Me llamo Graciela Montoya. I am 44 years old, I live outside Fresno, California, and I have been married to Ruben for 25 years. We have four children. Last year I got my GED. This year I am going to college.

I clean offices downtown from 5 to 9 in the morning, while it is still night outside. Three nights a week I go to the community college: English 101 on Monday and Wednesday, Intro to Psychology on Tuesday. My daughter Vero made this page for me at the library. I write my entries in a spiral notebook and type them in when I can get to a computer.

Today after Mass we drove to Selma and I read my essay to Amá, my mother.

She sat at my sister Tere's kitchen table with her coffee. I read it in English first, because that is how I wrote it, and then I read it again, putting it into Spanish as I went, slowly, because Amá's English is for the store and the doctor, not for this. When I got to the part about her hands with the knife over the trays, she put her hand over her mouth. When I finished she said, "Ay, mija. ¿Yo? ¿En un libro?" (Me? In a book?) I said, it's not a book, Amá, it's an essay, for school. She said it's a book.

Then she sang the song. The one I wrote about, the one from her mother, the one I never knew the name of. She sang the whole thing at the kitchen table in her little voice, and Tere and I just sat there. Tere got the cassette recorder out and made her sing it again. Amá still doesn't know what it's called. "It's just a song from my mother."

Last night was the big full moon. After the kids went to bed Ruben and I sat on the back steps and looked at it coming up over the vines. The trays are mostly rolled now. Ruben said, "I read your book." I said, what book? He said the psychology one, the chapter about dreams. He's been reading it when I'm asleep. He said, "That Freud was crazy." I said, "Some of it."

Then he said, "I'm proud of you, Graciela. I just don't want you to get so smart you get tired of me."

I didn't have a good answer. I put my head on his shoulder. We sat out there until the moon got small.

Tomorrow the alarm is at four. Échale ganas, Graciela. (Give it everything you've got.)

B+!!!

B plus. On the revision. Same Amá, better commas.

Ms. D., my English teacher, handed them back last night, and this time I didn't wait for the car, I looked right there at my desk. B+ in red, and at the bottom she wrote: "THIS is what revision means. Your last paragraph made me call my own mother."

I didn't cry in the car this time. I sang in the car. Selena, "Como la Flor," loud, with the windows down, all the way home. I stopped at the store and bought a cake, the kind with the white frosting and the roses, and when I got home at ten o'clock at night I woke everybody up. Danny and Lupita came out in their pajamas. Junior, our oldest, was still up. Vero screamed.

Ruben came out in his undershirt and asked for the paper, and he stood in the kitchen under the light and read the whole thing. He never read the first one. When he finished he handed it back to me and said, "Your mother is going to cry." Then he went and cut himself a big piece of cake.

That is Ruben saying he's proud. You have to know how to read him. I'm learning to read a lot of things this year.

Confession. Saturday night I fell asleep on the psychology book, at the kitchen table, on the chapter about — I am not lying — sleep. "States of Consciousness." I was reading how grown people need seven or eight hours a night, thinking qué bonito (how nice), and then it was one in the morning and my face was on page 132 and there was a blanket around my shoulders.

Lupita. She's nine. She got up for water and found me, and she didn't wake me. She went and got the blanket off the couch and put it on me and turned off the big light and left the little one on. In the morning she said, "You were snoring, Ma. Is that on the test?"

Vero says falling asleep on the sleep chapter is called research.

I added up my sleep for the book. Up at four. Offices five to nine. Home, errands, a nap of one hour if the phone doesn't ring. The kids, dinner, class, homework until midnight. About five hours. The book says that is not enough. The book is right. The book doesn't clean offices.

Tonight in English we talked about "audience," who you are writing for. Ms. D. asked who we picture reading our essays. I said my mother. A boy in the back said, "You, Ms. D.," and everybody laughed. I think I also picture you, whoever you are, reading this. Hello.

The psychology test: 81. A B-minus. Mr. A. taped the scores to his office door by the last four numbers of our Social Security, and I went and looked this morning after work, still in my work shoes. I wrote 81 on a Post-it, and I don't care that it's a Post-it, it's going on the refrigerator next to Lupita's spelling test. (She got 100. Show-off.)

Now the harder thing.

Ruben and I had words last night. I got home from class at 9:45 and the kitchen was a mess, Danny hadn't done his homework, and Ruben was in front of the TV watching the hurricane back east, the whole coast getting in their cars. He didn't look up. I said, "You couldn't make him do his homework?" He said, "That's your department." And then the thing he's been holding in: "Everything is school now. You're up at four, you're gone at night, you fall asleep on the book. What do you need psychology for? You going to psychoanalyze me?"

His compadres at the packing house tease him. They call me la licenciada, like I'm already a college lady with a title on the door. He laughs with them. I don't think it feels funny inside.

Ruben left school in the ninth grade to work, like I did. For 25 years we were the same. Now I'm doing something he isn't doing, and I think he's afraid I'm going somewhere without him.

I didn't say anything smart. I went and did the dishes, loud. After a while he came in and picked up the towel and dried. We didn't talk. But he dried.

Poco a poco.

Psych test tomorrow, chapters 1, 2 and 3. Vero made me flash cards. Danny quizzed me at dinner. ("Ma. Pavlov. Go.") Lupita asked if she can come take the test for me.

