one-fourth is the same as two-eighths. I don’t know if it was her teacher, or the decimals unit, or just that she keeps seeing me draw little charts in my own notebooks. But she was proud of herself, and my pride in her understanding was almost embarrassing in its size.
We’re not a family that has balance. Nobody in this house has balance. But we’re getting better at failing less loudly. I have a sticky note on the back door that says “if it’s not on the wall calendar, it doesn’t exist.” The note has been there for three weeks, and it’s the most honest thing in the house.
I still have eight modules left. I don’t know how the semester will end. I know Tuesday nights will stay demanding, and that at 7:45 I’ll be rushing to log in with dried pasta on the counter and somebody’s headphones lost in the couch cushions. But for now it works—or maybe it’s better to say it’s the only version of working I’m willing to accept. If they offered me a full-time program right now, I would say no. I have enough room for a Tuesday reading check-in and a binder in the car. The rest can wait.
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