I’m going to try to keep this as short possible. I need some way to communicate with my mom and I hoped maybe some parents had a way I could communicate with their comrade-in-arms so to speak.
My mother is useless (if anything a detriment) in my college search. She’s a bit older, so she doesn’t realize how much an investment is when it comes to college. She thought because her brothers, who in the 60’s and 70’s, paid for their college with a job their senior year+summer work in HS, there is no reason why I can’t do the same. Her idea of college education is going to the nearby state university, studying a “career major” (not sure what the real term is) like Accounting and Engineering or trade school, getting a job, end of story.
So in I come in and exclaim that I want to study science and/or mathematics, much to her disdain. I run the numbers for the local state university and the numbers just don’t work out, after much manipulation with CCers. I run the numbers for every state university and the numbers still don’t work out. My mother now believes it is impossible for me to college and tells me I need to start preparing for trade school and to drop my AP classes because they’re worthless now.
“Luckily, not so!” I exclaim happily. I inform her of full-meet schools’ numbers that I ran through that work out nicely, with help from CC of course. But all of these schools are really, really far away (except for Notre Dame and Chicago, but my mom tells me Notre Dame is 1984: Pope Edition and Chicago is a dangerous war zone where college kids are killed for sport) so my mom tells me there’s no way I can go there. Apparently because I am a somewhat quiet kind of kid, (I used to have social anxiety a few years ago, but now I’m pretty much over it) this translates to being “unable to function” in a faraway environment. Nope, she says, you can only go to college in Indiana and since we can’t afford any of them (and religious schools scare her) you can’t go to college. “Sorry son.”
The kicker here is that anytime I try to talk to her about colleges she insists on these previous points and yells at me for “arguing with her” and begins crying and screaming at me because I’m a “disrespectful expletive who hates his mom”. I’ve recorded my conversations with her on this and played for her, showing that I was polite, calm, and amicable while she was interrupting, hostile and name-calling. This only results in more insults hurled my way for thinking I can “get away with such blatant disobedience” and her telling me to “MOVE OUT WHEN YOU TURN EIGHTEEN!!!”
In my head, I just want to tell her to shut up and listen or get out of my face all the time, but I know that is only self defeating and would cause her accusations to have merit. Unfortunately for me, she speaks her mind with no filter.
Is there any hope? It’s hard making these decisions that will impact the rest of my life alone. CC helps, but there’s only so much you can articulate that can only be demonstrated in real life. This is causing a rift and I’m no longer close to her at all. I try giving her college mail and forward her e-mails and stuff but she doesn’t read it and throws it away. Anyway at all to get her to “open her mind”?
In summation: My mother has a rather uninformed and dated knowledge of the college process. Any attempts to inform her of this are met with a hostile response. How can I fix this?
