At 17, Rebecca Maple had to gather the courage to tell her mother she was pregnant. This was 15 years ago; Maple was a senior at Iola High School. “My mother had always taught me that whatever happens in life you have to face it head on and deal with it. And so when the time came, she told me: ‘You have a decision to make, a choice. Now, I’ll support you in whatever choice you make. But if you make the decision to have this child, you’re making a decision to be a mother.’”
Two weeks before Maple’s 18th birthday she gave birth to a son, Jackson.
Skipping forward a few years, Maple, barely out of her teens at this point, is crossing her front porch, about to enter the house. “I had groceries in my hand, but Jackson is wanting me to pick him up, but I can’t because I’ve got Orion in the other hand.” Orion is Maple’s second son, who arrived barely two years after Jackson. “Or, no,” — the memory clarifies — “actually, Jackson was running out in front of me, that was it. And I was holding Orion in one arm and also holding Tamera” — her daughter, born a year after Orion — “and I was still holding the bags and trying to open the door. One of my friends from across the street, he came out laughing so hard and was like, ‘What are you doing?’
“That was a tough time, with all three of my kids being so close. You know, it’s a lot of toddlers at the same time. … And it’s a lot of pressure. During those years when you’re trying to figure yourself out, it makes it much more difficult when you have to think about another person at the same time.”
But Maple never did lose her sense of self during this period of outsized responsibility. “I always had the drive to go back to school.” She completed her GED after her first pregnancy and continued, during her kids’ early years, to find the time to read. She had been a bookish kid and remained bookish in the face of an almost unbroken string of distractions. “I still have pretty much everything I’ve ever read on my shelf, from Plato to trashy romance novels.
“I wanted to continue to learn, because I knew I was going to go back eventually.”
And so, with the encouragement of her second husband, Travis — who, when the pair married in 2009, added two of his own children to Rebecca’s three — Maple enrolled at Allen Community College.
“I just had to stop and ask myself: In five years, is this really what I want to be doing? Because this is the rest of my life. I get one life. I can either be standing still and letting time pass, or making progress toward what I really want to do.
“So I talked it over with my husband, told him what I wanted to do. We discussed what it was going to take for me to be able to finish, and for him to be able to support me. You know, that’s scary for him, too, because we’re a partnership and that’s our family money that’s not going to be there if I go back. But he was absolutely adamant that he thought I could do it. He wanted to be supportive of me. And he is. That’s one of the things that helps me the most. … And the kids, too, are so supportive. There are a lot of sacrifices we have to make. You know, we don’t have cable, stuff like that. But the whole family is so understanding.
“My husband is just absolutely like, ‘No, you’re finishing this thing. There’s no reason not to.’”
For Maple, the stakes of finishing feel higher than they might for a traditional student. “I think there were a lot of people that expected me to fail. They thought I was crazy for trying to do all of this in the middle of my kids’ lives, you know. But I was like, ‘No, this is the best for them. For them to see me succeed is going to help them succeed.’ It’s important for me to finish. It’s important for them to see me finish. Especially for my daughter. A lot of women, especially a lot of women who are raising kids, they feel like they can’t go back. They feel like, ‘Oh, I’ve been out of school too long.’ But if you want to do it, absolutely do it.”
Next week Maple, 32 years old now and a mother of five, will graduate from ACC with a degree in psychology and has plans to continue her studies at Pittsburg State University, where she will specialize in cognitive behavioral therapy come fall. After completing her coursework at PSU, she will pursue a master’s degree in her field.
For the last decade and a half, since she was that nervous teenager approaching her mother with the biggest news of her life, Maple has gone at the world with her sleeves rolled up, working hard, along with her husband, to build a solid life for her family. Things can still get hard, Maple says, as they do for any family. But they’re a tight group, a large, loving, blended family of seven, and they support one another.
“When I’m not studying, and when the kids aren’t busy with school, we do a lot of hiking and outdoor stuff. We go on bike rides. Everyone’s got a bike. We do a lot of camping. See, my husband was an Eagle Scout, so sometimes we all go hiking and he points out all the flowers and we’ll show the kids. One day we were using the walking trail — we go down the walking trail quite a bit — and the kids stopped and we all just stood and watched a beaver there, building a little dam.”
Maple perseveres, thrives
