My daughter passed the news to me at dinner.
“Swear if I tell you something, you won’t mention it again.”
“I swear.”
“Cornell posts early admissions decisions on Friday, at five PM.”
There it was — the date, the hour, a precise moment of focus for the family anxiety, the fulcrum on which my daughter believed her well being teetered. Since she believed it, it was so. Since it was so for her, it was so for me, citizen in the boundary-free geography of motherhood.
I had, of course, taken all the predictable, useless parental steps to reduce my daughter’s over-investment in this prize. I had enthusiastically endorsed the now fashionable gap year, researched fine off-label colleges she might enjoy, orchestrated three full college tours in an effort to acquaint her with a range of possibilities. She said thanks and submitted her early decision application to Cornell, just as she had envisioned doing from her freshman year of High School.
She chose Cornell back then, or rather the Cornell of her imagination, since she had not yet seen it. But really, she chose much earlier than that. Not Cornell certainly, but she chose early on to enter the contest for which one of the 300 “highly selective colleges” is the prize.
There are some 2700 non highly-selective colleges in the country, so truly in this instance no child will be left behind — but to my daughter and her like-minded friends these are 2700 irrelevant options. There are plenty of football games and only one NFL, and if that’s the league you want to play in, well, that’s that.
You will think, as I once thought, that her father and I must have had a great deal to do with steering her towards this level of play. Maybe. Was it the Montessori school where the parents crow quietly when their kid’s progress from tracing sandpaper letters to stacking pink pyramids? Was it her progressive elementary school whose first grade class performed an original opera?
Surely in part. But that doesn’t entirely explain it.
My daughter never announced her decision to stay in the college contest, but it was clear by middle school that kids were already dropping out. There was the usual crop of seventh grade boys who rebelled against homework, the cluster of hyper-social girls who discovered those boys and so lost focus on books.
But my daughter and many of her friends stayed in the game. And parents have less to do with this decision than we’d like to admit.
Certainly folklore cherishes tales of ego driven, hyper-pressured parents at whose feet all college application casualties are currently laid. And there are whispers of some bohemian backlash, parents who actively encourage participation in late night partying and Lifetime movies. So far as I can see though, neither parent has all that much power.
You simply can’t force a kid to grind out the work, to make the four years of sacrifice and discipline required to earn one of these admissions spots. She has to want it. And if she wants it, you can’t force her to turn away — even when you know, in the fullness of your adult heart, that the prize is absurd, a mere score card, a final grade. Like every other report card, it doesn’t really matter but it matters at the time.
So — after fifteen years of advanced reading groups, of Spanish plus French plus Varsity sports even though she showed only a flicker of athletic ability; after learning to push herself through sickening anxiety in order to Debate, and spent summers polishing her skills in International Relations, while her friends were free to linger at the pool — it will come down to Friday, at 5 pm, when Cornell will post its verdict.
“”I’m not going look”, she vowed nightly. “Are you going to try to make me look?”
“No.”
Finally, “OK. I’m going to look. Come be here with me.” She is the tightrope walker, I the net. We are together in the middle of the ring.
She logs on. There it is: Click here to learn your admission decision.
She hesitates. “Mom, I’ll be all right either way, right?”
“Right.”
“I think so too.”
She is such a great girl and she is leaving me. A few seconds later, I know where she is going.
