This school thing is temporarily driving me crazy. Sitting through our final class for the summer I started thinking about how I could possibly make the whole thing work. Easy. I just take all three class and internship in the fall. Then next semester all that would leave is one. I’ve looked at the syllabus for at least two out of the four. They’re not bad. The papers here are only ten pages. But the classes are weekly the whole semester.

I don’t know how people do this. 300 hours a semester for internship comes out to about 20 hours per week (using 15 weeks). You get 2.5 hour a week from the class meeting. Six hours a day, three times week, that seems to me like an absolute eternity. And people seriously do this every day. They leave their homes and go to a completely different place for a job that they’d have to hopefully really like. They would have to.

My bachelors program was finished in an accelerated 15 months. Two full semesters crammed into two summers, plus fall and spring with clinicals going on through all of those. I loved it. There was none of this hemming and hawing and calculating and obsessively thinking. There was the aching heart of me missing my baby but it was only for a time until I could finally stay home with him. It helped that he was in good hands.

I did want to quit once while we were sitting by the seminary fountain. I absolutely would have except that I seriously believed then in submitting to my husband. His voice was my divine and guiding light and if I listened to it then I couldn’t go wrong. He didn’t think that I should quit. We were only going to continue having kids from that point on. We were there, I was doing it, I might as well just get it done. He didn’t have that ache.

I thought that going to school, ultimately, was pointless. In the grand scheme of life, when I stood before God, this would not be thing of my life that mattered. What mattered would be how I loved other people and what I did with the time that was given me. That time, I wanted to give it to those most important. Them. I also had thoughts. It would be easier to finish now with one, then to try to do it later with more.

So for me it was basically now or never. Realistically I didn’t see it happening, going back to school later, if I was to quit. It’d be hard to juggle school and little kids, and that would’ve been my choice, and I was fine with it. School isn’t what really mattered anyway. But the voice of God thought otherwise, and the voice of God thought school did matter. So I trusted that voice and I did not quit. I finished and I have no regrets.

School is what it is right now, an unclear path. I walked away glad for another box checked off, but sad feeling like it could be a while before I was back, if ever. But it hasn’t stopped me from looking up Colorado Christian or Johnson, the other schools that were mostly online options. Maybe they’d let me take one or two with them still. But the Tuesday foundations class is a no-go. Those are the cross-country meet days.