Graduating

 

When I had my vinyl floors put in recently, I had to empty the guest room closet. It’s tiny, but it gets stuffed with all the holiday decorations plus clothing I only use on occasion (like my snow jacket).

One of the items I pulled out was draped in a plastic garment bag, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what was inside. Was it the killer-sexy formal black dress I bought to chaperone prom years ago? No. It was my cap and gown. From 1988.

The “flood” of memories was more like a tsunami.

True story:

In 1984 I left my awful husband who swore he would never pay child support (and never did). At age 30, with no employment experience (despite being a published author), I was having trouble finding a job. A poet friend from my writers group came over one night and read me Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” I fell in love that night—not with the friend, but with Wordsworth and certainly the poem, which is still one of my favorites. (Thank you, William. By the way, I named a dog after you—but that’s another story entirely.) The poet friend had been trying to convince me that, instead of getting a job, I could go to college and study such lovely compositions as Wordsworth’s poem. That night, he finally convinced me.

Here's what happened next:

I enrolled in our local community college (Chaffey—go Panthers!) and became a fulltime student in the fall following my divorce. Keep in mind, I had four young children, so mornings went like this: Get all five of us ready, including lunches made. (“Sam, for the fifth time, buddy, where are your shoes?!?”) Drop three of them at the elementary school, then drop Sam at pre-school, then drive up to the college and attend classes all day, then pick up Sam, pick up the other three, and head home to do homework, make dinner, get everyone bathed and sorted and break up one or two or ten fights, get everyone to bed. (Shali, I see you still reading after lights out.)

Repeat every day for five, then collapse exhausted on the weekend. Begin again the following Monday.

In two years, I had a 4.0 grade point average and an acceptance to the University of California Riverside—with a scholarship that paid my tuition. I also had a longer commute to school from Chino Hills, but the kids were two years older by then, so things weren’t quite so crazy as they had been my first year but boy howdy, they were still crazy.

There was that time I went out to the car, carrying backpacks and herding kids as I went, only to find I had a flat tire on my little Toyota Corolla. I had a roommate at the time, and she helped me change the tire in ten minutes, I swear. (I think she just wanted to make sure I was out of the house for the day.)

So many memories….

But the kids were troopers and I passed my algebra classes and excelled in my literature classes and two years after I transferred to UCR I was ready to graduate. by the end of my final quarter of school, I was exhausted, having written twenty English papers in ten weeks while nursing three of my four kids through chicken pox. Shali, as a teen, had it the absolute worst. She was so sick she laid in bed for days, commanding me to stay out of her room lest I become sick and miss my graduation. As it was, she missed it, something I felt sad about until, years later, she had her own college graduation.

But I did it, damn it. I did it. Booyah!

At 34, I was the first of my mother’s children to earn a bachelor’s degree, and I did it with a 3.73 grade point average, awarding me, along with 19 other students, the cum laude appellation in the commencement program. Mom came to my graduation and quickly noted—poking her finger repeatedly into the commencement program page—that I had not graduated summa cum laude (“with the highest distinction”) as only three other students had. She wanted to know why.

“I thought you were a good student,” she said. “Why aren’t you over here?” she asked, poking her finger at the page once again.

She wasn’t kidding, y’all. Sigh. That was Mom. All I could do was stare at her.

Dr. Wayne Hubert, one of my favorite profs at Chaffey, gave me some great advice when I let him know I was headed to a career in teaching.

“If you’re going to teach,” he said, “learn how to pat yourself on the back.” He reached his arm around to indicate how I should do so. “Because you may do an excellent job, but most years, no one is going to notice.”

His words remained with me, and despite my mother’s attempt to diminish my success, I gave myself many pats on the back for being, in fact, a stellar student while raising four rambunctious kiddos and somehow keeping us afloat financially until I could get my teaching credential and get a job.

I rocked it. I am prouder of that accomplishment than anything else I’ve ever done.

So I kept that cap and gown (and the stole I received when I earned my master’s degree four years later—while teaching high school fulltime with three teenagers at home so yeah, booyah again, Kay!).

But when I slid the garment bag away, I saw that the gown and the stole had faded. With a sigh, I decided it was time to let them go. I’m retired now, and 70. I don’t want my kids to take on the drudgery of determining what should go in the dumpster after I die. I’ll get this one, my loves.

So the gown and stole were taken out to the trash. I kept the mortarboard, though, tossing it in a drawer of the same nightstand I’ve had since I was a kid. At some point, I’ll toss the cap, too. But for now, I just love remembering, from time to time, how indescribably difficult those years were—and subsequently how empowered I felt when I finally achieved what I had worked so hard for.

 

I know who I am (Part 2)

To say that my father's death when I was eight years old had an impact on my life would be an understatement. It was in that exact moment that the forward momentum in my life began to make a slow, steady turn in a different direction.

I was in the third grade when he died. In the fourth grade, Mrs. Walton told me that I could be a writer, and, as I noted in my previous post, I believed her. In the fifth grade, two things happened. First, my sister won a pony in a contest. She'd been entering the same tell-us-in-fifty-words-or-less-why-you-want-a-pony contest for years, my dad encouraging her to do so, promising her that someday he would get her a horse. After he died, her fifty words were heart wrenching. She won, and our lives became centered around a little dappled Shetland pony mare named Silver.

