The Right Time
Aug 5th, 2008 by Kate Olson
A friend and I sat for hours today and discussed returning to school - her for her doctorate, me for my masters. I was trying to make myself feel better about the fact that I can’t actually start my program until next summer, which means I won’t actually finish the program until July of 2010 - with my patience level, this just is NOT fast enough. I just kept saying that I have plenty of time to go to school and work, years and years and YEARS to go, go, go - maybe I should just chill out for awhile and just BE. I mean, I’ll only be 29 when July of 2010 rolls around, definitely not too late to get my masters.
My friend was saying that she wants to get everything done NOW before her daughter grows up, while I’m trying to rationalize waiting for some things until my kids are older. We explained our rationale to one another - it was so funny to hear that we have such different ideas of when the “right” time to spend more time away from ours kids is…………..is there EVER a right time? Our kids will deal with it at whatever age they are and I’m fairly certain that no matter how old my children are, the extra ours I spend at school won’t impact them as much as those hours impact me.
Maybe I’m wrong, who knows. Maybe there IS a right time. Until I get that mythical manual, though, I won’t know and will have to just keep stumbling around in the parenting darkness - at least when my darlings complain about me in therapy in years to come, they’ll be complaining about a highly educated mother………and think about my friend’s daughters, they’ll be ranting against their DR. mom!
Stumble along, that’s all we can do………….
Kate Olson is a mother of 2 toddlers and lives in rural Wisconsin. She balances motherhood & working from home in a semi-functional fashion - you can read more about Kate on our contributors page. She blogs about education and lots of business/tech stuff at Kate Says . Want more? Read all of Kate’s posts!
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Kate, this has both a conversationally personal tone and offers true insight into what I think is a very common struggle for career minded parents.
Having completed my BS on the tale end of my daughter being born was tough, but I will share with you that my wife just completing a year long and tough program to become a massage therapist really began to take its toll on my daughter.
It was so much she couldn’t handle it, mind you - it was that our family was always part time to her. Part of the time I was working long hard hours and when I was home mommy was going to school long hard hours.
As you say, we must all stumble our ways through life but from my heart I would encourage you to see your childrens’ time as a precious gift that could be taken from you in a heartbeat.
It is often in that context that I place my decisions. If I did not have my tomorrow - what would I choose. At times, I choose the path of my benefit - knowing full well tomorrow will come, right? Afterall, we are allowed our indulgences.
However, I cannot help but think in those quiet moments reading a story to my little one or when my daughter smears ice cream on my wife’s nose - those are the times I cherish. My education only offers a relief by which I might judge how special all of the other times truly are.
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I did my grad degree part time over 5 1/2 years, a period of time that saw me engaged, married, having our first kid, and then our second kid. Without a doubt, the hardest part of that stretch of time was when our kids were born. I’m also facing the same decision about going back for my doc degree, and my line of thought is similar to your friend’s - I’d rather do it now while they’re little (3 and 6 mos.) and get it done before T-ball and dance and Girl Scouts and school plays start, so I can be free of degree-related obligations to do all those things. The trade-off, of course, is missed time now.
Not sure if there IS a right time, per se; there will always be reasons to NOT do it. As for me, I promised my wife (after a particularly hard summer when Dylan was an infant and I was at class an hour away 4 nights a week) that I’d hold off on going back for the doc until he was in kindergarten or 1st grade. That gives us all a little extra time and room to breathe for a few years without having to deal with the time management crises that a heavy graduate load presents. Also, he’ll be 6 or 7, and Kiera will then be 3 or 4 - it’ll be easier for me to be away/working when the kids are a little more self-sufficient, as opposed to being newborns or toddlers.