What I’ve Learned in College

  SIT AT THE FRONT OF THE CLASS.  I have had more than one professor say, “The A-students are always in the front row.”  THIS IS A CLUE.  When you sit in the front row, they remember you, they learn your name, and they can see your facial expressions and tell when you are confused or are struck with a brilliant idea.  When you sit in the front row, you cannot text on your phone, surf Facebook, or read the assignment for your next class, but if you’re doing those things, you’re not going to get an A anyway. 

FOLLOW DIRECTIONS.  I have seen plenty of students smarter than I get lesser grades because they couldn’t follow directions.  It always reminds me of the test like this they used to give somewhere along the way in grade school.  The first instruction would be to “READ ALL INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE YOU BEGIN” and then there would be a complicated list of directions like, 

• 1.      Put your name in the top right corner 
• 2.      Draw 5 squares on the left side of test 
• 3.      Draw a heart after question #7, etc.

When you finally reach the bottom of the test, the last question says, “Now that you’ve read all the directions, only do #1.”  You can be so brilliant the sun shines out of your bum, but if you don’t use MLA format, or provide two examples, or submit it electronically before 11:59 p.m., you have basically told the professor that you didn’t really pay attention to what they wanted.  This hurts their feelings.  Hurt feelings give them the latitude to not pay attention to what YOU wanted…an A.

BUY BOOKS ONLINE.  Thanks to half.com and Amazon and a million other sites, you can almost always get your books cheaper online than in the bookstore.  Get the list of required books from the campus bookstore, then order them used online.  Secret Tip:  Amazon will give students a PRIME membership that gives you “unlimited fast shipping, such as FREE Two-Day shipping and One-day shipping for $3.99 per item on all eligible purchases” for FREE.  Normally, you would have to pay an annual membership fee of $79, but if you have a student email account (you know…ends in .edu) then the membership is FREE.  I said FREE.  Killer deal.  Do it.

WRITE IN YOUR BOOKS.  I’m all for electronic texts, and I have the complete works of Shakespeare, Milton and Austen on my iPhone, because books are HEAVY when you have to carry 15-20 of them around all day for back-to-back classes.   But I still buy a hard copy so I can write in them.  You just got them for next to nothing on Amazon, so write in them.  Highlight the important parts, make notes in the margins, draw lines here and there and go crazy.  It’s liberating,  and heaven knows five years from now (or in my case, 5 weeks) you aren’t going to remember why you thought that passage was so important without the yellow highlighter help.  

  

GO TO THE LIBRARY.  I have a lovely office at home.  It has my laptop and three printers and awesome speakers for my I-tunes and a comfy couch with warm quilts, and every time I try to work there, I either fall asleep or am joined by a throng of people within ten minutes of starting to study.  It has sound-proofy French doors that I close every chance I get, but they can still SEE me, and if they can SEE me, then they think it’s ok to interrupt me.  

GO TO THE LIBRARY.  The study carrels are uncomfortable, the air vents always manage to blow either hot or cold air directly on me (never season-appropriate air, either), the seats squeak and some nitwit usually has his laptop sound so loud that I can still hear it through his headphones, but when I study there, I am highly motivated to get done and get back home.   

ASK FOR EVERYTHING.  Always apply for scholarships – most people are too lazy to go through the process and you almost always get money.  There are scholarships for single mothers, and children of employees who work in upholstery (seriously) and for people going back to school after an absence of five years or more.  There is money for every kind of demographic you can imagine, and most universities have consolidated the application process so you only have to fill out one master application, and it serves for every scholarship you’re eligible for.  Ask for help with anything that causes you a problem.  If your paper-writing skills suck, ask for help at the Writing Center – they’re just sitting there waiting for someone to come in.  Need help with your resume?  Ask the Career Center.  Not very good with Excel or Word?  The Technology Center is your friend.  Your tuition and fees have already paid for all of those services and more, so ASK!

