Second Chance

As the fresh crop of new college students filed into the cavernous old auditorium, tromping across the creaky oak floor, I kept a watchful eye for my mother. The seats for the college entrance exam were filling fast, but I knew I couldn’t miss her when she entered the room. After all, at forty, she was twice as old as most of the eager young students, and wearing tent dresses these summer days to keep her eight-month-pregnant body cool.

Though she often complained about being “big as a house,” I hadn’t given it much thought until now. The air inside Churchill Hall, a campus icon built without air conditioning in 1926, some thirty-nine years ago, felt stifling hot. Two big ceiling fans whirring high above the second floor auditorium offered no respite. Suddenly I was preoccupied with how my mother might feel entering the auditorium during one of the last summer heat waves in southern Oregon.

            In June after my freshman year, the Dean of Students asked me to help proctor the exam. My morning assignment was to help set up the tables and chairs. By nine thirty, the outdoor and indoor temperatures hovered at ninety degrees. That’s when it dawned on me that my mother might not show up. I pictured her driving the old Volvo down the hill, her bare legs sticking to the leatherette car seat. Then, waddling up the steps to Churchill Hall, maneuvering around excited teenagers oblivious of her condition. If she made it that far, I was convinced she might change her mind before she signed in at the front table and was assigned a metal folding chair at one of the long tables.

            I had talked my mother into taking the entrance exam during winter quarter, before I learned she was pregnant, convinced a college education would get her on a sounder financial footing after years of scraping by since our Wyoming ranch failed in ‘57. When our young family moved to a Quonset house in an abandoned gas field called Badger Basin, our lives started to unravel.

            In February ‘58, weeks after giving birth to my baby brother Tommy during a fierce Wyoming blizzard, my mother took a secretarial job eighty miles away in Billings, Montana to help make ends meet. She rented an apartment during the week, while my father worked at nearby ranches and later, road construction at a uranium mine in the Bighorn Mountains. Nearly eleven, I was in charge of my three younger siblings weekdays while my thirteen-year-old brother worked part-time for a local rancher. By summer, we loaded Dad’s half-ton GMC pickup that he had outfitted with a steel rack to hold our belongings and caravanned to central California, moving in temporarily with Mom’s relatives.

            While my father sought new footing after a lifetime of ranching, my mother relied on her one-year of Business College to secure office jobs that paid the family bills. Even now, in 1965, as the only secretary in the college PE department, my mother’s take-home pay hovered at two hundred thirty dollars a month while my father was still seeking a stable job.        

            Sometime last winter, when my younger sister, Barbara, and I took dad aside to complain about our mother’s new habit of taking naps after work, leaving dinner preparations to us, he let us in on their secret.

            “Your mother is pregnant, but she doesn’t want you to know yet,” he warned with a wink.

            We swore to secrecy, astonished. After all, she already had five children, the oldest twenty. Then too, at seventeen and eighteen, my sister and I were just beginning to distinguish folklore from reality. I reflected on Mom’s admonition years ago that she had only to hang Dad’s hat on a rack to get pregnant. Gosh, I thought, she really meant what she said!

            After getting over my embarrassment that my parents must have had sex sometime recently, it struck me that my mother should consider college as an option. Part of my sales job included showing her how the monthly income she could get as a full-time college student on an NDEA loan would exceed her take home pay. “You can quit your secretarial job, attend college full-time, and have your baccalaureate in four years—before this baby starts kindergarten.”

            I felt sure my mom would readily agree with my logic, especially given my own experience with student loans. But she took her time. She balked at the idea of leaving a job that paid the bills. Yet sometime that spring, she brought up the college entrance exam.

            “When’s the next one?” she asked.

            I was elated, but I didn’t picture her lumbering into that sweltering auditorium that hot August day, her belly big as a watermelon, to take a two-hour exam among a sea of teenagers.

            I finally spotted her. She shuffled to the small registration table, wiped her forehead with a Kleenex, and smiled warily at the young student checking her in. I felt so proud and nervous. This was my mother, twice as old as her peers, daring to enter this crowded room in a faded blue maternity dress. I watched as she tucked her thick strawberry-blonde hair behind her ears and waddled to her assigned seat. Afterward, she complained about how the baby kicked her throughout the exam, “a bothersome distraction,” as she put it.

            At dinner that night, she complained about the challenges of the exam. “I’m not sure if it was the heat, the baby kicking, or my nerves.” She reminded us she hadn’t taken an exam since attending Business College after high school in 1942, a year before she married Dad. We giggled, unsure how else to react.       

            Baby Rob was born on September 15th, nine days before college classes began. Weighing in at ten pounds, two ounces, he made the Medford Tribune’s “Heavyweight of the Week.”  But that didn’t prevent Mom from starting classes nine days later. In fact, that week she joined her classmates on a biology field trip in the hills above campus, traipsing through the underbrush to identify different kinds of plants. I was aghast. This required stamina and strength when she was still recovering from childbirth.

            “I know. I know,” she said. “But I wasn’t about to make a fuss over myself during my first week of class. I told myself that if I could get through this, I’d be able to get through college.”

            She also had a newborn to take care of. Eventually, our longtime habit of family teamwork must have given her confidence to broaden her traditional vision of the devoted wife and mother. My sister and I often took turns feeding the baby each morning—stuffing his chubby cheeks with warm rice cereal and changing his diaper before we dashed off to classes. Luckily for us, Robby was a healthy baby with a hearty appetite.

            Before Christmas break, my dad plunked a dog-eared biology textbook onto the kitchen table. “I found this in my car. Whose is it?” he said, looking straight at mom and my sister. Mom grabbed the book and flipped through some pages. “It’s mine,” she proudly declared, pointing out her notes scribbled on nearly every page. My sister quickly conceded, “It’s gotta be Mom’s!” We all laughed as Barbara held up her own textbook, free of handwritten notes or worn corners. This incident portended how my mother would pursue her studies for the next four years until graduating in May of ’69.

            My mother donned the graduation garb that bright sunny May morning while the family assembled on the grassy slope above the amphitheater in Lithia Park.  Baby Rob, now a chunky four-year-old with piercing brown eyes and a mop of light brown hair, scampered up and down the aisles oblivious of the large crowd rushing around him to find suitable seats. Our grandmother drove from the family ranch in southeastern Oregon to attend the ceremony. Only my older brother couldn’t make it because of Air Force duty in Alaska.

            When Mom finally crossed the stage for her diploma, we stood up and shouted, “Hooray, Mom!” Her left hand tried to wave us back down, but we persisted. Her reddish-blond hair, burnished by the late morning sun beneath the blue cap, radiated her excitement back to us.

            Shortly after Mom graduated, Dad secured a full-time job with the US Forest Service, his first professional job since his rancher days ended in ‘57. He found himself working outdoors again, free of office jobs he had assiduously avoided. That same year, Mom got her first teaching contract with Mid-Valley High School in Medford, Oregon. Within a year, when Dad was transferred to Eugene, Mom was hired as department head at a nearby high school. Together, they had broken out of the juggernut, and slipped into a middle class lifestyle as smoothly as released fish join a flowing stream. They never looked back.