For me, post secondary education had always been just out of reach. I did not attend university straight out of high school. I did the applications, got the acceptance letters. I even had a dorm room and a roommate assigned to me. However, it was not to be for me, at that time. Although I have some regrets about not getting school out of the way as a young person, I know that things work out as they should. I am well aware that the stars would not have aligned as they did for me had I gone. I wouldn’t have had all of my life experiences that led me to marriage, family and the great life that is mine. So, I went about life, busily raising five boys five and under…and when my youngest child entered grade one, I entered first year university. His first day of big boy school was my first day of grown up school. I felt very fortunate and life was good. After all, my ‘job’ was to read great literature, discuss it at length, and then write about it. I felt stimulated and validated. Fast forward a decade or so through various job gains and losses. Our home changed, pets came and went and our boys grew up. Just like they say “The days are long but the years are short”. Again, life moved along, and we found ourselves back raising a brood of young children, this time, they are children who desperately need a full time parent at home each day…someone home to send them off in the morning, and someone home to greet them at the end of each school day, at least for a year or two, maybe more. When we made the decision to adopt four young children, we also made the decision to dedicate one of us (me) to being the rock that they needed to make them feel secure and safe in their new life. I didn’t win a cash lottery, but I definitely won the life lottery. So, here I am, true to my word, freshly at home with life lottery winnings. What to do, what to do. Go back to school, of course! Online learning. An amazing evolutionary tool. Get a degree from the comfort of your own home. Last time around it was a major in English Lit and a minor in Women’s Studies. Relevant for my life at the time…I loved literature, hence the English major. I grew up surrounded by brothers and I was raising five sons who by golly gum were going to be raised with feminist principles if it was the last thing I did, hence the Women’s Studies focus. My poor boys. They have many a story to share about mom’s highly attuned feminism outlook and the effect it had upon them during their formative years.
This time around, it will be a diploma in Addiction Studies, possibly followed by a Family Counselling Certificate. Relevant for my life now, as my fostering experiences often cause me to wish I understood more about the primary reasons that children come into care, and I have encountered addiction issues within my own social circle. Looking back upon my childhood, I see things in retrospect that were there and that contributed to my own development and attitudes. I have taken mini ‘addictions 101’ workshops that touch upon the many multi- layered issues surrounding addictions. These workshops have stirred up some uncomfortable feelings about the world around me, past and present, and caused me to examine my own relationship with alcohol. For me, discomfort is often a sign of my needing to learn more so, it seems like a good fit for my current stage of life. Who knows how this lottery will turn out.
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