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!