Privileged

I am changing careers at age 35 with an almost 2-year-old, having just embarked on what will be, at best, 4 years of training before I'm earning real wages. This would not be possible without my husband's deep pockets and near-infinite patience with me (to be sure, on a global level; on a day-to-day basis he's actually human and snips at me when I'm out of line).

This Nursing Assistant certification program is complicated: it began with First Aid certification (two 5-hour night classes), then we took CPR and HIV/AIDs & Bloodborne Pathogens certification courses, each about 8-hour Saturdays. Then there are twenty 2.5 hour classes, and finally 80 hours of clinic in June. One woman who doesn't look much older than me had to bring her (astoundingly well-behaved ) 4-year-old grandson to one of these classes for 5 hours. My husband watched our daughter during the Saturday classes, and my housemates and he dealt with the other irregular class times. We have (and can afford) good, reliable childcare during the days.

There was another woman, let's call her Nikita, who managed to attend all of those irregular classes. On the first day of normal NAC class, when we were told to leave our cellphones off during class, she protested that she has a two-year old with sickle cell, and that she needs to be reachable by phone were something to happen. Betty and her co-instructor "Judy," (who's there specifically to help all the ESL students), agreed that perhaps she could leave her phone on vibrate, and dash out of class to answer it. Nikita hasn't come back to class since about day three. I assume that childcare issues are the reason.

Our economy sucks and so many people are trapped. I listen to Planet Money (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/) regularly, and keep hearing about people in Detroit who've worked in the automotive industry their whole lives, are losing their jobs, so have mortgages they can't pay, and houses they can't sell, because property values there have dropped at a more dizzying rate there than elsewhere. Who wants to move to a sinking ship?

I, on the other hand, am changing careers mostly because I want to feel like my life is meaningful. Yeah, the economy's this bad, and I get to play around at the top level of Maslow's hierarchy, right? How fair is that? (There's a little more to my decision, but I'll save that for another post.) I think most of the people in my NAC class are there to bump up the amount they're getting paid to provide home care, or in the hopes of getting a decent wage at all--this for me is just a step to learn a little about the field in which I hope to advance further.

And it's not cheap! The course is a little over $900, scrubs, shoes, stethoscope, other random equipment, books, transportation, add up to another $500 or so. I hope and assume a lot of the other students have financial aid for this, but still. I wonder if Nikita will be able to get any of her money back.