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	teen voices

No College for Me! Respecting a Daughter's Decision
Valerie Schultz
Issue 111, March/April 2002

My daughter Morgan is 16, sweet 16, and has everything going for her. She is smart and pretty. She has two parents in the same house who both give a damn about her. She has her own room. She's learning to drive. She loves to read, listen to alternative music, and write poetry. She keeps a journal and plays the piano. She attends a youth group. She has good friends and three younger sisters to hang out with. She even has a dog that loves her. She is enrolled in several honors classes for sophomores. Her future looks bright and sunny--except that she rained hard on our parade with one simple announcement.

"I'm not going to college," she tells us one day. My husband and I--two BAs, a master's, and a doctorate-in-progress between us (mostly his)--realize our mouths are hanging open at this unthinkable statement. "No," she goes on, "it's not in the cards for me." Instead, she and her friends are going to move to San Diego when (if?) they finish high school, to start a rock band or be actresses or something.

"Why San Diego?" we ask.

She looks at us kindly. We are such oblivious dolts. "The beach," she enlightens us.

"What about supporting yourselves?" We've been saving for college not a beach house in San Diego.

"I think I'd like to be a waitress," she says.

I have to sit down. I am crushed. I start doing some math aloud: "Let's see, minimum wage times 40 hours a week times four weeks, minus rent and utilities, and how much did you say a new CD costs?"

"I'll get two jobs," she says belligerently. "I'm doing this."

My husband shushes me. When Morgan goes up to her room, he smiles. "When I was 16," he says, "I was either going to get a VW van with my friend Robert and drive to California or join the military." "When I was 16," I say, resisting comfort, "I wanted to go to college."

College was the whole point of life. I was one of those kids: an exemplary student, a grind, a nerd. I loved school and endured summer vacation (I freckled easily and would rather be conjugating irregular French verbs, thank you).

When I started high school, my parents had to sign the registration form, where you had to specify general studies, secretarial/business, or college-bound. I, of course, had checked the box next to college-bound. My mother frowned. She showed it to my father. "Why would she check that?" she asked in all seriousness.

"Because I want to go to college," I answered.

"Why?"

"Because I do. Doesn't everyone?"

"What a waste of time," my mother said. "You change that to secretarial."

"Secretarial?" I spat the word out contemptuously.

"That's what girls do!" my mother said. "You learn to type and take shorthand so you can get a job until you get married."

"Mom!" I shrieked. "I will never be a secretary! What a crappy life!" "That's what I did," she sulked. "I worked for Prudential Insurance until your brother was born. I was very good at shorthand."

I was dumbfounded. She was insulted.

"Oh, let her go to college," said my indulgent dad. "She's smart. And it's a good place to meet a husband." So while my mother muttered dark predictions about my future unemployability, I became college-bound. In a way, my mother turned out to be right. With a degree in theater, I was somewhat unemployable. I taught creative dramatics and worked for a theater company that interacted with disabled populations. But my paychecks were small enough that I also poured beer at Shakey's Pizza and cleaned bank offices at night.

My father was proven right as well: I did meet my husband in college, and we've been together ever since. We both have jobs in education, for which we thank our college degrees. And we know that the experience of college, for each of us in innumerable ways, was enlightening, formative, challenging, and integral to who we are today.

So the question remains, long into the hours when I am supposed to be asleep: how did we raise a child who so disregards the importance of education?

We want to blame ourselves. We haven't spent enough time with her. We've spent too much time. We didn't read enough to her. We read her too many books. We haven't monitored her friends closely enough. We've sheltered her too much. Why are her grades sinking? Why is her motivation dissipating, her interest flagging? What have we done wrong?

"School is boring," she says. "Period. I can't wait till it's over. Why would I volunteer for four more years of boring?"

Friends tell us we are panicking needlessly. (At least I am; my husband remembers the VW van.) Maybe a year or two off will clarify her vision of her future. Maybe one truly can have a fulfilling life without college. A friend suggests we make Morgan get a job at Subway this summer. "Give her a few months of grumpy people shoving sandwiches back at her and saying, 'I said NO LETTUCE!' Then she'll go to college for sure."

At the heart of my discomfort, is this knowledge: I have become my mother. The cycle is repeating itself, in spite of my best intentions. I, who so chafed at my mother's inflexibility and lack of understanding, am treating my daughter the exact same way. I loved school; therefore you must love school. I was college-bound; therefore you must be, too. My expectations of Morgan are not her problem. They're mine. But my initial, palpable disappointment in her announcement is her problem, for I know she is translating it into loss of my love for her. That is a problem I must fix.

It's a precision dance, mothering. How do you have standards for your children and still love and accept them completely? How do you transcend your own experience as the yardstick for measuring their lives? How do you help them to grow, even as they make choices you can't stand?

"Will you be mad if I'm a lesbian?" my ten year old demands. Here is a new vocabulary word, I think. I tell her I will love her no matter what, and it's so easy to mean that unconditionally when reassuring a ten year old who has just learned a new concept. The harder part comes later, at sweet 16. You still know you'll love her no matter what, but the expression gets lost as the expectations are unceremoniously dumped. I think of the choices my siblings and I have made in our lives, some better than others, and how my parents still welcome us for Christmas every year. They may not approve of us, but they love us, and we know that. That's the part of my mother that I hope comes through in me, as I try to find gentle ways to guide my oldest daughter, to accept her life decisions, and to love her in a way that she feels is sincere and unconditional.

I expected the diapers, the weaning, the menstrual period, the questions, the driver's license, the young adult. It seems I just never expected her to be different from me.

Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer and part-time director of religious education at St. Malachy's Catholic Church in Tehachapi, California. She lives with her husband, Randy, and their four daughters: Morgan (19), Zoe (17), Raven (13), and Mariah (10). Morgan is now in her first year of junior college--in San Diego.