I found my self-worth on a hot May day in 2004 when I crossed the center stage and, holding my head high for perhaps the first time in my thirty-three years, was handed a piece of paper that said I’d finally arrived.
And in that half sheet of fancy paper, marked with the seal of educational approval, I found value. I found esteem. I found me.
I started college on a whim when I was twenty-nine years old. I’d never really done anything right. I’d certainly never finished anything. And I really didn’t think I’d make it very far. Honestly…I didn’t think I was smart enough to do it. I didn’t believe in me.
You see, I dropped out of high school at sixteen years old. I got pregnant my junior year and the first thing my dad did is pull me out of school. Looking back, it was probably the best move he could have made at the time. It was 1988 and in tiny Soldotna, Alaska, hiding out was probably the best thing to do. But that’s another story…
Anyway…on the advice of my cousin, I signed up for some online classes in basic education, having no clue what I wanted to do. When I was very young I’d wanted to be a teacher, so I had that in the back of my mind. But then I remembered I didn’t like other people’s children, (ironic, yes?) and so I brushed that idea aside. But it didn’t matter, really, because I never figured I’d stick with it long enough to get a degree in anything anyway.
My first year I was completely distance education. I worked from home, in my pajamas, while bouncing Mya on one knee. I spoke to the Oregon legislature that year on behalf of distance education financing at the request of the president of Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. I was, apparently, the epitome of what distance education was designed for. The availability of online courses was without a doubt, the only way a person like me would ever see the inside of a ‘classroom’.
I was handed my associates degree in general education in the spring of 2002. Mya’s mom aged out of the system that year and went out on her own, leaving us with Mya. A couple months later Mya’s two aunts were placed with us, then ten and six years old. Our house was full, my drive was more intense than ever, and I wondered what was next…for me.
For three years I’d lived six miles from Linfield College, one of the best private four year colleges on the west coast. Known for their football team’s longstanding record of wins, Linfield is a top notch place of education. There was no way I could afford it. There was no way they were going to let me in. And there was no way I was going to drive by one more time without finding out if I was right.
So again, on a whim, I pulled into the office of administration and asked to see someone. I told him a bit about myself. I laid out my transcripts across his desk. He looked down at my 4.0 gpa…which I didn’t realize was a big deal…and he said, “We’ll be seeing you in the fall.”
Six weeks later, with $15,000 a year in scholarship money in hand…enough to cover half the costs… I stepped foot into a formal classroom for the first time in my life. I was thirty-one years old with five kids and a husband at home and the moment I walked across that old oak grove and entered the towering brick buildings of the English department, I knew this was my true home for the next two years.
Linfield was the epitome of everything I never thought I’d be…back when I was that ‘knocked up high school drop-out’…a role I’d never truly shed and to this day, still hold on to in some ways. It was…honestly…the highlight of my life then, and still, to consider myself a part of hundreds of years of students who’d walked within those brick walls. For me, those two years of Linfield made up for all that had come before…and that I’d yet to endure. For within those walls I finally found a ‘me’ that I could learn to like.
And so it came to be that in the spring of 2004, I walked across the center stage of graduation with four hundred other seniors and felt like I was the only one on the stage in the hot summer sun, my head held high, my flowing black gown bellowing around me as I crossed over into a new life.
