<p>Congrats to your daughter. Now you can retire your screen name, it’s not longer “hope”, it’s for real.</p>
<p>I don’t see that it’s risky to accept the waitlist at Stanford and also accept MIT. Nor do I think it makes any sense, unless IvyDaughter is absolutely in love with S. Good grief, she’s been accepted at MIT and Princeton! Full ride at Rice! Doesn’t she already have enough choices without waiting for an acceptance from Stanford that probably won’t come? Shouldn’t she be mentally moving into the dorm in Cambridge, figuring out about warm clothes, thinking about the subway, wondering about the challenges of the difficult, yet rewarding first year?</p>
<p>Or thinking about how she’ll have all that money for grad school, because she’s at a wonderful school in Texas for free?</p>
<p>Why should she be pining after the guy that is just not into her?</p>
<p>ahem…MIT is not a member of the Ivy League…is it?</p>
<p>She got into Princeton, Cornell and Dartmouth, didn’t she?</p>
<p>Oh yes she got into those schools…but it appears she will be going to MIT…unless she gets off the waitlist at Stanford and decides to go there. Name change to ParentofIvyHopefulwhoisn’tmatriculatingatanIvy. Is that too long a screenname?</p>
<p>Thumper1 - you are funny.</p>
<p>Maybe “Ivy Hope” is her first and middle name?</p>
<p>MIT counts as an Ivy to Asians I am told.</p>
<p>The name was created when Yale was DD first choice and Medicine was her career choice. Over her high school years her interests in computer engineering and her career choice in that field changed her top choice to MIT.
After last summer tour Yale dropped lower than HSP also. So once she got early into MIT she agreed to drop out of Yale and Columbia.</p>
<p>But since the name is unchangeable so I didn’t care to change. But hope to get into HP was still there and she got her only rejection from an Ivy too.</p>
<p>Remember that 7%, 3% for legacies, 3% for athletes, 1% for URMs (Asian is not part of that), 0% for you. Congratulations. You must be very proud.</p>
<p>MIT = Caltech, and >>>> any Ivy!!! At least in my books. Congrats again.</p>
<p>Congratulations to your daughter, POIH! She must be one amazing kid!</p>
<p>If she accepted a position on the S waitlist just to please your wife, there’s no harm in that. However, at the end of it all she needs to go to the school that makes her happiest. Otherwise every time she has a disappointment or set-back (and there will be plenty of them in college, no matter where she goes) she will think, “If only…” My freshman roommate turned down Yale, in part because she was an only child and felt that she needed to be closer to home, and it was not a good decision - not because she didn’t do great in college (she was Phi Beta Kappa) but because any time something didn’t go her way it would have been better at Yale.</p>
<p>I’m sure that your wife is having a hard time with this. She has experienced a lot of loss in her life, and the thought of her daughter going far away brings those old feelings flooding back. She may think that therapy is a waste of time and money, but it would be such a relief for her to sort through her feelings with a trained listener. Friends get tired of listening, and you and your daughter are too close to the situation (and have your own strong feelings). Maybe just a couple of sessions? Just a thought.</p>
<p>As an alternative or an addition, she might like to join the CC community when your daughter leaves for college. There will be a lot of parents contemplating this huge change in their lives. She will see that her feelings are quite normal and that the pain of loss will ease in time. Then there is the joy when you go to visit your daughter and see how happy and settled in she is!</p>
<p>I am also in CA. My youngest d went to college across the country last year ¶. It was easier for me with her because she had two older sisters. I knew that they do grow up. You have to think about your relationship with your own parents and how eventually you were on your own. Your DW will see that, but it will be very rough at first. When my oldest left, I didn’t know what to do. I had never been away from her for more than 2 weeks. 3 months until we saw her seemed forever. One day I had to dust the piano bench and I burst out crying. I had NEVER had to dust the piano bench. It was just so difficult for me. She is now 25. She and we did survive and eventually thrive. </p>
<p>My youngest is having the adventure of her life. She saw it snow for the first time even. She is currently reveling in the flowering trees. She learned what rain boots were for and how to take a train into the city. She asked me to get skype so she could see and talk to us. It’s wonderful. We do not bother her, but she does call and skype us. She has been the most communicative with us of all three kids. She calls because she wants to and knows she does not ‘have’ to. It also takes her as long to fly home as it did for us to drive to visit my oldest who went to school here in CA. Cross country travel is not a big deal anymore!</p>
<p>If you let her go she will come back. If you hang on she will try harder to get away. It is a normal part of growing up. The world is such a big, beautiful place. I am thrilled my youngest is seeing that.</p>
<p>OK, I’ve only read eight pages, but here are my thoughts anyway –</p>
<p>OP asked whether anyone had gone through this before… that was the point of the thread.</p>
<p>Answer: Apparently not.</p>
<p>Yet we are trying to classify the mother by DSM-IV criteria (or whatever the current version is).</p>
<p>I must ask all you posters –</p>
<p>What is a family?
