college visits -- part two

this past week has been a whirlwind. my daughter is a junior in high school and she had the week off for spring vacation. only for us it wasn't much of a vacation. we were looking at colleges and i spent the better part of 22+ hours driving. i've been through this before with my eldest child (now 21). we looked at 5 schools from one side of PA to the other for him and he ended up not applying to any of them only to end up in a huge school that he hated and dropped out of after a year. i had decided i wouldn't try to give advice this time. obviously, sometimes the best laid plans go awry. i'm a mother after all ....

of course her top choice was the first one scheduled -- with three more to follow (and two others that will have to be scheduled at a different time -- there r only so many days in the week). most of them had programs or tours that started at a decent hour (say 11 or 1) so that we could do a day-trip sort of thing. that wasn't so bad even though it made for a really long day for me (especially with my shoulder issues). see, even though she can drive, she can't drive my standard transmission car, and she hasn't gotten her license yet (feels its a waste of perfectly good money when she won't need it at college and will still have to pay insurance).

her top choice soon became no choice (we didn't even get to hear the presentation before she stated that she was pretty sure she wasn't going to go there or even bother applying). she's got that gift of discernment and something about the place really bothered her -- i'm thinking it was the very hilly terrain and the communal bathrooms (see she's spoiled because her brother's school had bathrooms in each dorm room). as she was announcing this i was left thinking, i just drove over 3 hours and into a screwy city with no city map in my hand and will now need to get us out of said screwy city and drive another 3+ hours home for u to tell me this???? all the time wondering if we were going to have a repeat of her brother's experience and if we were -- we could stop right now...

the second school we visited, her art teacher recommended. its kinda "out there" as colleges go, if u ask me. its for that "bohemian" crowd. i don't see my daughter as a bohemian -- but evidently she was thrilled. the school is in a refurbed dept. store -- i'm all for recycling and the space was huge and impressive for what they had in it and what was yet to be developed. everything reeked of cigarette smoke (including the refurbed hotel that served as a dorm -- each room had its own bathroom). my daughter doesn't smoke. as a matter of fact, she has asthma -- but on the day we visited she had a bad cold and couldn't smell anything. i wonder if a follow-up visit will change her outlook on it. i was looking at where its located and trying not to think of her walking alone at night from the studio to the dorm. of course, should i care whether its bohemian and smokey and potentially dangerous if she's getting a great education??? i can see that my views on this r obviously too motherly.

the third school is in our state and she's considering it her "safety" school. its an ok place even if the one all-female dorm (which is in a victorian house) is 30% lesbian. again -- we're talking artists here and they basically march to a different beat all the way around i'm discovering. but my daughter's reaction to this school was "well, its not going to kill me to come here, but its obviously NOT at the top of my list." alrighty then....

yesterday was probably the hardest day. friday night we'd gone to a worship meeting at church and even though i had thought we would leave early, we didn't depart until close to 10pm (and the meeting wasn't over). then i had to get up at 3:45am to drive 2+ hours to get to the last school we would be visiting early enough for their presentation (which, btw didn't start on time because some other parents couldn't seem to get their acts together to get there in time). needless to say, i was yawning a lot throughout the parental presentation. i was grumpy on the tour and they didn't even show us the living spaces for the students (they r building new ones for a third of the incoming students, but they still could have shown us the existing ones -- and the tour guide didn't wait till everybody was in one place to talk and often talked while walking so that those of us at the back of the pack couldn't hear her -- so we missed a good deal of what was being said, and yeah u get the picture).

even though i was impressed with the security and the school and the location (2 hours vs. 3+ for her new top choice), she still had stars in her eyes for the bohemian school and basically was blowing anything else off -- so y were we there?? idk

probably the best thing about the day was getting to see the sky that papa god was painting as we drove there and laughing about how mom was a dork for stopping to take pictures of it only to have a state policeman drive up behind her and ask if she was having a "kodak moment." then said daughter got the hiccups because she hadn't eaten any breakfast before we'd left (teens r like this u know) and so we laughed about how she knew i was going to scare her to try to get rid of them and "don't do it mom". when we got home, we both crashed in the livingroom (her on the floor and me on the couch) around 7. when i woke up at 9 and suggested we both go to bed i figured i might well be awake early and sure enough -- here i am at 3am writing.

throughout this whole college visit thing a couple of things have surfaced. first of all, i have a really tough time with the idea of my daughter sitting in a classroom with a naked man or woman in front of her that she's required to draw (hey, i'm a mom, sometimes we'd like to put a plastic bubble around our kids to protect them from stuff and keep them as innocent as possible for the longest period of time). something about seeing metalwork statutes of men with erect penises on the bohemian tour set me off i think and after that all naked drawings on the walls of the schools made me cringe (and i'm not a prude) ... even michelangelo managed to give david a flaccid penis.

secondly, i have no sense of art as its being expressed now. i've been reminded by my daughter that anything can be art and "can't u see what the artist is trying to say?" um, that they like other ppl's garbage and painting it all green makes it art??? yeah, even though i was raised in an artistic household, some things just don't speak art to me. i'm sorry....

i want my kids to have to have the best experiences they can, but i also realize that i can't tell them where to go to school. my daughter, for instance, refuses to look at colleges anywhere beyond a 3-4 hour drive -- which may be a good thing -- or a bad thing (limiting) if u get my drift. if i had been making the decision for my son, he would have gone to the smaller school in PA that we visited because for me, it seemed a good fit for him. instead, he chose a huge state school in the next state over and was miserable because he got lost in the shuffle. i can't tell my daughter where to go, but in a sense, i want her to be safe and happy and not be exposed to things that might tear down her morals and values. i think that's a pretty hard thing to find when we're talking art schools.

at some point i know i have to cut the umbilical cord. i've been reminded of this all too often with my son. what most children don't realize is that its very hard for a mom to do that. our purpose was to raise them, nurture them, teach them, protect them. yes, we have to let go, but after 18 years of doing our job, its hard to "switch gears". i've been calling on papa god more and more lately for strength to let go. after all, i was just a caretaker -- he is their protector -- they really belong to him and they were just on loan to me. once my job with them is done, i will be left "unemployed" -- which is essentially what i am in the real world anyhow. and then the question becomes -- what is my purpose now??

yes, this whole college visit thing stirs up a lot of emotions. i'm so glad i have papa god with me -- he surely is my rock to lean on. and who would know better than he about letting go and giving freedom to a child....