Her Stress
...aise my children so I did not have to work. After his death I found myself having to support us with only the Social Security we receive and be both mother and father to my three children. It has been fairly difficult, but we have learned many different things as we go along. Now my stress is mounting. With the help of my mother and the Special Populations program here at Macomb, I was able to start classes for my Associate’s Degree. This was a major adjustment since I have not been back to school in over twenty years. I did not think I would be able to this and I was very uncertain how to proceed, which added to the stress. I started with just one class; it was not a traditional class but a transition class, which was very unsettling. All of the women in the class were divorcee who went through very difficult divorces. I was the only one there who lost a husband. Not one of them had anything positive to say about men, one even said she wished her husband had died so she didn’t have to go through the divorce. I wanted to quit right then but gave the class a chance. The class did help me to set short term goals which are near completion. Now my stress is going on to a new level. My classes were not the most difficult part. The fact that I have such high aspiration for myself is one of the main problems. I felt I have to get all “A’s”. Trying to take care of household responsibilities, carpooling, taking classes, and doing homework was not working out to well .In addition, I had to add forty-five minutes to an hour each way, depending on traffic, to go to Center Campus for my classes since they were only scheduled there. Trying to balance all of this created an entirely new schedule for me. Now I come close to death by stress. One of my classes was Business Communications (BCO 205). This had three of my worst fears rolled into one class. First was the teacher. She basically started out bad and proceeded to get worse. Anyone who asked a question would get a standard answer “We will cover that in class” which meant the questions never got answered. Everyone else seemed to be as stressed with her as I was, so I felt I was in very good company. My second fear was writing a research paper, which had to be at least fifteen pages long, with a questionnaire and charted graphs of the results. The third and most dreaded is my fear of public speaking. This stress coul...