By Kerry Madden
Sunday, June 3, 2007
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.
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?
Yet any shred of empathy or respect I had for our boy during this process was blasted out the window. I became the harpy, the shrew, hiding the Xbox controllers in the dog food, shouting, " Your life will be ruined if you don't make an effort here, Sonny Boy!"
After the dust had settled and the applications were sent, we made the college tour. It was late March, and the first of four wait-list letters had arrived. Flannery had an audition for a friend's play in New York, so we decided to go see Bard, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, "Doubt" and "Sweeney Todd." He liked the Bard cross-country coach, but the campus was too deep into the apple orchards for him.
The Sarah Lawrence guide was darling and about to embark on a year in France, so that was his top pick. When we arrived home to more wait-list letters and a rejection, Flannery read them, nodded and said, "I'm scheduling band practice." I wrote engaging thank-you letters to the wait-list schools, masquerading as him -- another low point.
We watch our boy bounce across the stage to claim his diploma, chat with the principal. He had performed with his band, the Flypaper Cartel, on the same stage during junior year, wearing the very same pants and channeling Robert Plant.
After the ceremony, I buy one of those wilted orchids from the flower vendors. I find Flannery in the crowd with Mr. Jones. In the incandescence of the late June morning, I tell Mr. Jones, "Thank you very much." Flannery, beaming, says, "Yeah, hey, thanks!" Mr. Jones shrugs, "He did it." The three of us stand there for a moment not knowing what else to say. I'm afraid suddenly that I'll cry and mortify them both. Someone calls, "Flannery!" and like a shot, he's off to find his friends and begin the celebration.
I slide the orchid inside the graduation program. I'll give it to him later.
Kerry Madden is a children's book author in Los Angeles. Her son has completed his freshman year at UC-Santa Barbara.
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