thoughts on laura

laura's probably my best friend at school. she's 10 years older than me, is married (though estranged), and has two kids (ages 3 and 6). mostly, i really appreciate her. she is fun, interesting, smart, open-minded... there are a couple of things, though, that irritate me.

before she got married, she was a wild thing. emotionally distant parents led to teenage-midtwenties risky living. lots of drugs, lots of sex. getting married settled her down. lately, after moving out of the house she shared with her family, she's started smoking again, and drinks more than is probably good for her. i'm sure it's stress-induced. not easy to leave your family, esp the two small children you love so much, and move to the city. not at all easy when their father, your husband ("that man," she calls him) is often a prick. but i don't think taking up some of her old habits is necessarily the best way to deal. she's got a shrink, whom she thinks is the bomb, and is even on an anti-depressant. i wish she'd make more of that, and less of a carton of cigarettes and bottle of wine.

lately, she's been talking about the possibility of going to school part-time. she finds it hard to strike a balance between school and time with her kids. (kids live out in the 'burbs with "that man," btw). the most important thing, she's decided, is time with her small children. i think she's right on that one. when given a choice, she continues, of doing school work or spending time with the kids, she chooses kids. while in principle i agree with this one, i think in practice she could do both.

when i asked her how she would support herself if she started going part-time to school (no doubt the meager stipend we get would become part-stipend), she said she'd get a job. but, i argued, wouldn't the job take away the time you wanted to spend with the kids? that you thought you were getting back by only going part time to school? she claimed she could get a job that involved working at night, so she'd work after the kids were asleep. at this point, i gave up the argument, because i didn't want to push the point more, but i continued it in my head.

if she's going to spend the time after the kids are asleep at work, couldn't she just as well spend the time after the kids are asleep doing her schoolwork? one thing about laura is that she spends alot of time doing non-schoolwork stuff. like going to the opera, or out to dinner, or on bike rides. while theses are all worthwhile activities, they take away time that she could be spending either on school or with the kids. i think she's been out of school long enough that she hasn't gotten back into the groove of scheduling her time well. (not that i'm in that groove either (me=queen procrastinator), even though i've always been in school.)

she says that if she only had to take one class a semester rather than two, she'd have more time. i can't argue with the fact that she'd have 4 more free hours a week, just due to the fact that she wouldn't be in class those 4 hours. there's nothing she can do about the time she spends in class. but she could use the time between classes more productively--doing class readings, for example. then, regiment her afternoon/evening time better. if she does her schoolwork in the afternoon, she could spend the evenings with the kids. if she spent the afternoon with the kids, she could do her schoolwork in the evenings.

i just can't see how going part-time and getting a job is going to help.