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF, BELIEVE YOU CAN DO IT, BELIEVE THERE IS AN END IN SIGHT, BUT DO NOT BELIEVE your family when they tell you they will “support” you in this endeavor.  YOU interpret this support to mean they will, in cheerful Brady-Bunch style, pitch in and do laundry, cook dinner, clean house and acknowledge that writing deeply profound papers on “The Nature of Sermonic Language” requires more than ten minutes with a crayon and the back of an envelope while waiting on a child in the orthodontist’s office.  THEY interpret this support to mean they will ask how your test went before asking what’s for dinner. 

So tell me…what did YOU learn in school?

Rewind that Rerun

Tonight I saw the light.  It was on That 70’s Show and it was probably a rerun. 

 

Undoubtedly, Eli’s very most, all-time favorite show is That 70’s Show.  There were 200 episodes produced between 1998 and 2006, and I swear I know every single one by heart.  

EVERY day Eli sets the DVR to record EVERY episode on EVERY channel.  We have DISH TV and since I’m way too lazy to go see how many different channels and time slots that might be, let’s just say it works out to about a bajillion.  

Because I’ve had to listen to it virtually non-stop any time I pass through the living room, I HATE THIS SHOW.  (Well, to be fair, I hate just about all TV.)

Every night I clear out the DVR memory, and every day he records them all again.  I have had long heartfelt discussions with him, asking him to please stop recording them, explaining that setting that many timers causes everyone else’s shows to be bumped, which causes those bulgy veins to throb menacingly in people’s temples.   He says, “My bad” and promises not to do it anymore.  Twenty minutes later, his busy fingers are scrolling through the guide channel, setting recordings willy-nilly.

After I put Eli to bed tonight, I went back in his room for the umpty-eleventh time because he needed his glasses cleaned (Reason # 17 in a looonng list).  Making conversation, I asked him what he was watching on TV.  He told me about a movie that was ending, and then said, “You know what I’m going to watch next?  That 70’s Show."

I said, “That’s your favorite show, isn’t it, kiddo?  Don’t you ever get tired of watching it over and over?”

Somewhat surprised, he said, “Nooo…, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that was a rerun.”  

Astounded, I said, “Honey!  You’ve seen them all a million times.” 

And then he said, “Oh, well I guess don’t know it because my brain is messed up.”

I pretty much end every day with my head in my hands, ashamed at once again losing my patience with him.  Night after night, after I put him to bed, my phone begins to ring.  Sometimes it starts ringing before I have even shut his bedroom door and made it back to my office.  If I don’t answer my cell phone right away, he starts calling the house phone.  The other kids get frustrated and say “take his phone away,” but I worry he won’t have it the one time he needs it, like the time his legs fell out of bed and pulled him halfway to the floor.  I worry he’ll lose his blankets and lay shivering all night, or that he’ll get an excruciating itch he can’t reach.  

Those things rarely happen; he mostly calls over and over for me to get him some Coke or clean his glasses.  I plead and beg and cajole and threaten and sometimes scream and yell for him to please not call me for the same thing again, because I have papers to write, and laundry to do, and sanity to preserve.

It never occurred to me that he doesn’t know he’s doing it, that he doesn’t know it’s a rerun.

I guess “my brain is messed up” too.

It's a Little Tricky

This time of year four years ago, my life was pretty swell.  My husband had accepted a new job that paid him a ridiculous amount of money.  The youngest of my 4 children was finally headed to first grade and I decided to go back to school to get my degree.  We had a lovely home, we had friends, we were busy and normal.

On a Wednesday evening as I was getting ready to leave for school, the doorbell rang and I opened it to find a Sheriff on my front porch.  He informed me that our 20-year old son had been in an automobile accident and had been taken to the hospital.  When I asked if he was ok, the Sheriff looked me in the eye and said, “M’am, you should go to the hospital now.”  Eli had been on his way to work about 4:00 in the afternoon, and we later learned he tried to pass a car, clipped the bumper, lost control, crossed the center median and was hit by 5 different vehicles.  He was not wearing a seatbelt and was texting while driving.  He was unresponsive at the scene and life-flighted to the Atlanta Medical Center.  

