🎓 FIELD GUIDE 49: Because I can

Have you ever found yourself in the company of someone who you could talk to about anything, for hours? April is that someone. She will always engage if she can teach or if she can learn. She has so much knowledge, so much enthusiasm, so much…whiskey…in her tiny body. (Okay, the whiskey is only sometimes.)

April has done so much with her life. Marriage, kids, serving in the military, being a kickass paintball wife, starting a podcast, pursuing all the degrees…there’s no telling where she’s going next. But she’s going.

I once asked April why she was going to school now and she simply replied with, “Because I can.”

This weekend I hope you take the time to savor the things you’re doing just for the simple reason that you CAN.

-Skyler

Name

April Trepagnier

Occupation

Content Creator and Podcast Host of Bitches & Bourbon

Habitat

Georgia

Soundtrack

(Spotify)

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In December 2019, my family and I gathered on the northside front bleachers of Paulsen Stadium in Statesboro, Georgia, to watch our oldest daughter’s best friend graduate from Georgia Southern University. While chilly, it was sunny, a beautiful day to celebrate the accomplishment that comes only years after hard work.

My husband, Mike, and I had actually never been to college. We are both Navy veterans who enlisted immediately (me) or a short time after high school graduation (him). We both came from working-class backgrounds, complete with a solid work ethic, an abundance of street smarts, and absolutely no idea how the halls of academia worked.

We probably should have gone to college. He was a star basketball player with a brain that moved knowledge easily. I was an accomplished theatre kid with academic offers from several schools. But when you don’t understand how the system works and you don't have a checkbook to figure it out, it all looks impossible.

But it wasn’t impossible for these kids sitting out on this field on a sunny December day, waiting for their names to be called. They had done it. As the Commencement Ceremonies began, I thought about all the different ways life could have gone and how blessed I was at that moment.  

Georgia Southern University has several Ph.D. and Master level programs in addition to its baccalaureate offerings. Maybe I knew this before, but I knew it for certain now. One by one, students walked across the stage with a member of the faculty and received a new piece of flair for their ensemble. I had no idea what was going on, but I was fascinated.

“Babe, are those hoodies?”

“What are you talking about?” Mike asks.

“Those thingy thingies,” I intelligently explain while waving my arms around to indicate a scarf or a necktie, or complete confusion. He pauses and looks closer.

“I think it is. Huh. That is some Illuminati shit right there.”

See, I told you – no clue what goes on inside academia.

“I want a hoodie.”

I don’t remember thinking it before I said it, but no one in my family missed it.

“You’re going to school?”

“You’ve never been to school.”

“OMG! What would you learn about?”

“I saw hoodies in the bookstore. We could get one there!”

For the next two weeks, Mom going back to school became a funny story that the kids recounted often. It was cute to listen to them speculate about conversations I would have with the teachers, the different ways I would “mom” the younger students, and if my consequences for not doing my homework would be the same as theirs.

Like many things, it was funny – right until Mike decided it wasn’t.

“She could go if she wanted to,” he said to the children. Later, when we were on a drive alone, he said to me, “You should go. You’ve always wanted to, you’ve never been able to, you can now, and I think you would be really great at it.”

He wasn’t wrong. For the first time since I made the comment, I considered what that could look like. I allowed myself the curiosity. And then I allowed that curiosity to turn into a vision.

The next morning, I applied to Georgia Southern University. This part was not easy. I was a 43-year-old woman tasked with tracking down a 1994 high school transcript, SAT scores from 1992, and naval records from 2007. I was completely overwhelmed and nearly disheartened. I needed to make the spring semester. There were a billion reasons this was a self-indulgent, crazy idea. If I had six months to think about this, I would sabotage it.

The admissions department was having none of it. They worked, moved, helped, suggested, and willed the universe to do the same. These folks moved mountains. I got my schedule 45 minutes before my first class started. I was a college student.

The next three years would hold some of the most amazing experiences of my life.

I would be younger than some students, older than some professors, and while my age was a novelty, it was never a deterrent (unless you count learning a foreign language – doing that in your forties is not for the weak). My life experience brought a perspective to classroom discussions that would otherwise have been missing.

The intelligence of students young enough to be my children opened my depth of understanding to things I thought I knew. The culture of the university actively sought my participation. I was invited to join different student organizations and quickly became one of the most traditional non-traditional students I could manage. I attended conferences, spoke on panels, and conducted research in Ireland. My curiosities were encouraged and rewarded.

On May 9, 2023, I crossed the stage at Paulsen Stadium in Statesboro, Georgia, the same stage where I became enamored with the idea of a hoodie.

I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, graduating summa cum laude as a member of the Georgia Southern University Honors College.

In the fall, I will begin a fully funded master's program that I should complete a month before I turn 50. I am hopeful there will be a Ph.D. program that works after that.

I want a hoodie.

This is the point where I end my story for you.

Except this isn’t the end, and that’s the beauty of the idea. There is still so much story left to live. Like so many, there comes a point in our birthdays where we think what we have done is what there is, that whatever is left undone has been sacrificed to the altar of time.

Except time is still, as it has always been, all we have. I have no idea how many more sun rotations I have, but I know I have today. And I have proof that as long as I keep showing up, the journey is there for the taking. I think I will keep taking it.

xoxo