matriculating, happily

It's been 4 months, nearly to the day, since I last posted here. My apologies to those of you who missed me, and my most heartfelt thanks for your notes, pokes, prods, emails of concerns, messages of interest, and reminders that I once was a scrapbooker who held a blog that people actually read. :)

My life has changed, drastically, in a good way. It wasn't a sudden change, or unexpected, but the kind that gathers force, slowly, long built in anticipation. In some ways, it was a change first set into action in my childhood, delayed and reformed and restructured until it had become something new, and then had to rediscover itself.

I left university six years ago, with a toddler, and a partner headed to graduate school, with not much of a plan for my own future, but an invested interest and much energy involved in creating good futures for these two critical figures in my life. I had never thought I wouldn't finish university, and the expectation of doing great things was an imminent pressure felt from all my surroundings.

Somewhere between high school and motherhood, I lost what I once held precious and true, a desire that defined me, and that had always been there, and taken for granted. I had never really considered life outside of school, an environment of learning. The career path I had once obsessively thrown myself down was a cumulation of all things I loved: hard work, life long learning, creativity, challenges, a goal of contributing to something big and good. Distracted by unexpected and unwelcomed events, and unexpected but welcomed things, that desire was forgotten; dropped slowly, like a sweater that trails behind you, one arm at a time, as it slips off from where you once thought it was tied tightly. And occasionally you think of it, there is a vague recollection of something that once kept you warm, but you can't remember what it was or where you last saw it, but you might remember that it was pink and fuzzy.

Then, one baby became two (not literally, that's impossible, we just added another); a partner remained a partner but became a husband, and I was needed and I defined myself by what I did, and people called me a mother and a wife and a keeper of the house, and those things filled me and consumed me, and I was busy and I was loved, and I did all sorts of things, and some of them some people thought were great. But there remained the sensation of things forgotten, greater things not achieved, and things left finished poorly that could have been done so much better. That forgotten desire smouldered quietly.

The looming end of degrees soon to be finished by one, and school soon to be started for another, and a book consumed in a hot, humid day sitting at the park in the August sun, coalesced together together and I found that desire I had forgotten I had forgotten, and it burned brightly once again.

It seems like a long time ago but not so long ago, that I decided to come back to school. It wasn't even that I had to make the decision, I always knew I would return to finish things I had started and had left in such a poor, broken condition; but timing and life and a really good book pulled it all together and the decision was made.

And now, I'm here.
Sitting in the library, quiet study area, in the stacks of books where I am regularly mistaken for a librarian.

And, the best part? I've totally fallen in love.
I'm in love with something that I loved once before, but it's so much better than I ever remembered or ever could have expected it to be.
I'm in love with a concept, a goal, an idea. I'm in love with a life, with learning; I'm in love with a lab.
Every day I wake up, excited and nervous and anxious to get going, to get here, to sit here, to run my fingers along books and download papers to read, and sit in a lecture hall with 108 kids who are 6 years younger than me, and listen to professors lecture and talk on subjects they too are in love with.
Every night I go to bed with questions swimming in my head, and I dream! I dream about biochemistry and molecules, and pathways and networks, and every morning I wake up with those questions still swimming in my head (they are noisy), and if I am very, very lucky, I even wake up on occasion with an answer.
I know what I want to do, and the funny thing is, I knew it all along.
But the difference is, I'm here now and I'm doing it.
And I love it more than I ever thought I could.


Ashley.