When I saw him in the ER, he was lying on a bed with his eyes closed.  His shirt was gone, there was a small cut on his cheek and some blood around his nose, but he mostly looked like he was asleep.  I remember being thrilled when they told me he didn’t appear to have broken any bones.  I looked at his long, skinny body lying there and thought, “You crazy kid – you could have been killed.  Now wake up so I can beat some sense into you.”  

But he wasn’t waking up.  A scan of his head showed his jaw was broken in 2 places, his cheekbone was crushed and the bones around his eye socket were broken in several places.  He had sustained a severe brain injury, his brain was swelling at a rapid rate and they wanted to drill a hole in his skull to relieve and monitor the pressure.  When we asked what all that meant, the one response I remember was a Dr. who said, “Well, with a brain injury, the longer they’re unconscious, the more severe the injury and the longer the recovery.

Eli “slept” in a coma for almost six months.  

His hospital bill totaled over half a million dollars in the first 30 days.  About a week before Eli was discharged from the hospital, a drunk driver hit me and almost totaled my car. The company my husband had gone to work for folded, and my husband, a man who had never been without a job for 30 years was unemployed.  He stayed unemployed for a year. We ran through every penny of our savings and retirement funds in that long, long year.  We lost our home and all the equity built up in it and had to declare bankruptcy. 

When Eli finally came home from the hospital, he was about a 3 on the Rancho Coma Scale, which meant his eyes were sometimes open, he could sometimes turn toward sound or movement and could sometimes follow simple commands, such as “Look at me” or “squeeze my hand.”  For all intents and purposes, he was still in a comatose state.  He had to be turned every 3-4 hours to prevent bed sores; he was fed through a feeding tube in his stomach and given sponge baths in his bed.  He could not speak, or move any part of his body, except for his head and right arm. I went from being a parent who was thrilled that all my children were finally old enough to be independent, to having a 20-year old invalid who now required as much care, if not more, than a newborn infant. 

Every person I know has had trials, many worse than my own.  Some trials we just grit our teeth and get through them, but some trials won’t be over in a month, or a year, or maybe even in this life.  One of the most frightening things about Eli’s situation was understanding that it wasn’t ever going to be “over.”  And if that was the case, then I had to stop waiting for that day in order to be happy again.  I was going to have to figure out a way to be happy right now. 

Joseph B. Wirthlin said, “… in spite of discouragement and adversity, those who are happiest seem to have a way of learning from difficult times, becoming stronger, wiser, and happier as a result.”  Here are a few things I’ve learned about finding joy in the midst of trials. 

LAUGH.  I have a whole memory bank of horrible, terrible, days and nights spent in the hospital, but its way more fun to remember the times that we laughed.  Today Eli is confined to a wheelchair and cannot walk.  He has the use of his right arm, but very little functionality in his left.  Taking care of a person in this condition takes a lot of equipment, but that doesn’t make us good at using it. Once, while I was transferring Eli from his chair to his bed, the lift got tangled in his bed cord, collapsed the base of the lift and I ended up dropping him on the floor.  You know how when your kids are little and they get hurt, you try to keep your face impassive so they won’t know how freaked out you are, because if they see that you’re scared, they’ll be scared too?  Well, it still works when they’re 23, because I casually looked down at him crumpled in the floor and said, “Uh-oh, buddy, what are you doing down there?”  We laughed, and then I went screaming down the driveway to find my husband to help me pick him up.  

We laughed when we forgot to unclamp his feeding tube and it backed up and exploded all over his freshly painted room.  We laughed when he got his new electric wheelchair and drove it into every wall in our house and over everyone’s toes.   We laughed when he put his chair on full speed down the ramp in the back yard, hit a bump and threw himself face first in the mud 10 minutes before church on Sunday.  I won’t kid you – some things took a while before we could laugh at them, but laughing was so much better than the crying we had already done.

