Oh man, fuck today, fuck this whole week. I know I haven’t been around here much lately, and this is why:
The situation with our friend that I have mentioned before has continued to deteriorate. She’s been committed to a two-week intensive residential mental health program. Fortunately, in a brief moment of clarity, she signed her kids over to RatWoman and me in a formal temporary guardianship agreement.
The downsides of that are:
I have to find beds for two more kids here temporarily. Practically speaking, that means I have to expand the boys’ bunkhouse here tout de suite. RatBoy the Elder is going to have to sleep on a mattress on the deck until I do. Hopefully we can get that done this weekend.
We have to endure an unannounced site inspection by CPS sometime in the next few days. Not looking forward to that. I have nothing good to say about CPS. Yes, I know they have a horrible job, but they do it so badly.
CPS sucks, and lawyers suck. Lawyers who don’t suck are necessary and expensive. The paperwork is horrendous.
On the plus side, they’re great kids, they’re the same age as ours, and they all get along together. The kids are managing very well, and are easily adjusting to being in a clean house full of love, understanding, and happiness. And good food and clean clothes that comes regularly without asking. (Those seem like such small things, but apparently it’s not anything they had before.) And they’re fascinated by the garden and the animals-- the older girl had never seen a live chicken before!
In another plus, RatWoman seems to have finally gotten past the constant morning sickness. The part that comes next is hugely fun.
Thanks for taking care of the children!!! I cannot stand for kids to be not taken care of and you are making all the right choices even if it feels sucky.
The heat exchanger thingy for the building’s district heating connection broke Wednesday night. This is the second day in a row I’m wide awake because of the cold shower. It sucks! I don’t want to be able to experience my fellow humans before 10 am!
And if the plumber doesn’t fix it today it will be a weekend without warm water in the flat…
So yeah. No Brown. No Dartmouth. No UNC. But the child seems good with it. I think the writing was on the wall from the other acceptances and rejections she had already received.
We go up to the one small school that is offering her a great scholarship this weekend. She had to check the US News and World Report site to see how prestigious it is, which made me sad.
Probably she will go to a great state school and walk out with no debt, which right now makes me really happy.
The two more elite schools she got into but which are not offering much aid she seems okay with not doing that. I still am trying to figure out if there is some way she can go to either one, but they seem so financially out of reach. I feel like a big loser as I should have been saving for this all along but kept ignoring the advice to start a savings plan because my life was just too chaotic.
I know the feels. For what it’s worth, I got into some moderately elite schools. And I came out of a hyper-competitive high school- I was the idiot of my friends, and that’s because six of them (6!) got perfect SAT scores. I’m not a slouch, but hanging with kids like that can make you feel that way. Anyway-
Got into some moderately elite schools, went to one, hated it, came home, went to a state school (commuted, no less) and had a great experience with great classes and instructors. And once I did a grad degree, nobody cares where the undergrad came from, so I’m happy to have saved a buck and thereby managed to come out of undergrad and grad with no debt.
I made sacrifices to do that- and I was lucky to have parents willing and able to help (mostly by being supporting and letting me continue to live at home…), but looking back it was a great path for me to take.
She’s going to be ok- college, once you’re there, is about what you make of it (and not where it is). A lot of the competitive bullshit drops away, and it’s more about being around good people and being involved in interesting projects.
Deep breath.
She’s going to be ok. You’re going to be ok. Think slow, remain calm at all times, and fix the problems one at a time.
I went to a school that was just named one of the 50 most elite private schools in the US. In a class of 40, we had two students who graduated one year early and matriculated at Harvard as Sophomores. One of my other classmates went to MIT and was one of the lead engineers on the Mars Rover project.
Honestly, as proud of my daughter as I am, I do know what those superstar scholars are like and I think she will be happier in a place where she is not with them. I think she is a very bright and creative hard worker who will shine at a state school or a smaller private school with other bright, creative kids.
My cousin (who went to a very good grammar school, then a Russell Group university in the UK) ended up going to William & Mary for a Masters. He dropped out part way through - I don’t think he was struggling academically, but he couldn’t get on with any of the other students…
His brother went to Cambridge, and has surprised no-one by being largely useless for 20 years since graduating.
Exactly- that hyper-competitive world is a twisted view of things. It’s so focused on some arbitrary metric of “success” that it (often) loses track of the “why”.
I spent time in both the private and public versions of these places, and while I’m very glad to have been exposed to those worlds, it took me some time to get over the “I’m behind” or “they’re ahead” and to realize I needed to do things I love to do, and I needed to do them how I needed to do them. Learning to approach life on my own terms and with my own goals was my real undergrad education.
