At the age of thirty-seven, after a worldwide pandemic, diagnosis of a chronic illness and my estranged mother’s death, I enrolled on a degree course with the Open University and changed my whole life. You might think that making such a huge commitment to a part-time degree that would take me six years to complete after all that was foolish, reactive, and thoughtless perhaps, but in truth, it was the best thing I could have done at the time.
When I was nineteen, I dashed off to university following a disastrous rebound relationship from my first love that culminated in an early miscarriage and a broken soul. I had absolutely no support at home-in fact both awful relationships I was running from were due to me seeking the love I never received in my abusive home. In case it wasn’t already abundantly clear, that is not the headspace you want to be in when embarking on your new life at university! I lasted until the March/April (it’s a bit of a blur) of my first year of university, then went home to visit my mum, pregnant and heartbroken AGAIN (turns out the contraceptive pill wasn’t the best form of contraception for me). Alone, terrified and humiliated, I told nobody except my best friend at home, but when I lost that baby at 19 weeks, I again was completely alone, ending up in hospital due to haemorrhaging. In hindsight, this was a tremendously dark part of my life, but I just got on with it, putting everything that had happened into a box in my mind and sealing it up. After the trauma I had been through, I stayed at home, deciding that I wasn’t good enough for university and finding a strange comfort in the known traumas of my family. I convinced myself that I just wasn’t cut out for the university experience, and it was just one of those things that went into the box in my mind. I didn’t realise at the time that I was running from one trauma to the next, looking for love and acceptance that was nowhere to be found.
To be fair, my short university experience hadn’t helped to convince me that I was cut out for it. I was surrounded by other students who seemed to know what was going on, what the ‘rules’ were and who had the social, economic and cultural capital I didn’t possess and had no hope of gaining while there. I felt very much like an outsider, having to learn things as I went, always feeling about ten steps behind everyone else, never quite catching up. I was there for the wrong reasons-blindly running from my old life but not capable of making a new life just yet. I must have seemed so strange, but I made up for all of that by being the life and soul of the parties. My housemates all received weekly/monthly care packages, lovingly sent from their parents, they were visited often and taken out for dinner and told how much they were missed. I found out on my only visit home that my mum had emptied my bedroom and redecorated it without my knowledge and discarded many of my prized possessions that I had left with her for safekeeping. In hindsight, I have so much empathy for that girl who was so desperate to get away from her traumatic life that she dove head-first into a brand-new life, completely alone and with so much hope that it would all work out in her favour.
Over the next almost twenty years, I moved out of London, met my now husband and had a beautiful son after some fertility challenges. I threw myself into motherhood so deeply that my only hopes and dreams were for him, working hard on healing my childhood trauma lest it touch him in any way and creating a childhood he would never need to run from. I had always had a dull, aching, unquenched thirst for learning, but experiencing the world through my son’s eyes and seeing how much he learned every second of the day, learning with him, and experiencing the world anew through his perspective gave me an insatiable appetite for education again, the likes of which I had not felt since I, myself was a child, asking my teachers for more homework and researching history and literature in my spare time.
Then, on the school run one day, I received a call from my sister to tell me that my estranged mother had been diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t believe it at first. She had always been someone who had imaginary ailments that turned out to be nothing and had often threatened us that she would die young. But the decades of constantly having a cigarette in her hand and perhaps her own unhealed trauma had caught up with her and she was terminally ill. Shortly after, the pandemic struck and against my gut instincts, I did what my older sisters advised and attempted to make amends before her cancer took my chance to do so away. Typically, it was fine while I was useful to her, but as soon as her needs were met, I was once again thrown away like a used teabag and instead of building bridges, she seemed to decide to go out with a bang, creating as much pain and confusion as possible. Through all of this, I was becoming more and more ill, trying to work and care for my son when one day, after a much-needed trip to my happy place, the beach, I ended up in agony and bed-bound for three weeks, culminating in a diagnosis of Fibromyalgia. From what I know about the illness now, it is no wonder it came to a head at that moment in time!
As I learned more about trauma and fibromyalgia, I volunteered for local community groups and non-profit organisations and began to find my voice, but the thirst for learning was never quenched fully. On a whim one day, I contacted both Student Finance England and The Open University and found the details for a BA(Hons) in Childhood and Youth Studies. I realised that this was the degree for me, it was perfect! Within a couple of weeks, I was enrolled on the first module and began planning my life around how to home-educate my son and myself at the same time!
It has been challenging and I have struggled to balance my usual responsibilities with my degree, but I am three years in now (halfway!) and I have never for one second regretted my choice. This degree has given me the confidence in myself I have never had and has increased my love of learning immeasurably. I have something that is just for me that my husband and son have little if anything to do with except cheering me on and supporting me and I didn’t realise how much I needed that until I had it. I have so many aspirations now and much more direction in my life than I have ever had before and for that, I will always be grateful.
Whilst this is an extremely personal and vulnerable post, I write it to demonstrate that you can come from many challenges but still show up for yourself at any age and achieve goals you may think are years behind you. Life is a constant learning journey, and we should never stop learning new things about ourselves and the world around us. If you have a passion for learning, or anything else, I truly believe that it is never too late to start. You never know where it might take you.
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