As my daughter’s 2022-2023 school year heads into its fourth month, I head into my fourth week of my 10 week fall quarter.

It has been an interesting journey to go to school along with my elementary age daughter.

She has given me high fives when I finish an assignment and a “Woohoo” when I get a good grade on a test.

To me, all of that praise is really hers to begin with, because I wouldn’t be doing any of it if it wasn’t for her.

During the summer quarter of this year, I found out I had made the Dean’s List for my grades in the spring quarter.

I was very proud, but it also forced me to take a look at this journey that is a mix of motherhood and education.

I didn’t head to college after I graduated high school in 2010. Instead, I moved out and went to work. I didn’t have any real goals, but I was also just 17 years old at that time.

At 17, I didn’t make all the best decisions, but I was really trying to figure out what life, my life specifically, was going to look like.

In May 2015, at 22 years old, I had a beautiful baby girl. As I held her for those first couple months I realized — I did have goals.

I want to build a career that I love and am passionate about. I want to show my daughters they can do anything they want from family to career.

In late July or early August 2015, I walked into the admissions office of the local campus in Harrison, Ark., without an appointment I might add, with my baby girl in my arms.

I walked up to the first person I saw and said, “I want to start college this fall, but I don’t know where to start.”

I am a first-generation student, so I didn’t have someone to walk me through the process, which may have contributed to my decision to not go straight to college after I graduated.

I sat in an office where a very kind man did all the work for me. He asked questions and I answered them. He even created an email account for me.

That was it, and I was enrolled for the fall semester of 2015.

Now, 7 years later, I am three courses from earning my bachelor’s degree. For a full-time student, this degree takes about 4 years to complete, but my journey has included the struggles of being a single mother and a student.

It shows hiatus after hiatus, but it also shows some incredibly hard work.

There were semesters, and even whole years, where I was unable to attend college. There were also years that I took more courses than seemed possible.

I think it is funny sometimes to think of my current career as a journalist, and the degree I am earning in marriage and family therapy.

I sometimes feel like a juggler in a circus, having my hand firmly if only briefly on one part of my world, whether it is being a wife and mother, being a reporter, and being a student, all the while keeping the other parts carefully suspended in the air until it is their turn to fall into my hands.

In the end, TroutMom’s advice is the same advice that I have received from a number of people through this journey, “Just keep going.”

You earn the same degree if it takes 4 years or 10.

Jordan Troutman is the reporter for the Cassville Democrat, a wife, a mother of two daughters, and a student at Capella University majoring in Marriage and Family Therapy.