Tears, Exams, Tears, Transformation

By Chara, Role Model Mom Victoria Village Teacher

Building community: once a week, we eat together after class

I have loved journeying with this group of moms through this Fall semester of Role Model Moms. They have been such a committed group despite dealing with things such as family struggles, addictions, deaths of friends, and depression. Many of these moms have also admitted to having severe anxiety around school and there were many tears during the first set of exams. However, this group rallied around each other in all of these situations, encouraging each other to not give up. I am amazed at how many of them pushed through the chaos of their lives in addition to raising kids many times alone. Seeing their tears of anxiety change into tears of overwhelming joy when test results came back better than they expected. Six of the moms have recently found out that they have passed all their exams on the first try and will be receiving their GED (high school equivalency diploma), and the others who passed some subjects were encouraged and became motivated to study harder and try again. One of the comments through the joy tears was, “People thought I would never finish this. I was afraid to be a disappointment again. I can’t believe it has actually happened!”

The best part of my job as a Role Model Mom teacher is getting to see this beautiful transformation that these moms go through. A few of the moms at the beginning of this semester never spoke out in class, but by the end of the semester were eager to participate. Many of them come with very low self esteem and really bad past experiences that have pushed them into a little cocoon. However, over the course of a semester I get to see some of them break out of that cocoon and transform into these more confident, beautiful butterflies who get to dream again and have hope for a future of exciting possibilities.

The moms writing one of their GED tests