Me voy a dormir. I'm going to sleep.

I got a C+.

Ms. D. gave the essays back last night at the end of class. I didn't look until I got to the car. C+ in red pen, and under it a whole paragraph in her fast handwriting: "Your mother is alive on this page. I can smell the vineyard. But your sentences are fighting you. See me about comma splices." And the whole paper was red. Little circles everywhere, and CS, CS, CS in the margin. I didn't know what CS was. I thought it was something very bad.

It's a comma splice. It's when you hook two whole sentences together with only a comma. I do it, according to Ms. D., "like it's your job."

I sat in the dark parking lot and cried a little. Not a lot. A little. At home Vero read it and said, "Ma. C plus is passing." I said, "Mija, I didn't go back to school at 44 to pass."

This morning at the offices, dusting the diplomas on the lawyers' walls like I do every day, I looked at them different. Somebody corrected all those people's commas too, once.

After work I drove straight to the college and found the Writing Center. A young man with glasses showed me the rule with his hands: a comma is a little pause, a period is a stop. When you have two whole thoughts, you have to stop between them. I said, "Like two kids fighting in the back seat. You have to separate them." He laughed and said, "Exactly like that."

Ms. D. says we can revise it for a new grade. Ya verás. You'll see.

I turned in my first college essay tonight. Typed, double-spaced, two staples because I didn't trust one. I carried it in a folder so the corners wouldn't bend. I read it maybe thirty times before I let it go.

Something I didn't tell anybody. Sunday I heard Ruben on the phone with his compadre Beto. He didn't know I was in the hall. He said, "Sí, she's in college now. English and psychology. She's smart, that one. Smarter than me." And he laughed.

At home he doesn't say anything like that to me. At home he says, "¿Y la cena?" (And dinner?) But I heard it. I'm keeping it.

Our first essay: "Describe a person who shaped who you are." Five hundred words, typed. I knew in one second. Amá.

My mother is 70. She lives in Selma with my sister Tere. For forty years she worked in the fields: grapes, peaches, cotton when I was little, and every August, the raisins. When I was a girl we all went. You cut the bunches and lay them on the paper trays on the ground between the rows, and the sun makes them into raisins, and in a few weeks you go back and roll the trays up. I remember her hands with the knife. I remember she sang under her breath, always the same song, and when I asked her what it was she said, "Nothing, just a song from my mother." I still don't know the name.

I wrote it last night after class, at the kitchen table, from ten o'clock until 12:40. Four pages in pencil. Now I have to type it. We don't have a computer, so Saturday Vero is taking me to the library again. My handwriting is better than my typing. My typing is like a chicken looking for corn.

Tonight the moon is full and orange over the vines behind the house. I went out and stood in it for a while. The trays are down in the rows right now all over the valley, and everybody is praying it doesn't rain. Amá used to pray the same thing, every year. Si Dios quiere, it won't. God willing.

First English class last night. First psychology class tonight. It's 11:30, I have to be up at four, so this will be quick. (It won't be quick.)

English 101: 28 students. I counted. I am the oldest by twenty years, except one man in the back who I think is retired from the Army and sits very straight. The girl next to me had a ring in her eyebrow and a pager on her belt, and when my pen ran out she lent me one and called me "ma'am," so I forgave the eyebrow. The teacher, Ms. D., is maybe 35, very tall, and talks fast. She said, "In this class you will write five essays and you will revise every one of them." I wrote REVISE in my notebook and underlined it two times.

Psychology: a big room like a movie theater, maybe sixty people. Mr. A. said psychology is "the scientific study of behavior and mental processes." I wrote it down. I have raised four children and been married 25 years, and I thought, I've been studying behavior and mental processes my whole life. I just didn't know it was a science.

Both nights I sat in the front row. In high school, the little bit of high school I had before I left at sixteen to work, I always sat in the back. Not anymore. I didn't come back to hide.

Hello. This is my first time writing on a computer for other people to read.

My daughter Vero, who is 16 and knows everything, brought me to the library today and showed me how to use the computers. The mouse, the little arrow, how you double-click. (I click too slow, she says, like I'm knocking on a door.) She made this page for me in one hour. She picked the colors. I picked the words.

Why a page? Because Vero says people keep journals on the Internet now, and because I need somewhere to put all this. I am 44 years old and I am going to college.

Registration was two weeks ago. Vero did it on the telephone, pushing the numbers, while I held the schedule and read her the class codes, and we both screamed when the recording said I was in. English 101, Monday and Wednesday nights. Introduction to Psychology, Tuesday nights.

Then today, the bookstore. Ay, Dios mío. The psychology book alone was $71.50 new. I picked it up and put it back down two times. The used one was $54, with a yellow USED sticker on the spine and somebody else's yellow highlighter all through it. Vero said, "Ma, get the used one. Somebody already found the important parts for you." So I did. The two English books were $61 together, a handbook and a reader. I paid out of the envelope I've been saving in the coffee can since my GED. It's almost empty now. Ni modo. (That means: oh well, that's how it is.)

Monday I start. I'm going to wear my good blouse.

Write to me: [email protected]
(Vero checks it for me. Be nice.)

Thank you to the lady in Texas who went back to school at 50 and wrote to say the first C is the hardest one. Gracias.

If you know us, please be kind, and please don't print this out and show it at the packing house.