Parenting Is Hard and Confusing

Some of you may remember an email I received a few months ago from the parent of a 9th grader. The email started thusly: “My daughter is in ninth grade. I would like her to go to an Ivy League school.” It was a lot to digest. The good news is that I have a new website that makes it clear that I write full time and no longer do college admissions work—the idea being that I will no longer have to digest emails about college in general and highly selective colleges in particular. But apparently, the wording on my new website (which essentially reads “I NO LONGER DO COLLEGE ADMISSIONS COUNSELING PLEASE DO NOT ASK ME”) is not clear enough, because earlier this week, I received another email and it’s a doozy, y’all.

The writer of the email was urgently seeking my help because his child was admitted to a highly selective major at a highly selective public school (let’s call it Michiberklerolina), but the child did not want to go to Michiberklerolina. No, the child wanted to go to a highly selective private school. Let’s call it Harprinceford.

The problem was, the child’s application to Harprinceford had been rejected, and now the parent wanted me to help “guide” their child in transferring from Michiberklerolina to Harprinceford, in spite of the fact that the child was STILL a senior in high school and had not yet set foot on the campus of the top ranked public school as a matriculated student. But hey, why not start college with a big chip on your shoulder and one foot already out the door?

It’s easy to read such emails and immediately go into snark mode. (Actually, my default setting is snark mode, so I guess it would have to be Super Snark Mode™.) How dare they? The ingratitude! The entitlement! The short-sightedness! The [splutters indignantly] I don’t even know what!

But then I went back to the word “guide.” The parent wanted me to help “guide his child correctly,” and that broke my heart a little bit, because does anyone know how to guide our children correctly? Anyone? Anyone?

Did I ever tell you about the time my husband and I brought our newborn son home from the hospital and I sat on the couch and held him and burst into tears because he was so small and we were so inept and how could the doctors and nurses have released him into our care when it was so clear we hadn’t the slightest idea of what to do next? Then he became a teenager and I still felt like that, except now he was too big to be put in a car seat and driven around the block until he fell asleep.

This is one of the things that bothered me about being a college counselor—the expectation that I, a person who didn’t know what she was doing with regard to her own children, would give advice to other people’s children. For money! Of course those children were more likely to listen to me than my own children, because I was not biologically related to them. Such is the irony of parenthood—your wisdom is wasted on the people you love most because the people you love most think you’re cringe and possess zero useful information.

Parenting is hard and confusing and honestly, we should talk about that more. We should talk about how sometimes our desire to do what’s best for our kids takes the shape of looking for a best thing for our kids. The best preschool, the best elementary school, the best middle school, the best college. Or, if your kid is struggling, the best therapist. The best medication. The best calendar app, with reminders and pop-ups. You text your kid a link to the best article you’ve ever read, the one you’re sure will unlock all their hidden potential and make them to do the thing, whatever the thing is.

They never look at your text.

I once heard someone say that if you feel tempted to send a helpful article to someone, the article is probably not for them. It’s for you. “You” as in “me,” a person who sent many, many articles to all three of my children.

When I was a college counselor, the number of times I was asked about the SAT vs. the ACT, about the best high schools, about the best majors to get into the best colleges was… a lot. Parents asked those questions as though they were looking for the holy grail. If they asked the right questions and received the right answers, all would be well in the world, and the hollow terror about doing right by their child would be allayed. You know the kind of terror I’m talking about. The weeping-on-the-couch-with-your-newborn terror, which doesn’t ever go away.

What I realize now is that those parents (and I include myself among them, because I’m a curmudgeon, not a hypocrite) were seeking solace in particulars while living a universal story that’s been playing on repeat ever since parents and children first roamed the earth, arguing about who had to haul the animal carcasses out of the cave. Parenting is hard. Children are unpredictable and chaotic. Even if the children are compliant and high-achieving, life is unpredictable and chaotic, and even though they try hard, they “only” get into Michiberklerollina and not Harprinceford, and then you have to find the right college counselor—who doesn’t even work as a college counselor anymore—to right the cosmic scale.

