For me, it was less about the salary raise and more about my love of learning and my nagging desire to perpetually accomplish something . . . anything. Oh and also, I wanted to be smarter than my husband since he does not have a master's degree. As a feminist, I believe it's important that we women constantly strive to dominate the male race and flaunt our intellectual superiority whenever possible.
In all seriousness, when I first began my graduate program, I remember visiting my father (who holds two master's degrees and had begun work on a doctorate in the early 90's - I guess there goes my intellectual domination ambition) one weekend. My mother had died fairly recently, and when something positive happened in any of our lives, we held onto it with a white-knuckle grip for fear that yet one more constant would vanish from our world. So that weekend, my father introduced me to everyone as "my daughter Becky, who will be starting her master's program next week."
At that moment, I knew I had to finish my degree for my family, for my husband, for myself, and for my mom . . . and for the thousands of dollars in tuition money Dan and I were shelling out.
My master's program ended up providing more than educational advancement. Every month I met with a cohort, a group of Idaho teachers from all walks of life and experience. We called our meetings "group therapy at the Institute" because we truly shared our struggles, joys, and neuroses with one another.
On top of that, my graduate program emphasized arts integration in the classroom, so most of the projects provided me with a creative outlet to release some of the anger, bitterness, and sadness I had experienced as a result of my mother's death. Gradually, I began to heal, all the while thinking how strange it was that a graduate program would be the catalyst for me entering the acceptance phase of the grief process.
Then came the big master's thesis. You know, the dreaded final paper or project at the end of a master's program that is probably the leading cause of suicide among grad students.
I faced finishing my thesis with trepidation. It meant saying goodbye to the safe environment of the weekend classes where I could complain with other like-minded teachers about the lack of and the necessity for arts education in our public school system. It meant having to stand by these convictions in the real world of education. It meant the possibility of ruining my perfect 4.0.
But I did finish in a relatively painless fashion. I did have one and only one screaming/crying fit. I was trying to copy and paste a couple of my lesson plans into the final paper, and the formats would not transfer correctly. Dan, who is a software engineer and speaks to computers like Dr. Doolittle speaks to animals, couldn't even get it to work, at least not in the three minutes that I allowed him. I screamed at him to leave me alone, and he returned to his permanent perch in front of the Nintendo Wii as I disintegrated into a deluge of tears.
"Smart boy," said the third grade teacher at my school who had finished the same master's program a few years earlier. "He understood that's just par for the course."
So I made it. I have spent exactly a quarter of my life pursuing higher education, and I am now officially smarter than my husband which, don't worry, ladies, I will not let him forget.
I do wish my mother had been here to see me receive my master's degree and I mean physically here, not looking down on me from some ethereal alternate universe. But sometimes a little bit of pain brings about a greater sense of accomplishment.
“Time is a brutal but a careless thief
Who takes our lot but leaves behind the grief.”
- Emmylou Harris, The Pearl
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