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The day starts as any other- get up, take a fast shower and throw on the make-up and clothes required to make me look respectable. I wake up the kids, get them dressed, fed a quick breakfast, and then pack them into the car to drop off at daycare. I spend fifteen minutes at the front door of the daycare trying to calm down my two year old, and then rush out as soon as he gets interested in the truck his sister just pulled out of the diaper bag. I make my way to work, and spend the day going through the motions of a professional working woman.

Over lunch I take twenty minutes to get on-line and check out the assignments my professor posted for this week. Three article summaries, 75 pages of required reading, respond to two discussion questions and then to three other student's responses. Great, I'll be typing until midnight every night this week. Hey, I got an A on my last paper! Three responses to my discussion questions... cripes, that lady from Tennessee has the strangest ideas!

At the end of the day I quickly pack my things, careful to avoid the co-worker sobbing in the other room to three other women about her divorce. I made the mistake last week of going in there to console her, only to end up thirty minutes late to pick up my screaming nine month old daughter, and two year old son with soggy pants.

Pick up the kids, get home, change into sweats (whoever invented sweatpants was a genius!) and try to start something for supper. I kiss my husband when he gets home, and listen as he regales me with tails of comedic disaster in the life of the self-employed. Eat supper; yes Johnny, the pizza crust is a little dark, but you'll be okay. Give baths, read three...make it four stories to the kids before it's finally lights out.

And now it's time to switch gears. I pour myself a cup of coffee, pull out my laptop and begin reading through the articles posted by the professor this morning. All from professional journals that, at 10:30 at night, tend to make a person worry more about the condition of their pillow than economy's impact on our field of study. I blink through bleary eyes to respond to a few of the other student's responses, and then head to bed. I look up to see that it's one a.m., and my alarm will be going off in five and a half hours. Then I start all over again as I have been doing for the last two years. One year left, I tell myself as I crawl in next to my sleeping husband. One year left until I have my masters degree. I think back as I start to fall asleep about how bumpy the ride has been: a full career, mom of two, checking assignments over lunch and Sundays before church. Up until the wee hours of the night reading and typing. Spending my nights up with children reading articles out loud to help them go to sleep. It will all be worth it... I think.

Learn more about this author, Aimee Schrader.
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