Once again, March Madness is upon us.
But this craziness has nothing to do with hoops, brackets or the Final Four. We’re talking about the anxiety among high school seniors and their parents as they await the arrival of college acceptance letters.
My friend is a victim. After suffering through an agonizing fall trying to get her 17-year-old son to fill out applications and send them in on time, she now can’t stand the suspense. After the investment of so much time and stress, she has to know—is he going to college?
So one day this month, she found herself holding an envelope that had arrived in the mail. It was from a Virginia university. It was addressed to her son. But he wasn’t due home for hours from his Silver Spring high school.
She just couldn’t wait.
She carefully unsealed the envelope, finding a pre-acceptance letter from the university. She read with relief the letter stating that her son should expect a “big fat envelope” from the university.
She carefully refolded the letter. Then, after searching through the house, she found an old glue stick to reseal the envelope.
Did she feel guilt over letting her need to know overwhelm her desire to respect her son’s privacy?
A bit, maybe. But “I just was dying of curiosity,” she says.
I suspect she’s not alone. In our helicopter-parent world, it can be difficult to not take ownership of all of our children’s successes and failures, to not overstep our boundaries.
I know the feeling. I have to admit that I might have been caught last month holding an envelope up to the sunlight streaming through my kitchen windows, trying to decipher whether my eighth-grader had been accepted into a high school magnet program.
I’d promised her that I would not open any letters that arrived. But by angling the envelope just right in the light, I could make out the word “Congratulations.” Promise kept.
As for my friend, she was not tempted when the letter from another university arrived. That’s because, on the back of the envelope, the university had printed a big “YES.”
That was all she needed to know.