The second thing that happened that year was that I was I.Q. tested and found to be gifted. In the early 1960's, all fifth graders in California were I.Q. tested so that they could be "appropriately placed" in the academic programs that would best serve them in public school. (Don't get me started on tracking; that is a subject for another day.) I can't tell you what my I.Q. was because my mother wouldn't tell me. I do know that the school psychologist called her to give her this information and to let her know that I would be offered the opportunity to attend a special program for gifted children in the sixth grade. I would be bussed, along with four of my gifted peers, to another school every day to attend a class made up solely of gifted children.

So there I was every day that remained of the fifth grade, hanging out with my mutually smart friends, Cathy Dodd and Melinda Lively and Steve McCutcheon, planning for the next year, speculating on all the fun we would have, reveling in our newfound pride as smart kids, considering what our futures would bring. Cathy was my best friend and lived a block away. Her dad was a professor at UCLA, and way off in the distance I could see us attending college together there.

Oh—something else happened when I was in the fifth grade, or rather right after school ended for the summer. We moved. Mom said it was too expensive to pay the stable rental on Silver, so we moved a few miles away, from Lakewood to Cypress, to a house zoned for horses with a barn and a corral right there in the back yard. Heaven. For my sister, anyway.

The new elementary school had no program for gifted children. So that little part of my identity was no longer important or significant. I made new friends. Horsie friends. Turns out my sister's pony was pregnant, so we soon had another pony, then a horse, then the pony was given to me and I spent my time after school not doing homework but riding, cleaning, brushing, feeding, watering and preparing for the many horseshows I would enter.

I won a lot of trophies. And I'm proud to say that by the time I was sixteen I could train a horse "from the ground up," as they say in the horse world. But by then we were living in a new place because my mother had married my wicked step-father, and I was a clinically depressed, suicidal teen trying to navigate through deep emotional pain.

I didn't get good grades any more. I hadn't done homework since the seventh grade. No teacher ever told me I had the potential to do something with my life.

I did manage to finish high school. And then I got married, at age seventeen, for lack of any better options. And also because, in my senior year, I came home from school one day to find a Volkswagon "bug" in the driveway, the keys to which my mother handed over, telling me, "Let's face it, you're not going to college, so I took the money out of your savings account (which were funds from a death benefit paid out after Dad died) and bought you a car. You can stop borrowing mine now."

I still had a goal: I would train horses and write. I did begin writing. One of my first published pieces appeared in a horse magazine. But I became pregnant at eighteen, had my daughter on my nineteenth birthday, and in the years that followed, we adopted several children and eventually came to the realization that we could either feed our kids or feed our horses, so the horses had to go (all except my beloved pony, Silver, who lived to be twenty-three and was the first horse my daughter ever rode).

This story has a happy ending, it really does. When my marriage ended in divorce, I finally went to college. The snooty lady in the admissions office at UC Riverside looked at my high school transcript and explained that "for some people" community college is the best option, and so I went to Chaffey for two years, earned straight A's, applied to UCR again, was admitted with a full scholarship and graduated cum laude two years later (this, while raising four children as a single parent). In my senior year, one of my English papers was accepted into Ideas of Order, the prestigious "journal of letters" for UCR's English department.

Before I'd ever begun college, though, I'd been freelance writing for a decade, and I'd had a book published by a national publishing house, so really, writing was my first career. I began teaching after college so that I'd be able to support my kids, since I never received a dime in child support from my husband. Oh, and while I taught high school full time and continued to raise my own rowdy teens, I entered a graduate program, earning a master's degree in literature.

Yeah, I rock. (Little pat on the back there.)

Of course, I still had a colleague approach me one day as I stood in a processional line with nineteen other teachers, proudly wearing my cap and gown in UCR blue and gold colors, about to walk out onto the football field with our graduating students. She said, "Kay, you're wearing the wrong colors."

"No...." was my confused response.

"Yes, you are. Those aren't Cal State colors." (Only other academics, I think, will appreciate the bias in the distinction here. At least I hope so.)

"I'm a UC grad," I told her.

"What? No you're not!"

Really? Upon what did she base her judgment? That same old far-too-pensive expression? My tendency, still, to wear boots and cowboy shirts and drop "ain't" into a conversation just to shock my fellow academics? Here was Miss Madden all over again.

I have continued to encounter other Miss Maddens in my life, a few in particular in very recent days because I chose to teach Honors level classes this year, after twenty-four years of saying "Give me the sweathogs!" because those were the kids I could relate to. Some... people with whom I teach feel I am not qualified to teach in the Honors program. Things have been said, intimations have been made.

But I'm no longer the quiet little girl who sadly returned her green dot book to the shelf. So beware, Miss Maddens of the world. Stop trying to bring down my success at the end of the rainbow with your self-righteous superiority. That ain't gonna fly anymore. Because I know who I am. See?