Do Your Homework, Mom!

copyright 1997  Leader Publications

Note:  I reworded this a bit since my mom is no longer with us, to make it apply more to the past than it was originally written.

Caring for our aging parents is a lot like caring for our kids.  We worry if they eat right.  We worry about their health.  We take them to the doctor.  We take them shopping.  And we help them with their homework.

Yes, homework.  There’s a program that allows seniors to attend college for free, or half-price, and many of them are taking it up.  It’s not uncommon anymore to see an octogenarian or two on area campuses.

My mom, who was in her 60s, signed up for classes in film studies and stage design at an area college.

The film studies class came first.  Mom told me that it mostly consisted of watching old movies from the 1940s and 1950s.  Unlike all the other students in her class, Mom had already seen every one of the films at least once, years ago.

Though that familiarity may have helped, my mom still had to do some research and write a couple of essays for the class.  That’s where my help came in.

With her first essay, mom had done the reading and wrote down notes she wanted to include in her essay.  But when it came to actually pulling it all together, she just couldn’t do it.  She brought her notes to me and asked my help.

I know it goes against college ethics to do someone else’s homework, and with an old scandal relating to that very thing, concerning a student named Paige Laurie, I was almost afraid to do it, since I was a college student at the time, too.  However, I attended a different school than my mom.  And I reasoned that in my mom’s case it wouldn’t hurt.  After all, she wasn’t actually going to do anything with the credits she earned.  So I pulled her notes together into a reasonable sounding essay.

Mom sat on my couch while I sat at the computer composing her paper.  To ease my conscience, I would often read a sentence aloud for her approval, feeling that somehow, if she approved the sentence, it was more like she wrote it herself.

The project took up quite a bit of time, a couple of hours, so I was glad when we finished. 

Some weeks later Mom came over with not just an essay, but a research paper to be written.  This time she was really overwhelmed and instead of writing her own research notes, she merely read some sentences into a tape recorder from a book that she wanted to include in her paper and brought the recorder to me.

Mom sat on the couch, sometimes falling asleep, while I slaved away on her research paper.  It was not wonder that she fell asleep because I spent seven plus hours on the thing.

Being in college myself, I had my own homework to do, so I decided than that this would be the last time I helped Mom with her homework.  A few weeks later, Mom called me and told me “we” made a “B” in the class.  She then said she was thinking about taking English composition the next semester.

“Oh, Mom, you don’t want to do that,” I said in a near panic.  “Besides several essays, you’ll have to write a 10-page research paper at the end of the semester.  It would be really hard.”

“Oh, really,” Mom said in surprise.  “Well, that last paper wasn’t so bad.”

“Maybe not for you!” I thought to myself.

Thankfully, Mom never did take the English comp class.  She signed up for the stage design.  I was useless to Mom in that class, as it required a project of making up a small model of a stage design, and I’m just not good at that kind of art, so when Mom realized it was too much for her, she just dropped the class.

To her credit, Mom did complete a creative writing course with a grade of “B,” all on her own.

Addendum:  I have a few poems my mom wrote that are really good and I will be posting on my blog in the future.