A mom, a student: How a San Antonio parent juggles school, work and child care for a better future

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SAN ANTONIO — Labor had come so early in the morning, the contractions so fast. Three hours in the cream-colored delivery room and Isabella Mapes was a mom.

Dried sweat matted her hair. The nurses rotated in and out of the room, bringing her breakfast, trying to coax the new mom to rest.

But the 22-year-old had more to do this morning.

“I had so much adrenaline going through my body. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep,” she said. “My thought was, my goodness, I have this paper due, I have to get it done… I didn’t want to fail.”

Mapes was in her first semester as a nursing student at San Antonio College. She could feel the pressure of finals closing in on her. And having a baby somehow wasn’t enough to get an extension from her English instructor for her final essay.

She had to pass. If she failed, she would lose her federal Pell Grant, which helps low-income students like her go to college. Without that money, she would risk falling off track with school and dropping out.

She stared at the writing on the white board: mom, ISABELLA; baby, LILA.

Let me try to write at least one sentence between these big long beeps, Mapes told herself, her screen propped up on a swivel table by her bedside.

One in four Texas students is raising kids while working toward their college degree. Texas needs these students to graduate more than ever to meet a growing demand for workers with postsecondary credentials.

But while student parents get better grades than their classmates, they are also less likely to finish school: Fewer than four in 10 parenting students get their degree within six years, compared to six in 10 students without children.

For parents, their dreams of graduating are interlocked with the future of their children. Mapes figured getting a nursing degree could lead to a job where she could help people and earn enough to raise her daughter. But she feels like there is never enough time to finish every assignment or enough money to pay for all the groceries.

Mapes wouldn’t be at college without her daughter. After finishing high school in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, she spent her first years as an adult without direction, working on and off at a Target store. Getting pregnant, she said, was the push she needed to get back on track.

“She saved me,” Mapes said.

The chemistry lab instructions glowed from her laptop screen. She would need to dig into her kitchen pantry for this experiment.

The assignment was about different densities. The idea was to mix substances so the denser objects sink to the bottom, creating layers of separation.

From the fridge, she grabbed the milk. From her kitchen shelves, a bottle of maple syrup.

Doubt crept in. Did she have all the items she needed? It was 11:30 p.m., well past closing time at her regular grocery store. There was no instructor to ask for help.

Mapes’ kitchen is her lab room. Like many other student parents, Mapes takes her classes online so she can spend more time with her kid.

“I know I would thrive if I could take classes in person,” she said. “I mean, I can. But that’s not really an option for me, you know?”

Instead, Mapes tries to sneak in time for school when Lila and Lila's father are asleep in the bedroom.

The 1-year-old learned to climb this past year, which meant she needed more of her mom’s attention. Last semester, the spunky toddler had put bleach in the cat food and run a highlighter through 18 of her mom’s color-coded periodic tables. Nearly all the pencils in the apartment had signs of Lila chewing off the erasers.

Mapes is constantly juggling the demands of motherhood with her own goals. Parenting students often cannot disengage from their other responsibilities while they are in class, said Steven Christopher, a vice chancellor of student support service at Austin Community College, who advocates for a parent-friendly culture on college campuses.

“The child is sitting on their lap while they're in class — until they need food, until they need to be changed, until they need to get down,” Christopher said.

Mapes is making it work. Between class, play with Lila and shifts at the laundromat, sleep is the first thing to go.

But as hard as the balancing act has been, it is about to get harder. She will start her nursing clinicals after finishing her core classes. And when that happens, she will need to find someone to watch her daughter.

Child care can be expensive in Texas. Parents in the state on average pay about $8,700 a year for toddler care, according to a report from Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Mapes has a chance at a child care lottery. Her college offers on-campus day care for kids up to 5 years old on a sliding scale of $15 or $20 a week, which would cost her about $1,000 a year. The problem? Demand is high and spots are limited. San Antonio College’s day care center only admitted 31 kids last semester.

Mapes would be able to see the day care from her nursing school building if her daughter gets a spot. She hopes she’s lucky.

