GOSHEN — Even though Jillian de Moya will be walking across the stage alone to receive her diploma at Goshen College today, her four children will be alongside — in her heart.
The 46-year-old single mother says it has been “truly a family project” the past 4 1/2 years for her to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in nursing.
“It’s their graduation, too,” said de Moya, a former stay-at-home mom who came to Goshen following a divorce. “I have a mission in life. I have a calling to be a nurse midwife,” de Moya said. We sat down as a family to do the (financial) numbers. I told them we will be really poor for five years, but at the end I will have something to show for it. Or I can work at a factory and at the end of five years we can still be poor.”
She calls herself “an average person” with big dreams and a big mission.
“I told myself, ‘I can do it and I did it.’” de Moya said, wiping her eyes. “Only it wasn’t me that just did it, we did it.”
Her children stepped up to help with cleaning, cooking and lifting her spirit with words of encouragement when she was discouraged and ready to give up.
“It’s been hard and I’ve cried a lot,” de Moya said. “One morning I had an early clinical class and I was so very tired and discouraged. I got up at 5:30 a.m. and saw the coffee was made, the table was set and breakfast was waiting. My son (Levi) had gotten up to make it for me and then went back to bed. That was a special moment for me. I cried. He made me get through one more day.”
The mother and son are sharing another special event this spring.
“Levi asked me if we could have a combined graduation party together,” she said, after they took a picture together of them wearing their graduation caps and gowns. Levi is a senior at Goshen High School.
Her oldest son, Samuel, attends Ball State University and her other son, Lucas, is a freshman at Goshen High School. Her daughter, Salome is 11 and a fifth-grader at Parkside Elementary School.
“All the ways my kids have sacrificed, they are richer for it,” the mother said.
De Moya says she couldn’t work and attend college at the same time, even though she is a certified doula, a birthing coach who supports women during and after their pregnancies.
“In a perfect world, I will be starting graduate school in January to get training to be a midwife,” she said. “But first, I have to take a statistics class and I have some learning disabilities with math.”
That learning disability and her age almost made her quit before she started, she said.
“My fear was — am I smart enough, am I good enough to do this,” de Moya said. “It took me until my junior year for my fear to dissipate after I had an algebra class that I passed by 0.01 percent. I cried after I learned I passed.”
Her children supported their mother when she had the opportunity to travel to Nepal for approximately a month with her nursing class at Goshen College and someone anonymously donated the funds for her trip.
“My life is a miracle for the whole experience. I will be floating across the stage and I will cry,” de Moya said. “This is a family endeavor and it is their accomplishment, too.”
GC Commencement
Today
• 11 a.m. — Baccalaureate worship service at Church-Chapel
• 2:40 p.m. — Processional line-up in Union hallway by mailboxes
• 3 p.m. — Commencement ceremony at the Roman Gingerich Recreation-Fitness Center (no admission tickets needed).
• Commencement speaker — The commencement speaker is Raj Biyani, a 1992 Goshen College graduate and managing director of Microsoft-IT India. Biyani resides in Hyderabad, India, where his organization has become a magnet for top talent across India. During Biyani’s 15 years at Microsoft, he was awarded several U.S. patents and one EU patent as head of research and development. His team was a key contributor to the computer-generated animation of the ground-breaking 2009 film Avatar. Biyani also co-authored the 2011 book To the Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise and funds several scholarships awarded each year to Goshen College international students.