Organic Chem Lab

My daughter's blog dredged up a memory for me of those way-back days when I was taking Organic Chemistry at the U of M. I liked that class. Honest, I did. I loved the symmetry of those carbon bonds, the variability of what and how things bonded to the carbon atoms, the puzzles of how what fit where and combined with which.

It was the lab work that defeated me, and the prime reason was my cooking skills. I'd always prided myself on those skills. I grew up in 4H, and making breads and all sorts of other goodies was just one of many points of pride with me. All those blue ribbons had to mean something, right? What her posting helped me realize was my skills were the ability to combine approximate amounts of ingredients, stir an approximate length of time, cook at an approximate temperature. With a lot of things in the kitchen, that's good enough.

Not in chem lab.

I had other things distracting me. You can take these as excuses, but they were not really the cause of my poor work. I fancied myself a pre-med major, and was carrying a course load that also included Microbiology and Quantitative Analysis. Or perhaps it was Qualitative. Whichever, both were required, and I sucked at both of them. Or would have, had I not dropped the first and never made it to the second.

These were all evening classes. I also worked 60 hours a week doing family day care, generally 6AM to 6PM, with an occasional Saturday thrown in for a mom who worked at Daytons Department Store and needed to pull the occasional Saturday.

And did I mention that I was pregnant with my third? As my enormous stomach preceded me into the lab that first night, the very, very young TA who'd gotten stuck teaching that particular lab eyed me uneasily and asked the inevitable question: "How far along are you?"

"Nine months."

I knew full well by now that I carried my babies for 10 months, but as I watched him turn a bit greener than he had been upon first seeing me, I declined to inform him of that fact. I took great amusement each night as I waddled through the door in his reaction of semi-panic at my continued presence in class. It might explain why other students may have gotten more corrective instruction that I got, but that could just be my own skewed perception. At any rate, my results were below standard.

One night I bent over to open my floor-lever lab drawer, and felt my water break. Oops! How embarrassing. I relocked the drawer, stood slowly up, and called him over. I explained that I would not be completing class that night, and why, and watched as complete panic tried to take over his face. I was a veteran at this, calm as could be, but he...!

"Uh, um, I mean, is there, uh, anything I can, uh, do?" I just knew behind the words was the fervent prayer that the answer would be an emphatic, "No." I had other ideas.

"Can you tell me where there's a phone so I can call my husband and my midwife?" (Remember not having cell phones?)

He wasn't sure he should let me walk out of the room, much less go down to the first floor to find the phone. I finally convinced him that my hospital was about a block away on this very campus, and that I wasn't even in labor yet. (But I would be. Soon. It really would be best to let me go.)

Since Paul came by caesarean, and this was the good old days when that meant an 8-day hospital stay, it was a while before I got back to lab class. It didn't help my grades a bit. There were no make-up labs.

And the first thing the TA did when he recognized me was glance suspiciously at my stomach, just to make sure I wasn't still pregnant!