Look Ma, No Hands: Celebrating those Milestones
“Rights-of-passage & life events are best survived, enjoyed, and celebrated with those we love most.”
Being a non-traditional student is often not very glamorous. My studies at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College (SMWC) have seen me through many different life-changes.
When I enrolled at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in January 2020, my world was changing — but so was the rest of the world. . .
Covid-19 had begun to significantly alter life as we knew it.
In the last few months working at the Piggly Wiggly — a position I had held for almost a decade, I had started shopping and delivering groceries for elderly customer when my shift ended who were homebound, due to the global quarantine and social distancing.
Face masks became normal garb for everyone.
Younger students who had the “traditional” college experience were suddenly uprooted as campuses around the U.S. were closing or favoring virtual coursework for the interim. As time went on, it was clear that it would not be so easy to just go back to life as we knew it, a new-normal had commenced.
A phrase we often heard so much, it perhaps began to lose meaning was that we “lived in unprecedented times.”
This became a theme for my formative years in college as a nontraditional student.
As I left the Piggly Wiggly (a job that had earned me the affectionate moniker of “Pig girls,” as patrons of the store fondly referred to my sisters and me, as they considered us to be synonymous with the store) the job market was peculiar, but the unprecedented times brought me an opportunity I might not have otherwise found: I worked in a warehouse part-time packaging parts and such, and dispatching for a trendy food delivery start-up based in Madison, Wisconsin called EatStreet. Working from home was an entirely new experience, and I loved being at home with our new Corgi puppy, Archie.
Being very close and living with my two sisters — my twin and younger sister — is something I’ve always been grateful for, as they’re my only family since we lost our mom in 2017.
A couple years into my studies, I had the opportunity to visit my college campus at SMWC. This was my induction ceremony into Sigma Tau Delta, an English honor society.
It was a moment to take stock of everything that had happened in the last few years, as well as look ahead to what was uncertain.
My twin sister had been diagnosed with cancer and had been receiving alternating weekly and bi-weekly chemo treatments. Still, she was determined to accompany me on the five-hour drive to the ceremony.
The trip did not come without consequences. She was hospitalized with a dangerously low red blood-cell count the following week. If it had been up to me, she wouldn’t have gone (older sister speaking, here!).
But having been homebound for the better part of the year, I could understand why she wanted to be a part of celebrating something of what we call life.
Rights-of-passage & life events are best survived, enjoyed, and celebrated with those we love most.
I was lucky enough to celebrate the day and see the uncertainties of life with the two people that mean the most to me, my sisters. Two years later, my sister is in remission — back to enjoying her life, her job, her dog, drawing anime cartoons, and doing yoga.
She has seen me working 70 hours a week, studying on our living room floor or wherever else worked, and doing our income taxes from beside her hospital bed during treatments.
In a few months, she plans to see me, and our little sister walk across the stage to graduate from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College as Class of 2024 —
and to me, this is everything.
I took a photo of my mother and a much younger me. We felt her presence there.
In times like this, whether unprecedented or not, we take stock of how far we’ve come — and where we’re going.