What is a marriage?
What is weird?</p>
<p>All this discussion is entirely culturally based. If you were to ask a Yanomama (sp?) in New Guinea about a parent following a child, they would think it absurd that a child would ever be separated from the parents, or that a child would ever sleep in a big house other than the one their extended family of 40 lives in… unless she were traded to a neighboring tribe to keep the peace in the region. Is that weird?</p>
<p>In Mexico City, where I spend part of my youth, grown men and women live AT HOME, period, until they’re married. No exception unless they go to the states for college. They can finish their doctorate, and if they aren’t married, they still live at home. Is that weird?</p>
<p>Is it weird that Innuit (eskimo) give their wife to a visitor for the night? That it is an insult for the visitor to refuse this gift?</p>
<p>Is it weird when Christian missionaries convert polygamist tribes in Africa and then force all wives of a man save one to leave? Which will stay… the prettiest? The hardest worker? The youngest?</p>
<p>We live in a world with many different solutions to social structures. Most respondents on this thread are myopic and ignorant.</p>
<p>And if I were 7’ tall, I might be in the NBA. If I had the looks of Brad Pitt, I might be in the movies. If I had the talent of Keith Urban, I might be in Nicole Kidman. If I was born in Berlin I might speak German, If I was born a woman I might look nice in a skirt.
I am none of the above. I am an American male, and the Op asked my oipnion(and other posters here) on the situation he presented. If the Op had desired only people from New Guinea, Mexicans, or eskimos to give their opinions, then he might have had better luck with a different website. He chose to ask people here their opinions.
I can agree it is improper to give wife a medical diagnosis, but given the Op’s question here it is reasonable for posters here to give their opinions. If the opinions here differ from those an eskimo might offer, well then so be it. The questions were asked here, and the Op did not specify he wanted only eskimos to respond.</p>
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<p>Yes. It’s kind of early. A student’s feeling about the distance can go either way: enjoying a whole new self, lifestyle, geography, group of friends with which to stay attached after college (thus remaining permanently in the college location); or, enjoying the location only temporarily and wanting to return home, and/or have a warmer clime to visit even if the student settles across the country.</p>
<p>Personally, in your position I would wait, unless it happened that job circumstances virtually forced me out of the state to begin with. Parents do often end up moving nearby when grown children start raising their own, including if that is out of state. But adolescence, and the extension of it into young adulthood is a unique watershed. Generally, in this country, there’s an expectation that that will happen with some healthy distance from parents, because children naturally feel freer to discover themselves when they can separate from previous roles and routines. I do know that this is not the pattern in all countries, but someone raised here tends to have a different outlook (learned from peers) about the college experience & the extension of that.</p>
<p>Please POIH–if you are still reading—suggest that your wife enter counseling. There is nothing good to be gained from moving, and a lot of disappointment. Some kids NEED to go away to college–it is a good and natural thing in our culture. </p>
<p>As a mother, it seems very unfair somehow to me for your wife to encourage aspirations which include going to school on the opposite coast, and then when your daughter spreads her wings, obviously confident enough in your love that she need not worry about staying close, you move the goalposts. </p>
<p>There is an old hippie poem about if you love something, set it free. I think your wife could benefit from reading it and trusting that your daughter has both roots and wings. Leave her be and let her fly off to MIT and be in CA when she and her friends want to come out to the west coast.</p>