I don’t doubt you get what you pay for but with my limited income I pay 20 dollars an hour, every two weeks now, every week in the beginning. My place has a sliding-scale program.
I think he was using the “straight shooter” line and giving you his honest opinion based on what he read. I had the same reaction mentally but I read a little bit ahead before I commented. You did seem a little pissed/incredibly disappointed that she was giving up on this dream. It’s just how it came out I’m sure.
Well you know what? You’re acting like a dick now, so I wish I could just have deleted my posts in this thread. And “duh” yourself. If you don’t want people making mistaken assumptions, try to be a little bit clearer.
Well, if she were totally honest, probably a little bit by you, too. Because you’re the reason she’s in this position. Yes, she freely chose to make these sacrifices she’s made, but she made them for you. And now that it’s her turn, you can’t/won’t make the same sacrifices for her. It’s not your fault you didn’t have 4 kids back then and you’re both hemmed in in ways you weren’t then, and it’s not reasonable or logical to blame you for that. But it’s a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.
I honestly think the numbers/memory thing is a fig leaf. Not for her fear of failure (or success) but to keep from having to talk about it just being too goddamn hard to pursue this in your current circumstances.
Yeah, the thought of living on that sort of treadmill makes me want to shoot myself in the face.
Dude, if you don’t have money for counseling, you don’t have money for her to go to school, so the whole thread is a moot point anyway.
Rushgeekgirl, you said some really shitty things about me. How do you expect me to react?
You’ve not heard of student loans then?
Anyway around here community college can be gone to part time for six hundred a semester.
Geezus. When then this place become the BBQPit?
Honest and frank advice is one thing…this thread is a whole nuther thing.
I am pretty busy here at the moment but dayum…
Dayum again. I hope I can re read the whole thing from start to finish to see if I’ve misread it totally…but again dayum for now…
Glad to help. 
This may be more the issue than her (perceived) lack of photography skills. I don’t think you would be “pushing” to gently suggest she have a conversation with her teacher/advisor/mentor before making a final decision. I mean, she’s already been through this previously – spent the entire class session thinking that her teacher thought she sucked, when it turned out that he loved her work. I obviously can’t say for sure, but I suspect this may have more to do with fear of success/self-sabotage than a genuine failure of skill. And the person in the best position to know if she’s got what it takes is the person who’s been teaching her. And frankly it’s part of a college prof’s JOB to have conversations like that. Given her past experience, it may be wiser to trust the teacher’s judgment over hers, at least at this point in time. Lacking confidence in her abilities is different from not having the skill, and the best way for her to gain confidence is to spend the time and effort learning and practicing the skill.
This whole thing reminds me of that quote from Ira Glass:
If she loves photography, I think it’s worth it to reality-check her perceptions of herself against those of someone who has experience with how to develop beginner photographers.
Thanks for reminding me of that Ira Glass quote. It’s very apt in this situation.
It does remind me, though, that another bit of pressure I’ve failed to mention is her internal drive to be doing something clearly useful and productive. She does like doing art for art’s sake, but when it comes to expending the resources that would be involved in pursuing training for something like this, she is not willing to do so without some fairly concrete guarantee that it will end with her correctly feeling like a useful and productive part of things–not just an artist but a valuable worker.
For acing academic exams, sure. To just crunch through a degree (that no one will care about the GPA), not necessarily.
It definitely won’t be needed in the real world; professionals use texts, documents, google, and references to look up something if needed. Memorizing is a neat trick, but hardly necessary.
Yeah, I’m just not sure what to say about the reasons… she knows a lot more about it than I do, so I have nothing to interject…
Like I said above, it’s natural to speculate about whether the stated reasons are the “real” reasons, and even the extent to which she’s aware of this, but all of that is beside the point. She’s the decider–and it appears she has decided.
So you both went through a tough eight years, was that for your postgraduate studies, Frylock? Also, did you benefit, personally, after those eight years and was there any way your wife benefitted from them too? Was/Is there any way you could celebrate completing, as a couple?
Also you say she’s in a great position to follow her dream but you have four kids and only your income, so I’m confused by that. What is her bachelor’s degree in? In the first post you called it useless but there never is a useless degree (just some won’t lead to financial riches) and I think you were feeling emotional when you posted that - I would be too if the love of my life were feeling so bad.
Sorry if any of these points were made clear previously, I tried to skim over the cross words and might have missed them.
To address this, and I can only speak from my own experience, but Corporate America does not really value creative skills. They give lip service to it, they have some vague notion that a marketing department is a thing to have, but when the economy tanks, the creatives are the first on the chopping block. Because lawyers and accountants are important, see, and well, just grab the intern or the programmer and plop him in front of PhotoShop, because anyone can do it, right?