In trying to ascertain the extent of Eli’s brain damage, we compiled an activity box that had puzzles and games in it, and I explained to Eli that for every task he accomplished, he could punch a hole in his “incentive” card. After so many punches, he could get a treat or a toy from the “Reward” box.  He said, “Sweet.”   When his girlfriend came over, I said, “Tell Lindsey what you get when your card is all punched.”  He looked at her and said “Thirty dollars.”  

Another day I was trying to encourage him to speak louder and told him, “For every word you say out loud, I will give you a peanut-butter M&M.”  He proceeded to say about seven words.  I said, “That’s awesome! How many words did you say?” and he said “Seven.” “So how many M&M’s do you get?”  I asked. “Sixty-five” he answered.

They were small moments in long, dreary, painful days, but they went so far toward lightening our spirits.  In times of trial, there’s really only a couple of responses – laughing or crying.  I’ve done plenty of both, but I much prefer the laughing.

            LEARN AND GROW.  WHETHER YOU WANT TO OR NOT.  Joseph Wirthlin also said:  “… the dial on the wheel of sorrow eventually points to each of us. At one time or another, everyone must experience sorrow.  These experiences, while often difficult to bear at the time, are precisely the kinds of experiences that stretch our understanding, build our character, and increase our compassion for others.”

As Eli began to recover, we had no idea whether he had any memory of his life before the accident, we didn’t know if he would ever speak again, and we didn’t realize he could still read until we stumbled on it using flashcards.  We tried giving him a pen and paper to communicate, but he lost a lot of his fine motor skills and writing was difficult.  One day I thought of wheeling him up to the computer desk and putting his hand on the keyboard.  We asked him how he was feeling, and he painstakingly typed:   I FEEL BROKEN. 

I cannot imagine what it must feel like to be trapped in a body that can’t say what you think or feel, to look down at perfectly healthy legs that won’t work because your brain can’t tell them to - to feel like your body is broken.  But I believe that Jesus Christ knows and understands Eli’s pain.  When I knelt at the side of my bed, night after night, crying out to my Heavenly Father, there was no one who could take away that pain but Jesus Christ.  There were so many days that we sat in the hospital, sponging Eli’s body as he soaked the sheets with sweat because his brain couldn’t regulate his temperature.  Days I sat beside his bed holding his legs to keep his leg spasms from rattling the bed so loudly that people in the hallway could hear.  I couldn’t take away Eli’s pain – all I could do was petition my Heavenly Father that Eli and our family would get through it.  And slowly and surely we did, and along the way we definitely gained increased compassion and understanding for others. 

            BE GRATEFUL.  So many things were taken away from Eli and our family, but so many things have been given.  Prior to Eli’s accident, he was drifting aimlessly down an unproductive path.  As parents, we thought he slept too long, worked too little and we often only saw him when he needed gas money or food.  When he began to speak after the accident, the first words he said, over and over, were “I love you.”  From August, 2008, I wrote in my journal:

Eli is speaking more and more and it’s so unbelievable considering there was a time I sat at his side and prayed for him to please just open his eyes. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of caring for him and forget that every word he speaks and every bite he eats is a miracle wrought by the prayers of everyone and the loving kindness of our Heavenly Father.

And what does he say? All day long he says, “Mom…I love you.” or “Dad, I love you.” Every bite he takes, he stops and says, “Thank you.” Sometimes I have to tell him that it’s ok to eat all of his food before he says thank you, or he’ll tell me thank you after every bite.

A few months later around Christmas time, I wrote on Eli’s blog: 

 Eli has been doing something funny for a while and I thought I’d share it with you. Whenever I’m tending to him or even just walking by, he will look up at me earnestly and say, “Mom…I love you.” I always respond “I love you too” and then he will grip my hand and with even more sincerity, say, “I love you more than Dad.” The first couple of times he did it, I thought a) Well, of course you do – I’m your mom!” and then I thought, “Boy, I hope Pete doesn’t hear him say that.”  At least that’s what I thought until the day I walked by his room and heard him say to Pete, “Dad, I love you.” I waited and here it came. “Dad, I love you more than Mom.”   Inevitably, one day Pete and I were both in his room and Eli said, “Mom, I love you more than Dad.” Then he glanced over and saw his father had obviously overheard.  Eli looked back at me, put his fingers to his lips and said, “Shhhh…don’t tell Dad!”  

