I’m listening to Steve Earle Pandora..Bob Dylan comes on with a mournful song I love, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, and it reminds me of another good-bye, not of a lover, but of a boy, the one I’ve stuck my butt in the chair for since 8 am. It’s near 3 pm, and I’m just now taking a break to shower and make coffee, having spent the day filling out financial aid forms, tossing queries to his dad, hoping for clarity, ending up with sore elbows from resting them on the table while I type, atop the Christmas red tablecloth made by my dear friend Ferriss a couple of years ago, spread for the holidays, which have come and gone, though New Year’s is on the way.
I gather all the financial data I can find on the internet, IRA’s, a money market, mortgage statements, estimated home values, tax return information for 2010, and put as much of it as I can on the forms, fully aware of how much more is left to gather, to put together the 2011 return and data, to figure out how a family divided into two can support the oldest child into this transition to adulthood.
It’s a lot to figure, and it breaks my heart. Stanley Kunitz is here again, “the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.” How can a boy and his mother and father pay 60 thousand dollars a year, if the boy is accepted at the top schools to which he is applying, encouraged by his strong SAT scores, his love of math and science, his wish to be amongst peers, to make something of himself?
Was I, was my son, insane to think he had the right to apply to these places? Are we able to claim the privilege, seventeen year old boy and middle income earner mom divorced from newly remarried dad, full of midlife uncertainty and high hopes for our future? Will all the angst of gathering data and sending it off to the College Board and the FAFSA folks make the dream a reality, or just confirm our fears that these places aren’t for us? Will even the least expensive of his choice, UMass Amherst, be within our reach?
All this presumes that my boy, of nontraditional schooling at Sudbury Valley, where there are no grades, no classes, no transcripts, will find his way into the hearts and minds of the Admissions offices, will find a place amongst the select few who are admitted, should they afford to matriculate.
Never mind the mother, who like Sharon Olds, has as much angst about the lack of a son’s breathing in the house as about the money and the challenges of acceptance. Never mind that only sixteen years ago the boy was my baby. Never mind that I left school teaching when he was born and started the day care when he was ten months old, have shaped my life around raising these children who will all go off, if we can afford to send them, into the great wide world. It’s enough to crush a woman’s spirit, dark, gray day two days after Christmas, one day after my middle son’s birthday, two days after my daughter’s, nine days before my oldest son’s, when he’ll turn seventeen, and if all goes well, we’ll have mailed off several completed college applications and the financial aid forms, too.
Happy New Year is on the way. Plenty of change ahead.
Enjoy a little Bob Dylan on me and feel your own good-byes.
