A Letter from the Counselor

I have a high school senior, and it is November — college application time.  It’s that season for seniors everywhere, an intense push to whittle down lists of schools you know only a bit about while choosing an area of study that may seem completely divorced from the world of work that lays ahead. For most student, it’s an exciting, frightening, and excruciatingly painful process, depending on the moment.

Parents share the fright, excitement, and pain. We marvel that this being, once entirely dependent, is stepping closer to adulthood. We worry about finances (ours) and readiness (theirs). This storm of emotions is tinged with the knowledge that change is hard even when completely welcome.  Sometimes we’re scared, but we’re not supposed to show it.

Homeschooling parents face an additional challenge during college application season. We’ve been principal, counselor, and teacher as well as parent, and thus we not only write the checks but also the transcripts and letters to admissions offices. We answer questions that force us to put the parental hat aside and look dispassionately yet positively at the child who we rocked through colic and whose hands we held while he took his first steps. It’s mental gymnastics with no net and no spotter.

I’d managed to avoid these worries until a few weeks back when my homeschooled senior finished his part of one of five college applications. It was fairly easy for him, with only short answers about interests and activities requiring thought. He’d worried about this process, so he started on a simple on. After a bit of work and some checking and rechecking, he electronically submitted it. Done. Whew.

And then the email came. The one requesting his transcript (so close to done, but needing a few final touches) and a letter from his counselor. That’s me.

I knew this was coming. A few years back, I’d watched a friend work through the counselor sections on college applications, andI recall her concerns, trying to find the right tone to discuss her daughter, an accomplished young woman with plenty of options. She had to explain her homeschooling philosophy as well, something most homeschooling parents have some sense of but often don’t put into words, at least not for people making decisions that affect our child’s future. She had to explain her daughter without gushing but without pointing out the flaws either. It’s hard work for a parent.

So a few weeks back, after much stalling, I donned the correct hat and sat down to write the letter from the counselor, a letter I can likely use for any school that asks for it, but that hardly made it less daunting. I wrote, deleted, and rewrote, not quite finishing but stopping because, like many pieces of writing needing revision, I needed the distance time provides to view it again. A week later, I revisited the letter. It wasn’t as bad as I feared, and it needed only a handful of revisions to obtain the dispassionately positive account that the job required. I ended up pleased with the letter and slipped it into the mail with his transcript.

But something else happened in that letter writing process, something beyond profiling my son for a college option. Before starting the letter, I’d spent weeks staring at minutiae on his transcript, tweaking the font and color scheme (tiny with blue highlight for headings), agonizing over whether to weight his grades or not (yes, but only the college courses and list both unweighted and weighted), and wondering what makes a transcript ‘official’ (the word ‘official’ on it — really). I spent nights wondering if more time on literature would have been worth the agony and if his electronics class was a science or a computer studies course. I’d started to see him only as numbers and lists of classes. But this letter. This letter from the mother who, for a decade had worn the hats of mother, counselor, teacher, and principal. This letter from a mother standing so close to her subject that it appeared as a Pointillism-style painting by Seurat viewed just inches from the canvas. All dots, seemingly random and without connection to one another. This letter pushed me back.

This letter pushed be back from those dots and showed me a full picture of my son. I saw his passion for computers, both their hardware and software. I saw the hours of effort put into helping others, friends, family, and acquaintances who had relied on him for help with technology they didn’t understand. I saw the boy becoming a man who found a way through each technical problem that came his way, the one who thirsted for more knowledge and read more online about his scientific and technical interests than I often likely knew. I saw a competent young man who had so much to give to others, one for whom numbers and lists of classes told only fraction of his story. I saw struggles and victory, hard earned and modestly worn. Between the lines, I recalled defeats, painful but just as important in formation as the successes. I saw a student ready for the next step with plenty to offer a college or workplace because of the person he is, something no transcript can possibly convey.

His college application process continues to rumble on. He’s not enjoying it, and I’m not either. It’s still exciting, frustrating, and somewhat painful, although a bit less than it was. In time, we’ll see who choses him and, more importantly, whom he chooses. While we’re waiting, I’ll keep looking at my son at a bit more of a distance, appreciating him with the passionate love that I had while holding those tiny, soft hands when he learned to walk, letting go, bit by bit, as he was ready. It’s time.