My paternal grandmother studied nutrition. In the 1930s and 1940s, teaching, homemaking, and nursing, were really the only options. My aunt, also a nurse, mentioned to me recently that she didn’t know until she helped her mother write her memoirs, just how much of her life, all of her life, it seemed to my aunt, revolved around clothes and food. She made the clothes for her children. She fed her family, and damn, she was going to make sure they ate as healthy as modern science could teach us. Unfortunately for my Dad, that meant liver at least once a week. Thankfully, we’ve figured out how to get our iron efficiently enough without my parents’ generation overcooking liver once a week and I am grateful for that scientific knowledge.

Clothes and Food.

I don’t think I can claim either of those interests alongside my grandma. Knowing her later in life, she was well-read, well-spoken on numerous topics like education, music, politics. She was active on boards of nonprofits. She helped form music programs for both children and adults. She’d travelled all over the world. And that is one of the attributes I really clung to of my grandmother. She travelled so she could learn. She wanted to learn about people, get to know the people, their culture, and their thoughts.

Clothes and Food.

I wish I could ask her, “was there something else you wanted to study in college?”

Part of this question comes simply because I am reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own for the first time. She posits the theory that historically, women have not had financial or physical freedom to gain an education and have uninterrupted time to develop their gifts, such as writing or painting.

My mother’s office is the thoroughfare to my parents’ bedroom. My dad used to use that as his office, but when the kids slowly moved out, he commandeered one of our old rooms as his office. My mother could do that. No one would blink if she did. I know she usually reads my blog though, so watch out for a comment below. There may be a good reason for it. But it seems a hectic place, it seems a place that one can’t close the door and think or study.

As a parent, either male or female, I think you lose that ability, the space, the room of one’s own.  But I also believe it’s important to fight for and maintain that space for ourselves. A place to think, to work, to write, to create.

One of the struggles in my relationship with my now deceased grandparents, was that when I announced I would be studying music history after highschool, they told my parents to make me major in something “useful.” After ending with a degree in music business, I went to nursing school. I think that’s what they meant. Something useful. I think music is more than useful, but that’s another blog post. I am grateful my parents stood by my side both literally and financially in my musical studies. I am a better person because of that training and education. I truly believe the experience makes me a better nurse. Read that again. Music and liberal arts training has made me a better nurse.

But I still wonder, given the financial backing, the emotional backing, by her parents and by society, would my grandmother have studied something differently? How many women would have studied something differently?

My brother made an interesting comment about the scouting experience of his children recently, in that through scouts, they see other options for careers than teacher, mailman, accountant. (The teachers at their school, my brother works for the post office, and his wife is an accountant.) What someone is exposed to makes their decisions for them. It truly is a cycle. After my music degree, I felt lost. I looked around at people in my life, friends, family, who were happy, and most of them were nurses. I’m grateful for my medical training and the experiences I’ve had as a nurse, but if I knew then what I know about myself now, I wouldn’t have gone to nursing school. I would study ecology or biology. (Part of that is my insecurity with math and science throughout college. I always thought I was “bad at math” when in reality, I think about numbers differently than most teachers teach about numbers. This began in 1^st, I repeat, 1^st grade. I remember having panic attacks thinking about math class as early as age 7. And this spread through math and science and lasted well in to my adult life. I love science and math. I am actually good at it. And if I had realized that at a younger age, my life would look very different. Encourage girls in STEM. We need all the help we can get.)  

What we see around us is normal and accepting. What we are encouraged in, we thrive in. Those freedoms are very much founded in the physical and financial abilities such as having a place to study in uninterrupted.  Provide and encourage—our world will be better because of it.