Higher education rant

As if I haven't invested enough time and money (well, technically I haven't so much invested money as taken out enormous loans)--- but time, oh yes, that has been invested. Nights of hardly-homecooked-meals. Getting up at four a.m. to do homework. Weeks of moving through life in a sort of auto pilot brain setting just to get the kids up, fed, dressed, off to school, drive to the university, find a parking space, curse freely about not finding said parking space, run to class, need more coffee, borrow a pen, spend lunch biting inside of cheek and doing homework for next classes, surreptitiously read PhD comic and eat sugar to wake self up while tenured professor drones on interminably, run back out to car, speed to Isis' preschool, speed to Ezra's kindergarden, come home, shoes in the basket, start dinner, play with kids, no pulling your sister's hair, don't put that in your nose, serve dinner, I don't care if you don't like it, you get what you get and you don't throw a fit, kids in bath, pajamas, teeth, final pee, bedtime story, bedtime story again, mama come back in here for one more kiss, stumble out to stare at my Hebrew homework glaring balefully at me from the top of my backpack.

This has more or less been my life since January of 2006, except for the really fun times when I also had part-time jobs, or that one semester when I took twenty hours (what?!?!). I really have to question why I put myself through this when plenty of people can have the satisfaction of being stressed out and neurotic and NOT have papers due and strange Greek verb tenses to choke on. I think it's called Life, and I really wanted something different. Especially for the kids--- yes! I have guilt! Maybe if they'd been in a groovy place smelling of lavender with peach-blossom lazured walls instead of loud, bright, soccer-mom-filled, challah-baking madhouses. (Well, the challah part is redeeming I suppose.)

And with just one more semester to go, the diabolical prospect of an administrative snafu looms directly over me. University of Tennessee students refer to this as the Big Orange Screw, the tiny little clerical error that you discover your senior year that whumps you right back to 90 hours or completely obliterates all those Natural Science with Lab credits you so painstakingly accumulated AGAINST JUST SUCH AN EVENTUALITY!!!!!

So, all of the hard work and guilt-inducing absence from children has been for The Purpose: less the piece of paper and more the Rosie the Riveter bicep salute of knowing that I've accomplished it, when lesser women have whimpered in fear and gone back to their tanning beds. And now the prospect of having it all sickeningly tossed out the window is making me gnash my teeth. Like in Where the Wild Things Are: they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.

I'm trying to remember now if that describes me or the happiness-devouring money pit that is higher education. If it weren't for my friend Nicanor, I might have thrown my laptop across the room yesterday. He put things in perspective for me: I do not, at this time, nor have I had at any other time, blood under my fingernails from a bike wipe-out and a road rash over most of my body, alhamdulillah. Still. That thesis isn't going to write itself, and I find myself glumly wondering what the point is--- the temptation to procrastinate and read The Inimitable Jeeves is so overwhelming it makes me giddy.