It’s the chaos that draws me in. I’m familiar with this chaos because I am a student/parent myself. Here I am wandering through the houses of my neighbors; graduate students who are also parents. A lot happens in these makeshift homes.
It’s not just the fact that I have two simultaneous full-time “jobs”, neither of which brings in any money, or the fact that I’m not being as good at parenting as I think I should be, or the fact that I’m beginning to suspect that the children think they are the rulers of our little kingdom. My husband and I have both returned to college after making a life together somewhere else. The fact that we’re sacrificing steady income and proximity to friends and family to finish our degrees makes us approach our schooling with a level of desperation that won’t abide anything but excellence. It’s hard not to take that out on the kids.
It’s true that many children are raised by parents who are struggling to feed and clothe them, and many parents wear a variety of hats throughout the day. Many parents bring work home with them, either in a briefcase and in their heads. But whereas I used to make myself let go of work and focus on my family, now I’m actually supposed to be working
But the kind of work that a graduate student brings home is of a different variety, and requires a brain free to ponder, process, and examine. These parents face a crisis of literal attention deficit, and it’s not a disorder, just the hurdle of the moment.
Noël Joy Ash 