Never Mind the Snakeskin, My Boy Got the Sheepskin

LOS ANGELES

How well I remember. Graduation 2006. The families gather at the Greek Theatre, nestled in the hillside of Griffith Park. By 8 a.m., the California sun blazes on the 1,000-plus graduates boiling in a sea of royal blue. Flower vendors hawk wilted orchids as temperatures soar to 100. Under his cap and gown, our son, Flannery, sports snakeskin sequined pants and plaid high-top Converse sneakers.

I do not care. He is graduating.

After all the mental anguish of the past year, this is what matters. After the essays, the SATs, the teacher meetings, the tutoring, the online applications, the rages, the letters of reference, the deadlines, the warnings, the $700 in application fees, the threats, the late-night trips to the post office (the one by the airport stays open until 11 p.m. and my husband drives fast), our son has made it to graduation day. And he is going to college. Like thousands of parents, we are sending our child off to make his way into the world, and feel secure in the knowledge that we've raised him right.

Except that's not what I feel. What I feel is that the feeding frenzy of college application and graduation time has done just the opposite and made me wonder whether everything I did as a parent wasn't somehow, well, wrong.

I know I'm not alone in my unease. The crazed pressure of getting into college makes madmen of us all. The parents, I mean. Just remember those adrenaline-charged "College Nights" in the early fall of senior year that are supposed to ease the anxiety, but in reality are an assortment of freaked-out parents, numb parents and know-it-all parents crammed into some multi-purpose room? It's the start of the race, and the competition never lets up.

A few rows ahead of us sits the father who bitterly complained that his daughter preferred Tufts over Yale despite the family's rich Yale legacy. I see some of the sandbox mommies from Flannery's baby days. When he was just 8 months old, several mothers in the sandbox stared at me when I gave him a pear to chew on. "Shouldn't you cut that up?" one asked.

"He has eight teeth," I said. Flannery dropped the pear, coating it with sand. The gang of mothers watched carefully as I rinsed it off with water and gave it back to him, but I could feel their disapproval. I wonder what Ivy League colleges their children are going to.

I see Mr. Jones, Flannery's AP economics teacher, an aging rocker who has his own band, the Hickmen. Mr. Jones and I had struck up an e-mail correspondence in which I pleaded with him to read Flannery the riot act. This was after we received the "In Danger of Failing AP Economics" letter. Mr. Jones fired back more warning than hope, but our boy finished with the lowest C possible. I wave at the mother who yelled in my ear at an deafening basketball game, listing every scholarship her son had won. "You have to know how to work it!" she insisted, detailing his free ride to Berkeley.

Our son won a few scholarships, in theater and track, totaling a whopping $400, and he didn't fail anything or even get a D, which means he will not be "uninvited" to college. That was the mournful refrain of the counselor at his year-round magnet high school: "If your child gets a D or F senior year, your child will be uninvited." She would regale us with horror stories of uninvited students -- lives ruined, parents keening.

Back at the Greek, I scan the aisles, longing for a bloody mary to take the edge off. The amphitheater is a cauldron, but I will not budge from this purgatory of pomp and circumstance.