Journal of the Plague Year

The title of this essay might seem overdramatic, but this past year has tested the limits of our family’s collective endurance. True, there may have been nothing Bubonic involved, but we did suffer our share of missed deadlines, inaccurate transcripts and endless financial aid forms. Applying to college is not for sissies. And before you dismiss me as your garden variety neurotic, there’s one thing you should know: I have triplet high-school senior daughters. So, whatever your college preparation travails may be, unless you have quadruplets, I’m unimpressed.
When the girls were babies I would dress them in matching outfits. Old ladies in the grocery store seemed to think it was cute and the girls didn’t care- they were pretty much oblivious to anything that didn’t come with a nipple. Then, around the age of two, they began to assert their individual wills. Rachael ate nothing but peanut butter while Eliza ate everything in sight, including, on one particularly appalling occasion, a live tick. Sarah refused to wear shoes, or wait, was that Rachael? Keeping their idiosyncrasies straight was so confusing! While I pretended to applaud their distinct personalities, deep down I longed to just toss them in front of the same Barney video. When they started to mutiny against group activities, my initial inclination was to bully them into conformity. This approach was ineffective then, and when it came to their college searches, it still didn’t work. I asked them- quite reasonably, I thought- why couldn’t they all just go to the same college? I’d given up my plan to negotiate a volume discount, though at the time I thought it sounded like a brilliant idea. By now I was only thinking in terms of simplification: one visit to Mapquest, one massive tuition bill. But the girls ignored me, choosing, instead, to huddle over voluminous Guides to Colleges, attaching individualized color-coded Post-its on schools they found appealing.
I guess that’s okay. Most colleges seek diversity, and clearly, the triplets would be at a grave disadvantage, considering they share the same gender, ethnicity, and gene pool. Then, there’s geographical distribution. Forget a common zip code, they just recently got their own bedrooms. Triplehandedly, my daughters could skew the percentages of an entire entering class. I thought briefly of relocating a couple of them. I mean, how many kids hail from, say, Uzbekistan or Burkina Faso? It seemed like a promising strategy, but I decided to drop it when the State Department got involved.
It’s not as if this year has been without good times. Road trips, for one. Think about it, would you rather be killing the mildew in your shower or driving down the highway listening to NPR? Not to mention you can almost always find a Starbucks. For me, the information sessions provided not only a comfortable seat but, if the lights were dim and the admissions officer not sufficiently strident, a welcome chance to doze. I reveled in the college brochures that arrived by the boatload. Nowadays, schools hire marketing professionals, and some of those brochures are works of art. I would settle into a patch of sunlight on the sofa and peruse each school’s glossy offerings. Based on the brochures, I can tell you this: getting into college requires straight teeth and a kickass sound byte.
But sadly, the whole feel-good momentum comes to a screeching halt when it comes time to actually apply. Applying requires harassing teachers and writing essays and memorizing social security numbers. In our case, times three. Add to that the heartbreak that ensues when a college rejects your child. You consider hiring a hacker to break into the admissions office e files to issue the acceptance letter that you know your child so richly deserves, but the thought of jail time gives you pause, and before you can regroup and figure out exactly how one goes about contacting a hacker your kid is over it. She didn’t want to go to that stupid school anyway.
Gradually, I found myself coming to the realization that while the college admissions process can be arbitrary and unfair, it is also not the end of the world. The rich and the connected and those kids who started training for their SATs in seventh grade will probably get in, and many bright, worthy kids won’t. The deck is stacked for some, and it’s a crap shoot for others, but the important thing to note is that its ramifications extend only as far as the next four years of your child’s life. While the name of her/his institution of higher learning might lack panache at a cocktail party, life has a way of evening the score. That Harvard Early Action admit looks a bit less impressive when he’s middle-aged and out of work than does the public university grad about to perform open-heart surgery on you.
It’s funny. I started out feeling empowered, and gradually realized the depth of my delusion. Here’s an analogy: Life is a river, and college is the vessel that your child will navigate for the next four years. Because you love them, you hope for the finest, most impressive yacht, but as time goes by, you understand that what you should be hoping for isn’t access to the fancy boat, but a kid (or three!) resourceful enough to sail anything.