San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Together, mother and daughter earn their college degrees
After leaving her college dreams behind 31 years ago to help her parents, Rebecca Garcia told her daughters in 2018 she was going back to college. “It’s about time,” she recalls them saying.
As she embarked on her renewed attempt at a degree, she had company. Her daughter, Monica, had recently returned to college. It was rough going. She had struggled to graduate high school and had been told she wasn’t college material.
The two were asked how they got through it. “Together,” they immediately replied. Both graduated Friday with associate degrees from Northwest Vista College.
“I don’t think I could have done this without her. I really don’t,” Rebecca Garcia, 52, said of her daughter, who is 25. “I think God does things for a reason, and she was at a point where she didn’t want to do this anymore, and I was at a point where I did. And I told her, ‘Let’s just do one semester, and if we do it, we do it.’ And here we are.”
Between full-time jobs and memories of discouraging words, the mother-daughter duo say what pushed them past their fears of failure was each other, their family’s support and a promise they both made to Rebecca’s grandfather before he died.
For Rebecca, who had left college in 1987, her return was also about taking her own advice to her daughters to always “finish what you started.”
“I looked at them and I said, ‘I’m just going to run something past you, and I just want to know what you all think,’ and they said, ‘OK,’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘What do you all think if I go back to school?’… They didn’t tell me anything other than ‘It’s about time.’ ”
Her eldest, Desiree Garcia, 28,
had already graduated college and had encouraged Monica to re-enroll after taking a year off. Rebecca Garcia now had the support of both of them to return, and that of her husband, Richard, who jumped in to help out with the house needs as she worked and studied.
The initial push was the hardest, she says, but after meeting her academic adviser at Northwest, Francisco Saucedo Jr., she felt she could finally see a clearer path ahead. Saucedo soon became her daughter’s adviser, too.
“He sat there with me for almost two hours, telling me, ‘You can do this,’ and I remember telling him that I was scared,” Rebecca Garcia recalled about her first meeting with Saucedo. “He has been with me from day one.”
The funny part of the adventure, they say, was taking the same courses and having to see and address each other in class, as classmates and not family. They didn’t want the attention that might have come with peers or instructors knowing they were related, so they stuck to first names.
“It was very, very weird calling my mom by her first name,” Monica Garcia recalled. “It was very awkward and weird from me.”
“Then having to share books,” her mother added, laughing. “It was a lot of, ‘I need the book,’ ‘No, I need the book now.’ ”
They have plenty of memories to laugh about, but there were also plenty of moments where they two had to encourage each other to keep going. They would have a glass of wine and talk things through, or meet each other for lunch and study together.
The key word was always “together,” they say. But after three years living, studying, laughing and crying about school, their paths are diverging.
Monica was accepted into the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she’ll pursue a liberal arts major, to eventually go into digital media and maybe even music production.
“I’m not going to lie. It’s going to be really hard for me because I’m so used to having my mom,” she said. “But I know that I’m capable of doing it now.”
Because Monica was accepted with a scholarship that can be awarded to only one person per household, Rebecca will wait to enroll in a four-year college until she can find another source of financial aid.
She just got a promotion at her job. And even though she won’t immediately join her daughter back at school, she knows the time will come to continue making good on her advice and promises.
“I’m going to miss that one-on-one time with her and bonding with her, and having discussions and debates,” Rebecca Garcia said. “I’m going to miss it a lot. I know she’s here, but we just connected very well on a completely different level. Not just mother and daughter, but she’s my friend.”