Cindy Lange-Kubick: I promise I'll graduate next year

Maybe it was the chips and salsa talking.

All I know is last Saturday night, over hot platters of Mexican food, I made my daughter a promise.

We’d been counting up her credit hours while waiting for our quesadillas.

Working her way through school had slowed her down some.  And she wondered if she’d really have to walk across the Bob Devaney stage when she graduates next year.

Or could she just skip it?

I’ll walk with you, I told her. When you graduate, I’ll finally graduate, too.

It used to be a joke. I’ll probably still be in college when my kids grow up, I’d tell people when they asked about my degree.

After a while, I just stopped talking about it. Not being a college graduate never bothered me. And I always figured the roads that took me to the job I have now  —  working odd, interesting jobs, being a young mom — were an education worth more than a diploma.

But then came Saturday, listening to Anna, imagining a moment of mother-daughter bonding.

Why not?

My list of excuses for not taking that last photojournalism class — too busy with my kids, don’t have the money, hate the darkroom — are moot.

My kids aren’t kids. I can find the money. In the digital age, darkrooms don’t exist.

I don’t subscribe to the Everyone Should Go to College or be Destined to Failure philosophy.

I don’t think I’ll be a better person for graduating. Or be in line for a promotion.

Actually, I think too many kids sign up and show up and go through the test-taking motions without any real benefit.

Plenty of them drop out. Or flunk out. Feeling like failures when they shouldn’t.

When young people, including my own, think they should know what they want to do with their lives, I tell them not to worry.

And not to be in a hurry.

What I wanted to be when I was 20 (special education teacher) is not what I wanted to be when I was 30 (English major), is not what I want to be now (retired).

And so I tell these fretful not-quite-grownups it’s never, ever too late.

I thought I was ancient when I went back to school, a 28-year-old freshman who objected to the word freshmen, planned her academic days according to pre-schoolers’ schedules and wrote papers between loads of laundry.

Those were the days when UNL didn’t recognize transfer credits from Southeast Community College, where I’d gone for nearly two years out of high school.

And I needed to pass a math class before they’d even let me in the door.

I didn’t start on the ground floor. I started in the dungeon.

Then I got my dream job. And when I went from part time to full time at the Lincoln Star, I put my backpack away, almost a college graduate but not quite.

Next fall, if I keep my word, there will be four Kubicks in college. All of my children and me.

Tomorrow, my nephew Nick Kubick will cross the Bob Devaney stage. He’s a great kid who ran a four-year marathon, working and studying, becoming a ROTC leader and a 2007 grad, ready to take on the universe.

There will be loads of grads there with him, young and not so young, with so much to be proud of. 

I called the journalism college a few days ago and they hooked me up with a new adviser.

Given that it had been so long since I’d been a student, he said, he was going to have to get back to me. That one class I needed to graduate in 1994? It may have become two, he said. Maybe more.

I hung up the phone.

I am pretty busy, I thought. I do have a full-time job. And my basement does need paint. And my kids, my kids really, truly still do need me.

And what’s the big deal about a college degree anyway?

Still. There is that promise.

Which I plan to make good on, for reasons still not quite clear to me, one year from now.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.