Dr. Kate

She shuffled across the red carpet in tenny runners, wearing a long black robe with red velvet stripes down the arms and an odd, tasseled hat on her head. It’s the stuff you might find in the costume box of her childhood, only this was real grown-up stuff with a hefty dose of pomp and circumstance.  She emerged from the whole ritual with a new name:

Katherine Helene Connors, Ph. D. 

This is what pomp looks like...

... and this must be circumstance.
I love how the Chancellor, who earned her doctorate in Finland,
 wears the traditional Finnish top hat and sword. 
All these Ph.D.'s look like they raided their costume boxes, don't they?

My girl and her Ma.

I’m trying to remember what it was I dreamed for my penultimate child when she was small, when I began to learn her personality and style. The dream, if there was one, must have been lost in the day-to-day shuffle of child number three followed swiftly by child number four. I guess was realizing, even as an inexperienced parent, that it wasn't my right to dream her dreams.

Our kiddos:
John, Sarah, Kate and Annie.

Kate was nearly always pleasant and accommodating, quiet until she found something funny, and full of love and devotion. I should have guessed, when she inevitably wore her cowboy boots on the wrong feet, that her path would be unusually winding. She’s a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of gal, willing to examine things as they come and not necessarily getting to know the end from the beginning. She might tell you it’s a curse. But it’s a blessing. Maybe a blurse. She does not get trapped in perimetric limitations. I see that as the ability to allow instinct and higher powers to co-mingle and lead her where she needs to go, whether she planned to go there or not. Kate has a whispery soul. She is not energized by outside forces. Frankly, they exhaust her. It would be easier for her if she had known exactly what she wanted to do… where she wanted to go… and when. Instead, she has spent a good portion of her life walking into the unknown. I suppose my dream for her is to find joy, wherever it is hidden away for her.

Today, Dave, Libby and I sat in the audience at Brock University in Canada when they announced her name. She paused in front of her PhD advisor, Dr. Jan Frijters and turned her back to him. He raised his arms over her head and placed a doctoral hood over her shoulders. I pondered the image of a student shifting from facing her mentor to turning outward as he placed a symbolic blessing on her head, sending her out into the world to make good all the trust and training. 

This was the culmination of many years in Kate’s life, which included two years in a PhD program at Binghamton University, when her advisor took a job outside of academia, and they closed the lab. That professor’s devoted cluster of PhD candidates were suddenly out of a program. Kate had to reapply for new programs. Thankfully, she was accepted into Dr. Fritjters’ program. Then two years into that the world shut down due to the Covid Pandemic. Two years later she could no longer muster the required focus on her current dissertation topic. Rather than quitting, she restructured to take a more wholehearted artistic approach. The journey involved considerable self-discovery and personal enlightenment, which included mighty struggles with matters of the heart. The journey was no less windy or risky that a trip up Farmington Canyon

Kate's dissertation has some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read.

She has emerged victorious! And vulnerable.

When any of us approach such consuming projects, there is often (in my experience) a rattling let down at the end… a place where we question the balance between cost and benefit. We mothers do that without knowing what we are doing when we get the baby blues, now better defined as postpartum depression. Those who have been caregiver for someone with dementia or other illnesses or disabilities get it when the dreaded time comes and the era of devotion is over. We have to first take a long nap, if possible, then set about redefining ourselves. I pray the prayer of all mothers that my child who is now a woman will have the patience, fortitude, faith and spiritual tenacity to get through the transition without too much damage to her sense of self.

A pillow on Kate's couch.

Whatever the future holds for Kate, no one can take from her the accomplishment of this remarkable feat. It’s been many human years in the making. Even more costly and rewarding in ways we don’t yet have the tools to measure. 

More valuable than her accomplishments, we celebrate the self-discovery. It matters more to us who she has become than what she has become. 

To the rest of the world, she is Dr. Kate Connors 

To us, she remains Kate McGate who stays up late! 

(She's pretty great!)

What a new Ph.D. and an old J.D. do the day after graduation.