As most of San Antonio winded down on a January night, the steady hum of dryers spinning behind fogged glass filled the laundromat.

Under fluorescent lights, Mapes folded a sweater, the left sleeve in, then the right, before she tucked it into a pouch. She and the eight other moms working alongside her had 27 orders to complete that night for Flamingo Wash N Fold, a laundry delivery service.

“You can tell a lot about a person based on their laundry,” she laughed. “We see nasty chones, airpods, diapers they leave by accident,” she said, using Spanish-language slang for underwear.

Mapes works at the laundromat three days a week from 7 p.m. to 2 or 3 a.m., often after a day of child care and homework. The red-eye hours mean she doesn’t miss out on time with Lila.

Candice Bryant, the laundry service's owner, hires moms because she knows they need the work and flexibility. She sets working hours so the shifts start after most kids’ bedtime.

“You can’t work and be a mom and have free time. It’s hard to find work that fits into a schedule,” said Bryant, who is a mom to three kids.

Mapes’ weekly paychecks mostly go to food and diapers. The out-of-pocket cost of attending a public college is two to five times higher for student parents, compared to their low-income classmates without children. Parents are also likely to take on more student debt.

When Mapes is sorting and folding, she’s almost always listening to a fantasy and romance audiobook. She finished 350 books last year, most of them while folding clothes at the Flamingo Wash N Fold. When a new book in the “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series comes out, she’ll be here.

“Normally, there’s so much going on in my mind all the time,” she said. “Here, I’m not thinking about nothing. I want to be lost in another world.”

This laundromat is the only time in the week Mapes is apart from Lila. Some nights, when the weight of parenting has built up, she pulls into the parking lot early and sits in her car for a moment of stillness.

Some moms squeezed into tiny chairs, crossing their arms and leaning forward to keep their balance. Others found a spot on the building blocks of the kids’ play couches.

Every Friday at the San Antonio College library, Mapes and dozens more pack into the children’s corner for a school-run support group for parenting students. There’s applesauce for the toddlers who join: The facilitators understand how moms and kids are a package deal.

“Oftentimes, it is the feeling of isolation we’re trying to break through,” said Andi Kephart, who has facilitated the support group since it launched a year ago. “We cheer people through to graduation.”

As a young mom, Mapes didn’t have any friends with kids. She struggled with loneliness, anxiety and postpartum depression.

“They say you lose all your friends when you become a new mom,” Mapes said. “The parenting group changed so much for me.”

After Texas banned abortion, more lawmakers expressed an interest in helping parents — and helping them get to graduation. In 2023, a package of bills changed the kinds of accommodations student parents can get, said Aurora Harris, of Young Invincibles, a group that advocates for young adults in the state.

Parents like Mapes can now register early for classes, which can help them balance their busy schedules, get pregnancy-related accommodations or take a leave of absence. Schools must also collect data on student parents and have a designated "support liaison" that connects them to health care, housing and child care resources.

“We ended up having to make some strange bedfellows for some of these bills,” Harris said. “Folks were like, OK, we do need to support moms more since we might have a lot of unintended pregnancies.”

Still, the state needs to do more to get parents to complete their degrees as fast as their peers, Harris said. She'd like to see parenting students be put first in line for child care centers on and off campus. And she said parenting students need guidance on how much they can expect to pay for non-tuition costs like food, transportation and child care.

On the days Mapes is out of steam and questioning how she can keep going, she thinks of the moms in her support group with their toddlers in their laps. And she pulls a tool she learned in her parenting class.

On the floor of the San Antonio College library on a December day, her knees touched the cold carpet, her eyes closed. She took a deep breath and the noise of the library faded away. For a few seconds, everything was still. The exhaustion, the doubt, the long nights spent studying while her daughter slept — they all seemed worth it.

In the calm, she pictured the day she would walk across the graduation stage. Her hands trembled. She could feel the weight of the moment, the bright lights, the sense of accomplishment. Mapes would see Lila in the crowd, small but radiant, her eyes wide with pride.

She imagined the way her daughter's little hands would clap.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: San Antonio College has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.