Never Mind the Snakeskin, My Boy Got the Sheepskin

The University of California online application, due by Nov. 30, had tricked us into thinking we could handle the college application dance without much ado. Denial was well in force in our house, and I should have known that Flannery's heart wasn't in it when he announced early on that "David Bowie received an honorary degree and is doing great!" But the deadlines for private colleges loomed, so I demanded he write a to-do list. This is what he scribbled on the back of a Trader Joe's receipt:

TO-DO LIST

band practice -- get gigs

shoot movie for NYU in desert

apply for colleges

rock climbing

David Bowie tickets

write college essays

record demo

Rock climbing? A good friend had invited him to go, and when we said "No way!" we began to get a series of hard-sell calls from the dad: "Come on! The boys will have a blast. Kids shouldn't go to college for a year anyway." After the fifth or sixth call, my mild-mannered husband lost it and howled into the phone, "Listen, you! You need to take that brick of hash out of your head. Flannery is not going rock climbing!"

In the nail-biting fray, our middle child, Lucy, would whisper, "Don't cry. I swear you won't have to go through this with me." I harked back to my own college application process, which consisted of my father insisting that I apply to the University of Alabama because it had a decent women's golf team. My mother's advice was simply, "Don't apply anywhere we can't afford."

But as I cracked the whip for Flannery during this dark period, demanding polished essays and the meeting of deadlines, I could feel myself morphing into one of those uber-moms who plan every second of their children's lives. Should I have sliced up his pears into neat squares and fought to get him into an exclusive preschool (hello scholarship?) thereby paving his way to a lifetime of success?