Mother, son graduate together from CVCC

Kathleen Fort’s hands shook as she read the poem to her world literature class at Central Virginia Community College.

It was a basic, first-day-of-class icebreaker: Write a limerick about a classmate and read it aloud. But for Fort, who was more than twice the age of most of her classmates, the task was terrifying.

“I was very, very nervous about going back to school,” she said. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t fit in. I was afraid that the work would be too difficult. I had no idea what to expect because I hadn’t really taken any kind of academic class since 1981.”

On Thursday night — four years after that first lit class — 50-year-old Fort graduated from CVCC, a moment she shared, quite literally, with her 23-year-old son Caleb, who received his degree in welding.

Today, Kathleen Fort will earn a second diploma from Randolph College — putting to rest a journey that began three decades ago when she started, but never finished, her college education.

“I don’t even know if I can articulate it…,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s college that did it, but I just feel like I’m back to myself, where maybe I lost that for a little while. I just feel like me again. So that’s pretty amazing.”

For Caleb, graduation marked an end and a beginning.

“It’s like going over a large obstacle and seeing how large and expansive the landscape really is,” he said. “It’s the ending of a transition period where we’ve all started new paths.”

Last week, Fort’s apartment was in a state of chaos as two lives prepared to diverge.

On Monday, the living room floor was covered with two year’s worth of art she created as a studio art major at Randolph — oil paintings of her daughters, woodcuts printed on antique Jap-anese paper, fliers advertising local shows.

Two days later, the art was packed away, and replaced by Caleb’s blue tent, drying in the apartment after a rainy trip to North Carolina.

Fort is preparing to move to Blacksburg, where her fiancé lives, and launch a career in graphic design. Her son is searching for a welding job, maybe in Lynchburg, maybe in another city or state.

“I guess you could call it peculiar,” said Caleb, who lived at home with his mom while they both attended CVCC. “We’d just see each other in the student center and wave hello.”

Mother and son took different paths to college, but both ended up with degrees that encompass their passions.

Fort combined Ran-dolph College’s traditional liberal arts education with a technology-driven graphic arts degree from CVCC. Between the two, she hopes to launch a career as a freelance graphic designer.

“What I did was mix the schools together, essentially, and they both allowed me to do that,” she said.

Her passion for art stretches back to her childhood in New York, when she remembers being entranced by Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup cans during field trips to the art museums of New York City.

When it came time to pick a career, however, she settled on becoming a secretary, a job she knew her family would approve of.

“My family is a family of factory workers and, you know, no one goes to college and no one’s an artist,” Fort said. “They just couldn’t get behind it and I really needed their approval so I didn’t do it.”

The idea to return to college came to Fort when she worked part-time at Randolph’s Maier Museum in 2001. Once she moved past her initial classroom anxiety, she thrived in the college setting, earning a 4.0 GPA at CVCC and Randolph.

“Immediately, I realized that it wasn’t at all about proving anything to anyone else,” Fort said. “I just felt like a world opened up in front of me.”

Like his mother, Caleb loves working with his hands and has a creative streak. But the Brookville High School graduate struggled with his classes at CVCC until he found a niche in welding.

“It’s very meditative,” he said of welding. “It’s just you and a molten puddle of metal and you work with it to make it do what you want.”

Caleb lived at home with his mother while attending CVCC. Meanwhile, his younger sister Margo moved to Mississippi and his older sister Elisa graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Fort gave her children space to find their own paths.

“She definitely allowed us to explore,” Caleb said. “We didn’t have a lot of boundaries in what we couldn’t or shouldn’t do.”