College and Parenthood: Finding the Balance

A plastic bag of microwavable popcorn is sitting on the countertop. The kids are bickering bitterly over the television remote. And the Luna household, a modest beige three-bedroom at the top of a Southern Eugene cul-de-sac, is ready for a Friday family movie night.

Between objections to her twelve-year-old son’s risqué movie ideas, Cat Lunes, an at times overextended mother of three, is scanning notes from her Clinical Ethics Psychology course. She’s been anxiously awaiting this exam for weeks.

“It’s hard not to feel on edge most of the time,” Luna exhales as she gets up from the table, tosses the popcorn in for a few minutes, and goes to close her textbook.

Cat Lunes is one of nearly 5 million undergraduate students across the country with dependent children. A study conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that more than 26% of undergraduate students are balancing raising children and attending school and about half of them are single mothers. Lunes is now in the final year of her studies at the University of Oregon but she says that finding the balance between education and motherhood wasn’t always an easy journey.

Pursuit of higher education wasn’t something she’d even envisioned for herself especially considering the circumstances of her upbringing.

She grew up in a crowded home.

“I was the youngest of nine kids in an impoverished family.”

In a small town in northern Illinois, Lunes was forced to drop out of school before completing the seventh grade. At the time, she viewed it as an obligation.

“It’s a kind of fear that you can’t understand until you don’t know where your next meal is coming from,” she explains, “I really enjoyed school but it wasn’t an option.”

For years she strung together day jobs to make it work. But when her third child was born, her marriage fell apart, and she found herself living across the country in Oregon with no other family to rely on, she knew something had to change.

“That was a really isolating time in my life,” she chokes back on her words,  “I realized no matter how difficult it would be, I needed to create some kind of stability for my children’s future, at least… more than I had growing up.”

At 28 years old she went back to receive her GED. The year following was filled with applications and second-guessing herself. Nonetheless, she received a letter of acceptance and planned to begin classes at the University of Oregon that coming fall.

Lunes hadn’t stepped foot into a classroom since she was twelve years old, the same age as her now eldest son.

“Walking around a college campus, knowing that I had a place here, it was surreal.” This was the first time she’d received a formal education in over seventeen years. And the balancing act that has been the last four years of her life didn’t go off without a hitch.

“The first year was the hardest,” she explains, “It was hard to remind myself that I was a good mother because I was spending so much time feeling distant from my children’s lives.” During that time, Lunes had found programs and low-cost daycares to occupy her kids, allowing her to be a full-time student and keep up a part-time job.

“I was on the verge of dropping out so many times,” she explained. She’d considered cutting her losses and going back to the day jobs that had kept the food on the table.

“I remember one morning I had a presentation in one of my classes and my daughter woke up with some kind of stomach bug.” Her grade depended on the presentation and her daughter depended on her. “I felt so awful for trying to convince her to go school sick that day just so that I could go to school too.”

Luckily, her professor was understanding and let her make up the presentation but these kinds of mornings weighed on her. It’s taken compromise, long nights, and a large dry-erase family schedule mounted on the refrigerator, but she feels like now that she has finally found harmony between the many roles she’s playing.

As she settled into the routine of classes and making close relationships with professors she’s learned to balance these different aspects of her life. In the last year, she’s also managed to land an on-campus job working for the Non-Traditional Student Union Office.

“She makes everyone feel welcomed as soon as they walk into the door,” says Antonio Christian, one of her coworkers and a fellow student parent. Now, she’s working to advocate for students like herself who may have not thought that college was a possibility. She finds contentment in connecting other students to the same on-campus groups and programs that have helped her along the way.

Lunes can finally now see her degree in the not-so-distant future.

“It’s going home to my kids makes all the hard work so worth it,” she describes, “I want to make them proud more than anything.”

The living room fills up with the scent of artificial butter and the kids settle into their spots. They hesitantly agree to let mom use her iPhone flashlight to continue studying as the movie plays in the background. Just as long as she still joins them on the couch.