We laugh, but sometimes when he tells me he loves me, there is such an earnest look on his face that it breaks my heart.  I wonder if he really wants to say more, but can’t articulate it. Is this the only way he has to express the depth of his love? By saying that it’s more than someone else he also loves?  Our Father in Heaven sent and sacrificed his Son, someone he loved more than anyone.  And he did it for us, whom he also loved more than anyone. “

Our Heavenly Father compensates us because He is merciful.  Any sacrifices we have made, any sorrow we have experienced, has been compensated ten-fold and I know there is more to come.  One of my favorite scriptures is John 14:18 “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.”  We will be comforted and we will be compensated.

            JUST DO IT.   What if you feel like you can’t find that joy?  Maybe you think you’re just a glass half-empty kind of person?  Is finding joy something you can learn to do?  I think it is.  

            My brother Jimmy was four years older than I, but we grew up so close people sometimes thought we were twins.  He was funny, charming, and charismatic and could make everyone laugh.  He looked out for me and protected me.  He was shockingly intelligent and athletically gifted.  He excelled at virtually everything, but sometimes people so “gifted” are bored at the ease with which they are able to master everything and everyone, and Jimmy was no exception.  He began to find a challenge in breaking the law and ended up going to prison for 25 years.  

While incarcerated, he escaped several times, taught himself to play the piano, overturned many of his convictions through his own legal research, wrote two books and became a rather accomplished “jail-house” lawyer.  He has an irrepressible soul.  Every time he called me on the phone, he made me laugh so hard my sides ached.  Jimmy could always find the joy.  

Several years into his sentence, even though he was convicted for a non-violent crime, circumstances conspired to have him sent to a Supermax facility.  Basically, Supermax was solitary confinement and sensory deprivation, where inmates were locked up 23 hours a day, with one hour out for a shower, phone and recreation.  The majority of the inmates sent there either slowly went insane or tried to kill themselves.  Jimmy lasted five years before the facility was ultimately shut down and he has since been released from prison.   

I recently asked him what things brought him the most joy when he was finally released, and he said, “EVERYTHING.   It’s all about perspective.  Every day that I can smell fresh cut grass, eat food when I want to, get in a car and drive wherever I please, is a perfect day.  I never take any of it for granted.  Every single thing brings me joy.”   If Jimmy can find joy, you can too.

One of the lasting effects of Eli’s accident is a poor short term memory.  One day I was trying to write a paper for class and I told Eli I needed to study and to please not bother me.  I had barely gotten started when he began to call me about every five minutes. “Mom, I need a cough drop.”  “Mom, I need a pillow under my arm.”  “Mom, I dropped the remote.”  This can go on all day, but I really just didn’t have the time or the patience for it this day.  He called again and said, “Mom, I need a drink of water.”  And I very firmly told him, “Honey, I have to get this paper done.  You are not going to die if you don’t get a drink of water in the next 30 minutes.  Can you please wait until I’m done?  And don’t call me again.”  There’s a good chance I might have raised my voice.  I went back to frantically typing away at my paper until after a while it occurred to me that he really hadn’t called me back.  Somewhat ashamed, I went upstairs to check on him and noticed that he had a full cup of water.

“Hey, who filled your cup for you?” I asked. 

“I did” he said with a big grin.   

“Get out of town!   How did you do that?” 

He began to explain how he got his chair up next to the sink, used a wooden spoon to push the faucet on, and then one-handed, he filled his cup, turned off the water and returned to the living room. 

“Wow” I said, “That’s awesome that you did it for yourself.  Was it hard?” and he looked up at me and said, “Mom…..it was a little tricky.”

Like you, every day I have is filled with some good, and bad, and sometimes, some downright awful, but if you look really hard, you can find a little speck of joy too. 

You might have to look really hard…and it might be tricky.  But I know you can do it.