As a teenager, you can’t imagine anything worse. Just after finishing high school – as you start counting down the days until college begins, drooling at the thought of finally experiencing the freedom you’ve been craving – you learn some devastating news. You rant, you stomp up and down the house, you choke back tears and curl into a ball on your bed, then finally give in to your emotion and sob into your pillow, making it a sopping mess. How could she, your own mother, do this to you? It’s inconceivable, inexcusable and most definitely unforgivable: Mom is going back to school – and not just any school, but the same school as you! Mom is going to be your college classmate!
Such a scenario is the reality for sisters Caroline and August Wright, who attend the College with their mother, Jenna-Lyn Johnson. In their case, though, there was no yelling, no crying, no weepy face-to-face confrontations. The girls, in fact, encouraged their mother to join them as Cougars. They were proud to see her resume her quest to attend medical school after being thwarted nearly 20 years ago when the demands of motherhood forced her to delay completion of her undergraduate education at Queens College in Charlotte in the early 1990s.
Back then, Johnson was recently divorced from a high school sweetheart, forced to have fellow students babysit her young daughters in dormitory rooms while she went to class. Such a routine became unsustainable, and she withdrew from school to concentrate on her kids. She soon remarried and continued raising her kids, with the family eventually moving to North Charleston in 2008. As her youngest daughter, August, was finishing high school and began thinking about joining her sister at the College, the wheels started turning in Johnson’s head, too. She did a little homework – a novel task after all those years – and rejoiced when she found that it wasn’t unusual for older students to attend college or medical school.
“Universities realize now that older students bring other things to the table,” says Johnson. “They add variety to the matriculating class.”
Now Johnson, 39, is finishing her last year at the College, scheduled to graduate with a degree in biology and a minor in discovery informatics. Her daughters are both sophomores: Caroline studying business and Japanese and August studying chemistry and linguistics. Last year, the three women regularly ate together at the Liberty Street Fresh Food Company four days a week, each bringing a few friends to tag along, forming a group Caroline affectionately refers to as “the island of misfit toys.”
In many ways, Johnson says, college has not changed that much, it’s just she who’s different. Initially, the pace of classes surprised her, and she was reluctant to ask questions. As an adult, she finds it takes her longer to write papers since she is particular about what she wants to say. Test taking requires more time, too, because she is more careful and, in turn, more accurate. She took one class with daughter Caroline and was embarrassed when Caroline bested her by turning in a paper early.
Much of the time, say Caroline and August, their mother acts more like their friend than parent. She watches movies with them, attends concerts with them and refrains from acting like a mom while on campus. Oftentimes, other students and professors don’t realize Johnson is their mother. Those who do are supportive of Johnson’s returning to school and achieving her goals.
One friend of the family, senior Jacque Roberts, credits Johnson with striking a delicate balance: “On campus she tries to keep the mom portion toned down, but
at home – forget about it – it’s mom all the time.”
Roberts, who took Japanese classes with Caroline and a statistics class with Johnson, is one of the regulars at the family’s lunch table. At 30 years of age and a veteran of the Air Force, he’s also getting his undergraduate degree later than is traditional. He says that Johnson differs from her daughters and other college students in that she has little patience for dawdling or amusements – and would never suggest a television break during a study period.
“There’s no nonsense with her. It’s, ‘Let’s sit down and do this and get it done,’” says Roberts of Johnson’s approach to homework and class projects. “She’s not one for games.”
That’s not to say there’s no place for fun in Johnson’s college life. She’s been to two Linkin Park concerts with her daughters, as well as a My Chemical Romance show. This fall, she attended a Jason Mraz concert in the College’s Carolina First Arena with August (Caroline is studying in Japan this semester).
With each class she takes, Johnson is becoming more and more like a bona fide college student again, learning how to use a graphing calculator and checking out Ratemyprofessor.com before signing up for classes. She’s pulled an all-nighter, she confesses, but hasn’t skipped class yet – and she hasn’t gone to a college party this millennium. There are just some college experiences she’ll never have again.
“I would walk in, and it would be Mom walking in. It would kill the party,” laughs Johnson. “I’d never get that invitation.”
And that’s OK with her.
