So, here I am in my senior year. It’s hard for me to believe, but it’s true. It seems like just yesterday, I was a young mother with two children. I still have two children, but they are grown and no longer need me to watch over them or direct them.
For that matter, it seems like recently I was a kid riding my bike all over, playing jump rope and rollerskating in the summer and ice-skating in the winter at Strawbridge Lake in a town a bike ride a half-hour away from my house. My childhood as a baby boomer was somewhat idyllic to some extent. I attended twelve years of Catholic School taught by nuns. There were rules and structures in place. And if you didn’t follow the rules, you could look forward to unpleasant consequences. Which included having your hands rapped with a wooden ruler with a metal edge. You would have to stay after school and write many pages of apologies for your negative behavior. Then you would be sent home with a note from your teacher informing your parents of your misbehavior, a double whammy because both your mother and your father would give you further negative consequences for getting into trouble at school. Mainly because my parents paid high tuition to have us be educated in a private Catholic school.
Reflecting on my life, I find that I have few regrets. Yes, I made the occasional bad choice, but who doesn’t? I have led an interesting and challenging life. After I had two children, I decided to go to college when they were grade-school age. I applied and was accepted at Temple University in Philadelphia and the Hussian School of Art. Also, in Phildadelphia. At the age of thirty-six, I began my college education. For the first several months, the other seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Freshman students mistook me for their teacher. They were somewhat shocked when I explained that I was a Freshman, too. But, over time, they all came to know me, and believe it or not, I was a popular student with the student population. As for the teachers, they seemed to make a unilateral decision that I was the first student to be called on in class, and since I always had my work done on time, be it artwork or written work, My work was used as either a good example or a poor example, either way, the students would learn from my completed work. Although it was difficult at times to balance my home life with a husband and two children and going to college full-time, somehow, through pure determination. I graduated at forty-one with magnum cum-laude and art teaching credentials at the top of my class. At the grand old age of forty-one, with a standing ovation from my whole class and the professors.
Tyler School of Art
After graduation, I searched for an art teaching position in New Jersey. I found that the public schools in New Jersey were no longer funding art teaching. I can not express how devastated I was when I discovered that there were no jobs for me at all.
After some long nights and consideration for my future, I decided that since the public schools were no longer teaching art, I would start my own art school. The house we were living in at the time was too small, and over time, I found an older home in Pitman, New Jersey, that was large and also empty, as the previous owners had passed away years before. Until now, no one had the desire or the funds to buy and renovate the house.
Pitman home and Art Room
The realtor made a last-ditch effort to sell the house and had an open house. And we went to the open house and checked it out. The home was large, 5,500 square feet, and had been unoccupied for many years. It needed a great deal of work. But I was determined to make it ours. And so we made an offer, and they eventually accepted it. We sold our smaller home, moved into our new home, and began to renovate it from top to bottom. The previous owner had been a therapist and had two rooms and an office where he treated his patients. It also had a small bathroom. I was convinced this would make my perfect art room where I could teach my students drawing, painting, and sculpture. I immediately began renovating those rooms. And the two storage rooms. I will slowly purchase all the materials I need for myself and my students.
After I had The Art Room prepared for teaching art, I went downtown Pitman and talked to the editor of the local paper, The Pitman World News and Report, and had a one-page advertisement about my school and the classes I would be teaching. And that my friends were the beginning of my art teaching career. I taught children of different ages in the afternoons and adults in the evenings during the week. Over time, all my classes were filled. I also taught drawing, painting, pottery, and three-dimensional art for many years. I also had the privilege of getting to know my neighbors and many of the residents of Pitamn. We lived there for twenty-five years until we were ready to retire. It was hard to leave Pitman and all the great people we had come to love, but we knew we couldn’t afford to live there once we retired. And so, after my husband retired, we sold our house. And started seriously making decisions about where we would be living next. And our final decision was to move South to North Carolina as it became clear that the taxes were much cheaper there. It was tough for us to move away from our Pitman home and the friends we made, but we did. And so, I sit in my bedroom in our house in North Carolina, having been retired for nine years. I have kept myself busy volunteering three mornings a week at an animal sanctuary and writing this blog for the past nine years.
I don’t know what or if our circumstances will change, but I do know that I will keep putting one foot in front of the other into the future.