I spend a lot of my job search having to explain that I’m a designer, not a developer/programmer, and YES there is a difference between the two. A lot of places are looking for programmers who design. This is laughable because these two things require completely opposite brain orientations (left brain/math/logic vs. right brain/artistry/“soft” skills).
So yes, it’s tough, in spite of the fact that it’s a very necessary and needed skill. It should be in high demand, but it’s not because it’s under-valued and perceived to be an “easy” skill that anyone can do. This is the only industry I know of where it’s actually fairly common to hear “My sister-in-law’s teenage son has Photoshop, and he’d do it for free. Why should I pay so much for you?”
My income is such that we can live on it, so long as we are careful, and school is cheap here plus there are student loans available. Especially if she can work a little bit as well, it is doable. For a few years, a few years ago, while I was in grad school, we basically lived like two single parents trading off the kids, and I’m willing to do this again, and in the past she’s said she is as well.
I think it would be a big mistake to suggest any kind of counseling except career counseling just yet. I know this puts me in the “jerk” category, but Frylock, your posts are really coming across as judging her for her “failure”. If that’s the feeling you’re giving her (justified or not), telling her she needs counseling will only make things worse. It doesn’t sound like she needs it to me. What she DOES need is some guidance from a professional on her career options. She’s not the first Mom to want a new career, but she probably feels pretty alone right now.
No, they’re really not. I’ve gone back and read and re-read them, and they’re really not. I challenge you to find textual evidence to back up your claim. I can lay out my argumetns as well.
Believe me I have no intention of telling her such a thing. This is not the time, I am not the person. I did ask upthread, though, just to have information on hand. But I cannot presently imagine a way to bring it up that wouldn’t backfire horribly.
I agree with this as well, though I am not as confident. There are some unmentioned longstanding reoccurring thought patterns underlying some of the events I’ve described. But this is not the place to go into it.
Maybe I can suggest “reverse interviews?” She’s already spoken with the guidance guy at the local community college’s photography-and-visual-arts (or whatever) department. But his job is basically to sell her on enrolling so I’m not sure how valuable she found that to be.
How does one get guidance from a professional on career options? Just email somebody at random? I don’t know… How does the real world work? 
I don’t have much experience with it myself unfortunately.
That sounds a bit like my upbringing, but I only have two siblings and neither parent went to grad school. It was still tough, and money was always an issue in one way or another. In the end my mother, who’d always cooked at home for us (and did at work, part-time), started a business with the skills she’d gained and, after a few years, my father joined her to form a catering company.
Of course that was after we were all in school ourselves, no way they’d have had the time or resources to do that with young kids still at home.
You say you’re willing to go through those eight years again but it’s going to be different; you now have more… well, more everything to be responsible for. You have more mouths to feed, clothes to buy, scraped knees to tend to etc. Maybe 15 years of financial commitments. That sounds daunting but there are ways your wife can improve her lot and fit it round a busy family schedule (smiling, roller skating mom montage goes here), but that takes planning and an understanding hubbie. It seems she already has one of those.
The only thing in my original post which I can possibly imagine could have given anyone the impression that I’m disappointed in her for failing, or making a bad choice, or whatever it is some of you are saying, is the part quoted above. And that would only make sense if you were assuming that the text was somehow meant in a kind of sarcastic sense. But you shouldn’t make that assumption. I mean each sentence quoted above in a perfectly straightforward sense. (Maybe not 100% straightforward on the very last sentence.)
Other than that, I have no idea where some of you are coming from. Again, I challenge you to show me your textual evidence. My hope, of course, is that if you actually do decide to do so (which would admittedly be an amazingly generous thing for you to do) you’d discover on reflection that the evidence isn’t there, and that you were importing assumptions into your reading without textual justification. And you’d tell me so and we’d all go away happy. 
Haha now I’m going to ruin everything.
I freakin’ told her we should not have a third kid.
There I said it.
(And of course, to be clear, I know it takes two to produce that kid… But damn I wish I’d pushed harder on that. I love my kids more than anything, and at the same time, I deeply regret deciding to go ahead and cooperate in their conception.
I never told this to anyone before, ever. I should probably be shutting up right about now.)
I’ve known a few art directors, graphic designers, and professional photographers and I don’t think a single one had formal training - at least not at the degree level - wait, one has a fine arts degree and has been a professional web designer, but he also codes. Most had talent and such a love of it that they were able to turn a hobby into a paying job.