I decided to sign up to do a degree in October 2011, thinking maybe I would be able to get a better job with a degree. I started my first module about a month later. I had zero confidence. I had zero self-esteem. I had just come out of a hideous breakup, left my job, had two very small children and I didn't know what else to do with myself. My first module started in February 2012, when my (then) youngest was ten months, and my eldest was thirty four months. Neither of them were at preschool at that point. I lived on my own. I was bored. I was angry. I was determined.
So I worked. I worked nonstop for four years to achieve my undergraduate degree in June 2016, with first class honours. During that time, I got divorced, remarried, had another baby, got my eldest diagnosed with autism. Uni was the basenote through those four, strange years, always there to focus on when everything else was going to shit.
July 2016, I was awarded my degree, my kids finished school for the summer. What next? What next? I couldn't bear the thought of having nothing to do, and Alex was only just one. I had developed a all-consuming passionate hobby in family history, and decided to have a stab at a history masters to professionalise my credentials.
Three days later, Mum got ill. You know that story. You know how that ended.
But I carried on. I could have stopped. Nobody would have been surprised if I'd deferred. But I needed the framework, I had to have something that wasn't mourning, something I could do that she would have loved, that I could do in her memory. As time went on, it stopped being about Mum and started being about the people whose deaths I was studying, it started being about bringing long forgotten processes to light, it started being about something more useful than a mere grief process.
From May 2018 until January 2019, I worked like a demon, reading everything relevant, spending hours researching Every Single Woman in the Assizes in Northamptonshire in a Thirteen Year Span to make one pie chart. I started to pull it together. My dissertation was titled Infant Death in the Coroner's Court, but it was about women and mothers, childcare and illegitimacy, and the juxtaposition of working-class women in a court of men. It was about the deliberate exclusion of women from judicial process concerning them, judicial process where their lives were at stake. It was about how limited networks of men developed in cities, to judge and govern the lower classes. It was about gendered space. It was about how we used to live, and how we used to die.
I had my mum in mind while I wrote it, and I thought of her experience, and how she might have been treated had my brother been born one hundred years earlier, and how she might have been treated had he been born even ten years later.
I passed. I passed with merit.
This masters is for me.
For my mum.
For the women whose stories I was privileged to tell in my dissertation.
For my kids who, I hope, will understand why Mummy never stopped wanting to learn.
I couldn't have done it without my beloved husband, who never read a word of it but patiently listened to me bellowing on about it most days. Or without my in-laws, who looked after Alex while I went to the library every week to transcribe the relevant data set. Or without my sister, Jess, who DID read every word of it, and provided feedback as well as being a soundboard for me sorting out arguments in my head. My siblings, my Dad, my friends, random people in the library, who have listened to me blarting on about dead babies over the last year - you're all saints, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I couldn't have done any of it without the OU, and my tutors, or without the expert guidance of Peterborough archive staff, and the Coroner's Society historian. Or without my Learned Friends, especially Dr B.
You've all been the most magnificent cheerleaders. I am so grateful. I graduate in June: I didn't bother with my undergrad graduation, because Mum was about to die, but this time, I will.
What happens next? I don't know. I don't want to stop, but I also recognise that I might have to. I've developed a business from this, and you can find me at Sophie Michell's Family Research if you want to HIRE ME, as I am now OFFICIALLY a professional historian.