I don’t regret leaving the “elite” college I went to, and I’m very proud of my undergrad from state school that I paid for, in full, myself. Teaching a kid that it’s not the “where you went” that really matters but the “what you’ve done” that employers ultimately care about.
FWIW, I was lucky and the bonkers-smart people I hung out with were socially competent and lovely people, but there’s often a trade off at the fringes, and… yeah. I’m happy I don’t spend a lot of time around those folks.
You know, something is really off this cycle. My kid got into two of the top schools in the country, but didn’t get into a school that accepts 44% of all applicants. She’s reporting back, after talking with her friends, that the same sort of irrationality is common to all. Something is rotten. There’s no legitimate rhyme or reason to how the results are coming in.
The most important thing is that the school your daughter goes to is one that will support her both academically and as a budding adult. That’s one reason why I’m not pushing for the top university my daughter got into: I worry that being an average student there will not be as enriching and empowering as being a flourishing student who captures the teachers’ attention at a lower-ranked-but-still-quite-good small college.
You’ve already done the FAFSA application, right? Your daughter might be able to get more funding than you think.
Never underestimate the value of not having to worry about money 24/7. I’m still constantly reminded of how my college education was severely curtailed by having to work several jobs concurrently while also taking a full load of classes in order to pay for everything. And now? Geez, students are graduating with more debt than a mortgage.
(edited because of a grammar mistake…no, I could not let it stand!)
Exactly.
Because I had no debt coming out of undergrad, I could take a job working in special education for no other reason than it was interesting- and not worry about if it was enough money to live on and pay off loans. And that experience led to grad school and a pretty good (I think?) career, so… yeah. No debt at graduation (and the freedom that comes with that) is totally worth more than some theoretical “status” from a college.
My wife and I only cleared our student debt quite recently, and our eldest is already on his way to highschool next year, with no educational savings started. Currently the plan is to encourage our kids to stay in montreal, where tuition’s cheap and the rent is free
Fuck today, for every family member with a high school senior, because today is the official deadline for all schools to report. How many teens will be berating themselves for not being “good enough” because of test scores, or a B one semester two years ago, or having “only” 6 extracurricular activities, which clearly are not enough to matter?
This is not the appropriate gateway to higher education.
Its not even 3AM where I am and fuck today.
I’m almost on the side of robots on this morning, emotions are garbage, 16 years of history is apparently garbage. I am going to sleep for 7 days straight if I can. Hope you’re all here on the flip side.
This sort of thing has gone on for years. I had a classmate in the 70s who went to an Ivy but was rejected from our state flagship. Admission to US colleges has been an odd and sometimes unpredictable combination of factors for over a century…which is a positive thing, on balance.
The good news is that the academic job market has been so bad for so many years that the faculty at what were once middling schools are now as strong as the faculty at the elite schools were decades ago. A student’s professor at a Chicago or a Wisconsin might be a VAP or postdoc who a few years later will be tenure track teaching the students at a lower ranked school.
Just watch out for schools in financial trouble; even a few fairly prestigious schools have been on the edge in recent years, and the public university mess in Illinois is not confined to that state. You don’t want your kid’s school or major shutting down halfway through the degree.
Yeah, we did the FAFSA, the iDOC, the CSA. Being divorced is a screw with the aid, because even though my husband (the kid’s stepdad) has no financial obligation to my daughter’s college, they look at his income too.
I pretty much knew I was at the too rich to get any aid, too poor to be able to pay for college easily stage. Just happy we have good state school options.
The college we visited this weekend was nice and a good fit for my kiddo. We talked with the aid counselor there and think they will work out the package so it will be do-able for us.
Half of me hopes she ends up at this school as I think it’ll be a good fit but half doesn’t as I don’t think it will push her emotionally as hard; think she will be happy and comfortable there, which in one way as a parent sounds nice, but I think it’s time for her to get out of the nest and grow up.
I have a package coming to me via USPS- Priority 2 Day with tracking.
It shows as having shipped out March 30th- and hasn’t been updated at all since the 31st. It still shows a anticipated delivery date of April 2nd, but that’s clearly not happened.
What’s the point of tracking if it doesn’t fucking work? What’s the point of an anticipated date if it’s not remotely attached to reality? What’s the point of paying extra for 2-day if it’s going to take 6 (assuming it comes today)?
I’m sorry. It’s such a bitchy and trite thing to be pissed about.
