It’s an early Wednesday morning, and 5-year-old Paloma is sitting on the sofa watching “Clifford the Big Red Dog.”
She’s grabbed a box of Corn Pops and is eating them out of the bag while her mother, Nancy Gamboa, 26, gets ready in the bathroom.
Gamboa has only a limited amount of time before she has to walk her daughter to the University Village day care center where Paloma will stay until closing time at 5 p.m.
While she is at school, Gamboa will take the bus from Sepulveda Boulevard to campus where she’ll switch, temporarily, from being a full-time single mother to being a full-time UCLA student.
It’s all part of a balanced routine that Gamboa said she has developed over the years.
“Right now I feel like I have a really good balance of what I need in my life,” she said, citing her schoolwork, friends and family life.
Attaining that balance, though, was a journey full of trial and error.
“You’ve got to learn the hard way. Everybody does,” she said.
In 2003, before her unplanned pregnancy, Gamboa was in her second year at UCLA.
She knew what she wanted to do: study abroad, go to graduate school. Her life, up until then, had been pretty organized.
But in the spring of her freshman year, Gamboa received some difficult news. Her father had unexpectedly passed away. When she returned to school, she said she found herself overwhelmed emotionally.
“I don’t think I ever really recovered from that,” she said, adding that she felt a general lack of guidance from the university. At that young age, she said she felt disillusioned with UCLA.
“I was emotionally unstable and once I felt preoccupied with other things, it was really easy to just say, “˜forget it,'” she said.
So she left for New York. UCLA was the last place she thought she would ever go back to.
It was after moving to New York with her boyfriend that Gamboa’s plans changed.
At the age of 20, she found herself pregnant and unsure of what do next. None of her friends were having children and suddenly she felt isolated.
“I felt horrible, I felt ashamed. And now, knowing what I know now, I would’ve never felt that way,” she said.
Once her relationship with her boyfriend ended, Gamboa moved from New York to North Carolina to Virginia, setting out as a single mother for the first time in more than two years after having lived as a stay-at-home mother.
It was, she said, as if she had traveled from one extreme to the other. Life in New York had left her feeling as if her identity had been wiped away; everything was determined by her daughter and what was best for her.
In Virginia, however, life and work as a single mother caused her to be away from Paloma for long hours at a time.
Returning to school continued to be a goal for Gamboa.
She had just never realized how much it was a part of who she was, she said.
The constant “chugging along,” of everyday life in Virginia made her reconsider where she was headed.
“I think I started getting into that same rut of feeling like something is missing. I know I can be doing more than this,” she said. “I know I’m more than just a job and that day-to-day grind.”
Six years after dropping out of school, Gamboa decided to return to California and apply for readmission to UCLA.
Finding out that Paloma had been accepted to the university child care was the “sealing deal,” Gamboa said.
At the University Village Center, Gamboa said she found great support from the staff and single parents who, like she had, struggled to raise their children while staying full-time students.
“When you find other people that have had that (same experience) too, it’s almost like an instant connection. It’s almost like an instant trust,” she said.
“(There is) somebody to give you that light at the end of the tunnel.”
As a result, Gamboa and a few other parents decided in the spring to form a small club and support group for parenting students.
The group is meant as a resource for other parents who are looking for university resources, something many parents said was difficult to find on their own.
“We talked about our experiences and how we ended up here at UCLA, and then through that we all had almost the same,” said Rosela Roman, a mother of three and the club’s secretary. “We started noticing that we didn’t have a sense of community compared to other schools like Berkeley.”
For Sharmaine Lopez, a second-year sociology student, encountering the other parents in the club gave her a sense of calm, knowing that she was not alone.
“Because we do see each other a lot at day care, that’s how it all starts,” Lopez said. “You start talking to them and you see that you’re going through the same thing.”
After having lived through what Gamboa said was a difficult time in her life as a single mother, she wants to make certain that others don’t feel as isolated as she once did.
“I know how it is when you’re up against the wall and you have no options,” Gamboa said. “You feel so heavy and so hopeless.”
As a result, she always makes herself readily available to other parents in the University Village housing, offering to babysit when she can so others can attend classes or get some rest.
That willingness to help is shared by all the parents, she said.
That’s why, late on Wednesday evening after finding out that her club meetings had been cancelled, she was headed to the day care to pick up Paloma and babysit her friend’s 4-year-old daughter.
At close to 5 p.m., traffic was getting worse and the bus she regularly takes was crowded.
The ride back took longer than usual, but it was a relief, she said, to be going home.