As darkness overcame Charlottesville, vampires, zombies, and witches trolled the streets, followed by a few frighteningly cute ballerinas and creepily kitschy Pillsbury Dough Boys. But for me, the real scary moment came when I watched my seventeen-year-old son click the “Submit” button on his college application.
When the application process began, I vowed to be hands off, a promise my son reminded me of daily. I would let him make his own choices, write his own essays. And I did.
Yet it’s hard to let go. I want to tell the Admissions Committee about this person I have lived with and cared so deeply for all his life, but there is no place on the application for me.
I want to tell them about the time last summer when my son called me from his job as counselor at a sleepaway camp. “One of my campers had an asthma attack in the night and the other counselor took him to the emergency room,” my son said. “Now I’m in charge of the whole cabin by myself.” He called me again two days later, in the same situation. He told me about helping one of his campers with dialysis and recounted the story of another boy who started the session having tantrums every time he didn’t want to move from one activity to another. None of the other counselors wanted to discipline this troubled boy, especially since he was the son of one of the camp trustees. My son said, “At first I couldn’t stand the kid. But then I realized he just wanted attention. He was homesick.” He sat with the boy and described his favorite foods—stacks of pancakes dripping with syrup—and gradually the boy came around, and the tantrums stopped. “After that, he became one of my favorite kids,” my son said.
But the story of moving from child to parental figure is not the one my son wanted to tell about himself. Instead, he wrote about overcoming his fear of insects after watching the creatures treated with reverence and made beautiful through the lens of a Terence Malik film. He also wrote about the short distance between “harasser” and “enforcer” at the camp waste stations, after moving from one role to the next in a year. He described seeing his former self—his ghost, perhaps, since he wrote it on Halloween—in the mischievous smirks of the kids who kept trying to get away with ever more elaborate pranks.
He wrote about how he sees himself, not how I see him. And that is how it should be. Dear Admissions Committee, I hope you agree.
