The Wisdom of Our Elders

Every now and then, I will say something that I didn't even realize was true until I hear the words coming out of my mouth. Yesterday was one of those occasions. My son had picked me up at the airport after I returned from visiting my daughter, and we were chatting in the car on the way home. I can't remember how we got on the subject, but it is a frequent topic of conversation anyway -- that of career decisions and changes. I have made several career changes in my life and am currently looking for a part-time job that will supplement my inflation-eroded teacher's pension. But first, some background:

I came of age in the 1950s when the only career paths open to women were teaching, nursing, or secretarial work. Although I didn't really expect to need a career--I would be a wife and mother--I needed something to do until I found a husband and had a family. I chose nursing, knowing little about it, but it seemed exciting and a bit romantic to my teenaged mind, fueled by fluffy fiction about student nurses who always fell in love with handsome interns, and who occasionally solved crimes while they were learning to change beds and give injections. Nursing education at that time was almost exclusively the domain of hospitals, where a few basic science courses might be taught in local colleges, but the rest of the learning took place in the hospital, giving care to real patients. There were a handful of university-based nursing programs, of which three were in Texas. During the 1960s and 1970s nursing education would move into the domain of the universities and by the mid-1970s very few of the "diploma" programs, or hospital-based programs still existed.

But I didn't know all that. I wanted to go to nursing school and assumed I would go to one of the diploma programs in Memphis, 80 miles away. Enter my uncle and aunt. My dad's brother, Fritz and his wife Mary lived in Fort Worth and Aunt Mary happened to be secretary (or in today's parlance, Administrative Assistant) to the Dean of Texas Christian University's Harris College of Nursing. They persuaded my parents that I should attend nursing school at TCU, and my parents agreed, to my good fortune. At that time I was much more excited about going to school in Texas than I was about the fact that I would have a BS degree in Nursing when I finished my education.

Many times over the past 40+ years I have regretted my choice of nursing as a profession. I stayed with it for more than 10 years, even earning a MSN along the way, but I never really found the satisfaction in it that I had hoped for. And I didn't find any handsome interns or solve any crimes either. Eventually I went back to school and earned a teaching certificate in English and then another Masters in English. After that it was a MS in Library Science.

But the realization that came out of my mouth in the car on the way home from the airport was this: because my aunt and uncle influenced my parents and me to get my nursing education in a university, I had the necessary educational foundation to make the later changes that would prove more satisfying to me than nursing did. I had the two years of core education which ALL college students need, no matter what their major. My parents, who had not attended college, and I did not understand all of this, but my aunt and uncle did. For their wisdom and guidance, I am most grateful.

Thanks, Uncle Fritz and Aunt Mary.