Remember Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? In the book, Charlie Bucket, an abjectly poor boy with a heart of gold, stumbles across the last of five golden tickets that entitles the bearer to be admitted to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The other four tickets have already been claimed by wealthy, entitled children whose families have leveraged their vast resources to get their offspring into the factory. But here’s the rub: the golden ticket offers admission to the chocolate factory, but it does not guarantee success in the chocolate factory. By “not guaranteeing success,” I mean that four of the five children are variously sucked into complicated machinery, assaulted by squirrels, and subjected to horrific disfigurement—all because of character flaws presumably stemming from their parents’ desire to give their children every possible opportunity. To do what’s right by them. I know it’s a children’s book, but imagine for a moment Mrs. Gloop’s anguish. Imagine Mr. Salt’s rage. Imagine the Beauregardes’ bitter disappointment.

I called my first book The Golden Ticket because I enjoy a bit of irony and because the golden ticket to which my title refers is a fraught and dangerous thing. You might even argue that there’s no such thing as a golden ticket, or a dream school, or a perfect pair of jeans. Even if you find the perfect pair of jeans, styles will change. Your body will change. The low-rise Seven for All Mankind jeans that looked amazing on me in the early 2000s are, fortunately, no longer in my possession, but I am convinced there’s a pair of barrel leg jeans out there that will make me look like a former ballet dancer and not like a rodeo clown.

This is what I do now, instead of guiding other people’s children. I read books about parents and children (recent favorites: Rachel Khong’s Real Americans, Gabrielle Hamilton’s Next of Kin) and I write about parents and children. The Golden Ticket is about college admissions, but it’s equally about the expectations we put on our children and the expectations we grew up with, about best intentions and unexpected consequences. My new book, Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip, is about a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast with my mother and daughter, but it’s also about all the ways in which our choices, our circumstances, and our environment shape us. Like in this passage:

I want to be clear: neither David nor I had any interest in grooming our children to be candidates to “good” colleges. We did not buy Stanford swag or enroll them in summer enrichment courses that would result in accelerated class placement in the fall. But we lived in a place where that was the norm, where the unofficial motto was Move fast and break things. We didn’t want to break things, but we also didn’t want to get left behind. We wanted our children to live up to their full potential. We did not realize that their full potential was not for us to decide.

What’s a well-meaning parent to do then, you ask? Give up?

Not at all! Based on my vast experience of wandering in the wilderness when it comes to raising my own children, I suggest these simple action items:

•Talk to other parents. Not about how hard it is to get into college, but about how hard it is to be a parent. Share your own best practices. Laugh about the ridiculousness of it all.

•Tell your kids about your own experiences as a child and a teenager. Try not to mention walking seven miles to school uphill both ways.

•Make pop culture your friend, and maybe even something you share with your kid. I have personally found great solace in memoirs about dysfunctional families—there’s something deeply satisfying about reading Educated or The Glass Castle or I’m Glad My Mom Died and thinking, “Well, at least I didn’t do THAT!” And there is no dearth of hugely entertaining TV shows that examine good, bad, and horrific parent-child relationships from every conceivable angle. Wanna feel good about yourself as a parent? Start with Succession. Or find a TV show you might enjoy watching with your kid. On the three-day roadtrip I describe in Troika, my mother, my daughter, and I bonded while binge-watching the second season of The White Lotus. Sure, there are several cringe-worthy moments in the show that are maybe not ideal to watch with members of your immediate family, but boy did we have rich conversations about class, money, entitlement, and ambition.

•Look beyond Harprinceford and check out schools like Muhlenberg College, where students are required to interact with adults who are not biologically related to them, with impressive consequences.

•Don’t send your kids links to helpful articles. They won’t read them anyway.

So many updates!

•Our next Curmudgeon Chat for paid subscribers is Sunday, April 19 at 9 am Pacific. In honor of National Poetry Month and also to encourage reading more and worrying less, the chat will feature the extraordinary Laurie Filipelli—poet, college advisor, and dear friend. Laurie will be talking about the unexpected and valuable ways that reading (and writing) poetry can help both students and parents navigate the choppy waters of [gestures broadly] everything.

•My second book, Troika, is out in five days! If you haven’t preordered, you can do so here. OR you can ask your local library to order a copy. OR you can recommend it to your book club! OR, if you’ve read it and loved it, please leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon!

•Please join me and fellow authors Stephanie Weaver and Ilene Angel next Wednesday at 4 pm Pacific for a virtual book launch of not one, not two, but three books (yes, a troika!), featuring micro-readings, a world premiere of a song Ilene composed specifically for this occasion, and conversation/Q&A with all three of us. Register here.

If you’re in California, here’s a full list of in-person events. I would love to meet those of you who live nearby IRL!