Second Guessing

It's been a good day gone bad. Not totally, horribly bad.  Nothing devastating happened.  No maiming, maladies, or death.  But bad, nonetheless.

All started well enough.  The kids got off for school okay.  I left on time for my classes this morning, amid joking by my husband of my schoolgirl status.  I remembered to bring along something to eat for breakfast.  Traffic wasn't wonderful, but not horribly bad.  I arrived at the satellite school in plenty of time to prepare myself and get situated.  I even enjoyed my first class:  Psychology.  We discussed some interesting things, I took some notes, and I did well on the class exercise.

After Psych, I sat down, did some reading, ate my lunch, and waited for my next class to start.  That's when things started to go wrong.

Composition & Rhetoric.  You would think that class would be cake for me since I love to write.  You would be thinking wrongly.  It's an entirely different kind of writing.  In class we discussed pre-writing and rough drafts.  We talked about paragraphs with topic sentences and supporting evidence.  Then we had to write a paragraph.  Just a paragraph.  Using one of five topic sentences provided for us.  We had to prewrite, then list our sentence and supporting evidence, and finally write the paragraph, to be turned in at the end of class.

I suppose I could blame this on performance anxiety again, as I did yesterday.  To be honest (and terribly cliched), I felt like a bull in a china shop.  A square peg in a round hole.  As I struggled with my format and evidence and sentences and the like, others around me breezed through it.  They're all so much younger, I told myself, and they probably all just did this same thing within the last year or two.  Still, I left school today heavy-hearted.

I beat myself up over it during the drive home.  Why am I doing this to myself? I thought.  We can't even afford for me to go to school, and here I am spending this money and failing.  I'm too old, anyway.  You can't teach old dogs new tricks, right?  And if I just failed at "sit!" how the hell am I going to be able to Bunny Hop while wearing a pink tutu in two months?

I'm a little prone to drama when chastising myself.

I know my husband would tell me I'm crazy.  It was one bad class.  I'll pick it up.  I'm not wasting our money.  It's an investment.  I can almost recite what I know he'd tell me verbatim, although he makes better faces while saying it.  Still, I can't help second guessing myself.  Yes, I've always wanted to go to college.  Yes, I was a pretty darn good high school student.  But did I wait too long?

Maybe I shouldn't have chosen what has turned out to be our worst financial period in over a decade to try and do this.  Maybe instead I should have gone out and pounded the pavement, looking for a job.  Yes, I'd already submitted a dozen applications.  True, I'd only heard anything from two of those: one to tell me they were filling the position internally, the other to tell me I wasn't what they were looking for.

Whaddya mean you're not looking for a stay-at-home mom who hasn't worked outside the home in almost twenty years?

Maybe I should have tried harder.  No job too meanial.  Set my sights lower.  Maybe.

It's too late now.  Wrong decision or not, I'm in college.  Waste of money or not, I'm going to school.  I'm just going to have to work harder.  Continue setting an example for my children.  After all, it was only one bad class, right?