I remember when the most difficult thing we had to search for at the start of the school year was a backpack. We’d tour the aisles of Target, scanning all possible choices because my kids had one chance at it and they wanted the perfect one. 

This year, instead of touring Target,  we’re touring colleges, also trying to find the perfect one. And while our son searches for where he’ll spend the next four years, his parents are searching for an institution that will spit out a fully functioning and potentially self-sustaining earner—I mean graduate. This, of course, assumes we all survive the process. 

It all brings me back to mid-April  1980 when disappointingly thin envelopes flooded my mailbox. All at once, I received rejection letters from most of the Ivy  League, including Princeton, Brown,  Yale, and Wesleyan (not an Ivy but close).  Oh, wait, I was wait-listed at the University of Pennsylvania. But to me, that was essentially rejection. 

My response to this development on my academic journey toward adulthood was to cry for days. No one could console me. Certainly not my parents, who kept  knocking on my door telling me, “It’s all  right, Pamela, we love you even if you  didn’t get into Yale.” Which just made me cry louder.  

My two best friends tried to cheer me up. They came to the house with a  “university rejection” care package. They took pictures of really ugly guys and made them into hand puppets of boys who attended the offending institutions.  Oh, and they gave me chocolate because when you are devastated for any reason,  chocolate really does help. 

It’s not like I was delusional in my quest for the Ivy League. I ranked 10th  in my class of over 1,000. And in my head, that meant I could be a tweedy intellectual  (but with the non-frizzy hair and perky nose of Ali McGraw in Love Story). It never occurred to me that there were a  lot of other schools out there. My search began and ended with the Ivy League. But  I ended up attending American University in Washington, D.C.  

My husband, on the other hand, only applied to schools that were profiled in the magazine High Times. He never visited campus and ended up applying to only four schools. He chose Ithaca College,  which so lived up to its reputation from  High Times that he ended up with a record low 1.1 academic G.P.A. the first semester and a record “high” 4.0 in social life. His pissed-off mother offered two choices:  transfer to another school where he would apply himself, or live at home for the rest of his life. So he transferred—to American University in Washington, D.C. So in the end, where we went to the school did pave the path for our future lives. But not because of the courses that were offered, the sports teams at the school, or the amount of ivy on the walls.  It was our own “sliding doors” choices (or lack of choices) that led to us meeting at  American. In my case, maybe it was divine rejection. In his case, call it matriarchal intervention. 

If we hadn’t ended up at this school neither of us chose first, we never would have met. And then (stick with me here)  we never would have gotten married, had children, and, now, been back involved with a college search. Call it “The Circle of Life-College Search Edition.” they say hindsight is 20/20, but knowing all this now, I want to tell my son that, in the end, he’ll end up where he’s supposed to end up. Instead, we have embarked on a search of epic  proportions—one so stressful, we’ve engaged a team of advisers to keep us  from killing each other, not to mention the poor people who keep asking the  seemingly innocent question, “Does he know where he wants to go to school?” And the next worst question, “What’s he  going to major in?” 

My answers to both questions right now are, “I don’t know!” His answer is  the teenage version: “No clue.” Which is perfectly reasonable for a kid of 17 but somehow makes me crazy. I don’t expect him to know the answers to those questions, but I want him to be passionate about trying to figure them out. My husband reminds me that some of recent history’s greatest success stories never even finished college. There’s Michael Dell, who sold computers out of his dorm room before he ended up dropping out of the University of Texas to start Dell Computers.  Bill Gates, whose father was a highly successful lawyer, also didn’t last long in college. There’s Larry Ellison, Mark  Zuckerberg, and a guy who preceded them all on the unschooled achievement list: Abraham Lincoln.  

So maybe we should be looking for a school where he’ll drop out or get kicked out so that he’ll become a wildly successful computer geek or perhaps president of the United States.  

Right now the only schools my son is thinking of applying to are schools he has visited with his dad to attend football games. These schools were completely random because they simply coincided with my husband’s business travels.  

They include Michigan, Pittsburgh, and  Alabama. All great schools, though  I think all he knows of them is that they offer tailgate parties, screaming cheerleaders, and the wave. 

He also wants to attend a school far from home because he has this idea that if he goes to school close by, we’ll keep showing up on his dorm-room doorstep or at the frat house he can’t wait to join, just to hang out. While I’m naturally conflicted about my baby leaving home, he doesn’t seem to realize that if we do this right, when he leaves home, he’s leaving home. We will not show up on his doorstep, perhaps not even for parent’s weekend (seriously, I have no idea what I’ll be doing that weekend). I’m the mother who doesn’t go to his lacrosse games because I’m too busy. So what makes him think I’m trekking all the way to his college to check up on him? Doesn’t he know I can do that electronically for the rest of his life? 

And he should know that when he leaves, he won’t have room to come home to, because when he’s gone we want him to stay gone. Isn’t that the point of sending your kid to college? We’ll happily redecorate his room into my new sewing room (true, I can’t sew; maybe that’s because I don’t have a room) or perhaps his father’s fantasy television room with the largest flat screen known to mankind and a small refrigerator in the closet so he doesn’t have to go all the way downstairs. 

Another thing on his list is a fun and cool campus tour guide. That, and not going on tours with his mother. The only colleges I’ve taken him to are the colleges he later decides he doesn’t want to go to. Could it be because I sat in front and asked all those questions? Is he afraid  they’re going to remember at admissions time and say, “Don’t let that Sherman kid  in—his mother is annoying?”  

It’s gotten so bad, that I’ve started touring colleges without him. Which is kind of like visiting Disney World without children. Maybe I could do a swap with my friends. I’ll take your kid to Cornell if you take my kid to Ithaca. We’ll call it an “embarrassing mother swap.”  

Ironically, everyone tells us our kid is a “good package” (grades, extracurriculars, and test scores). We just don’t know where to send our package or how much postage it will need.  

I do want him to know that it doesn’t really matter to us where he ends up. Because life is a journey you have to enjoy for the long haul. I just want him to go where he can continue to learn and grow yet remain the kid we love—kind,  helpful and continually working to make the world a better place. And in between all that growing, no matter where he studies, I’d also like him to actually study—unless he can guarantee he’ll do all of the above without paying all that tuition, just like Steve Jobs did. R 

The Suburban Outlaw is a recovering lawyer and presentations coach through her company ShermanEDGE: Explore, Dream,  Grow & Excite. She lives in Pittsford. Read her Saturday column in The Democrat and  Chronicle and at herrochester.com; or visit  www.suburbanoutlaw.com. 

As first published in the Democrat and Chronicle and USA Today Network.