Emerging from the Depths, Maybe

Well, it’s been a hell of a month, again. When is it not?

There is always a good reason not to sit down and start typing.

I was complaining about my attention span a few months ago, but it has gotten so much worse.

And I blame the American college application process.

It has sucked up all my energy and turned my brain into a constant hamster wheel of fruitless analysis and speculation.

As a European mother who can’t even remember sending an application anywhere on her own behalf, back in the mid-1990’s – I think our high school did that for us? - I find myself shell-shocked.I had been warned, mind you.             

A good twenty years ago, when Yale was still admitting 25% of applicants and everybody should have just relaxed, there was my graduate student of a husband working as an SAT tutor, telling me one crazy story after another about the rich families that used his test-prep agency in NYC. The Horace Mann kids, the Brearley girls, the Buckley boys. Some got yelled at by their parents, who kept hoping they could do better, grab ten more points, get on inch closer to the Ivy League sanctuary.

One mother flew him to Delaware where the daughter was sent to boarding school in the hopes of giving her a geographical edge. My husband spent several weekends there, and in the family’s summer home on a fancy Florida island.

The girl did go to Yale. She also hated her mother – at least that’s what she told my husband at the end of every marathon review session.

Later, when we had children of our own, there were the exhausted-looking moms of seniors at school functions, telling me the system was broken while bragging that their offspring was admitted to Columbia or Princeton.

There was the dad who whispered to my husband, when our son was still in elementary school, that we had to brace ourselves and that his daughter’s rejection from Yale and subsequent landing at Williams (gasp!) “almost broke his marriage”.

This September there were the compassionate looks from an acquaintance whose son had left home already, who told me that twelfth-grade had been “kind or traumatic” to their family.

Never mind that the traumatized family’s son ended up at an Ivy League school. That Williams is the most elite liberal arts college in the country – which I did not know at the time.

I have had to catch up since then, get myself educated, on an accelerated course.

But never would I have imagined anything quite as grueling as what we went through over the past nine months. What we are still going through, before the May 1^st acceptance deadline.

I knew that the process would be challenging for my son, and triggering for me as a mother, after the two years we spent in France when he started high school.  The adjustment was hard for him, and the school where we sent him, too rigid for a young teenager accustomed to a more lenient American approach. The grading system was also much harsher.  Once we came back to New York, he excelled and benefitted from what seems to be general grade inflation all around. But his hybrid transcript was always going to make the top schools he aspired to, somewhat out of reach. Between his anxiety and my guilt, mixed with the core madness of what college admissions have become, I feared an explosive cocktail.

For that reason, maybe, I was determined not to let the process swallow me up whole, because I knew we were not going to come out at the very top anyway, no matter how great my son had been doing since our return.

I took the Fall in stride, making sure I didn’t add too much stress to my already taxed boy. I made sure I checked on him without being overbearing. I let my husband handle most of the calendar and deadlines, as I knew the move to France and back had been less charged and painful for him. I knew he did a better job of engaging our son without making expectations too heavy.

For a while, I thought I had found a balance, and was under the illusion that I would go through the process unscathed.

There were warning signs, though.

The visibly shocked parents who asked me whom we were “working with” and received my incredulous stare in response. The condescending piece of paper subsequently handed to me with a number on it – a cheaper consultant, they said. Our son telling us his best friends couldn’t believe he didn’t have someone “helping him”.

The Winter break trip cancelled and spent huddled indoors, while my son completed his applications after the ED didn’t work out.

The three rounds of interviews for a prestigious scholarship that seemed to be at my kid’s fingertips, before he found out the university the scholarship was for, did not accept him. The two processes were separate, we were told. For the scholarship committee, my son seemed like a promising young man. For the school’s admissions office, he was a nobody.

There were also the other interviews, when my kid was told he was most definitely going to be accepted. Only to find out two months later that he was most definitely wasn’t.In the middle of this, there were the other applications. For Canada, for Europe. Countries that only consider Junior and Senior grades.  Places where my son would be in a better position, maybe. And where indeed he was accepted. Every time.             

By late January our head was spinning. Was our kid intelligent by U.K. standards but an idiot on this side of the Atlantic? From the first responses we were getting, it seemed like it.            

And it got somewhat confirmed last month when the Ivies-or-equivalent decisions came.

Definitely not quite good enough, despite all the efforts put in.   

Increasingly competent by UK and Canadian standards, increasingly lacking by American standards.

And that’s when I made the fatal mistake.   That’s when I started trying to understand.

I must have looked up something with “consultant” in it, because before I knew it my Instagram feed was inundated with commercial videos from various companies promising a 98% success rates in the Ivy League, with a few tantalizing strategic videos.

Since I’m a masochist who felt she had done something wrong, had failed to understand something that more competent, more involved, more wealthy parents had mastered, I did watch some of them.

And boy did a whole world open to me. Of advice and tactics and cynical dos and don’ts that made me slightly sick.

Clearly, we hadn’t done what it took. Would it have made a difference? I doubt it. But the sense of control, of reassurance, might have been nice to have at some point.

All I know, though, is that I don’t want my son to become a conduit to a mom’s ego boost. I’ve caught myself many times hoping he would have adjusted more easily in France, hoping he would work just a little harder on his debate competition prep, hoping he would bring home a prestigious award. Hoping he would say yes to the teacher’s offer to compete in one of France’s most challenging high school competitions, at the end of January when he was exhausted from his applications and subsequent interviews. Hoping he would do more sports, be more focused, more efficient, just more perfect.

More, more, more.

This is what I’m left with as this school year comes to a close. The unrelenting pressure on our teenagers to do more, to be more. To not just be perfect students, musicians or athletes, but also somehow young entrepreneurs and founders, as the start-up ethics seems to have invaded the college application process in this country.   My son loves piano. It makes him happy and he does it quite well.  But that wasn’t enough. What he needed to do was start a non-profit matching high school piano teachers with seniors or underprivileged kids. Debate wasn’t enough. He should probably have enrolled in international competitions in Dubai and Hong Kong. What do I know. I wouldn’t think of these things at my age, and he’s supposed to have them all figured out at 17.

Call me lazy or unambitious, but from my perspective a teenage boy should worry about having fun and maybe getting a girlfriend, or boyfriend for all I know. At least that’s what teenagers worried about in my days. Where is the space for that in the middle of all the ever-increasing accomplishments? Maybe some kids do it all. I’m sure some do. I do wonder, however, what is left to dream about once you have done it all by age 18 and already are a music genius, a founder, a philanthropist, a published author or scientist. Do you just keep piling on the successes? When is it ever enough? And what is the cost on these kids’ mental health through college and beyond?

Again, these are genuine questions, and I am very aware that I am not myself in a particularly ambitious or driven phase of my life. Which could lead to envy, or projection. But I also know that being ambitious on my child’s behalf, pushing ambitions onto him that wouldn’t truly be his, wouldn’t feel right. It has been such a difficult thing to navigate. Finding the fine line between encouraging, and pushing. Helping my child discover his own interests and ambitions, and needing him to excel in some field or another in order for me to feel good as a parent.   

I haven’t found the answer so far, and I doubt I ever will. All I know is I can try to do what feels right every day. And serve a banana smoothie at breakfast when there is an exam. My level of legitimate intervention has been dwindling drastically this year, in a way I did not anticipate. It is hard to accept, but also a relief. I’m the one who makes the smoothies. That is pretty much it, these days, and maybe that’s just fine.