Mom Of Seven Kids Celebrating Mother's Day With Law Degree
PLAINFIELD, Ill. (CBS) -- It'll be a special Mother's Day for a Plainfield mother of seven, who's celebrating her law school graduation.
"It's been an emotional, exhausting journey," Jennifer Wood said.
She already had her hands full as a mother of three autistic boys, and stepmother to four other children.
As a non-lawyer, she'd found she was limited in advocating for her special needs children in school, so at the age of 37, she started law school at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Mother Of Seven Finishes Law School
Her daily commute from Plainfield took two hours everyday, and after her husband lost his job, she had to work part-time to support the family.
Wood said, as she struggled to juggle all of the demands on her, there was a time that she thought about giving up, but one of her twenty-something classmates kept her going.
"He just said to me, out of nowhere, one time, 'You're just Wonder Woman.' And I said 'Pardon?'" she said. "And he said, 'You're just Wonder Woman to me. You inspire me.'"
Wood said, when she gets her law degree a week after Mother's Day, her husband and seven children will be cheering her on.
"It's just really going to be the culmination of a dream. I'm going to be really excited. I already bought waterproof mascara because I know I'm just going to be very emotional about it, very emotional," she said.
