When Etta was working on her essays I tried everything I could think of to let her know I was available to help. I folded laundry in her room while she was on her computer. I made her bed while she was on the common application website. I was even so brave as to ask her straight up if she would like my help with her applications. That was a terrible idea. I was met with stone-cold silence and then a surprising teenage tantrum that started with, “You don’t think I can do anything right! You’ve never believed in me!” and ended with a heartwarming declaration of, “YOU ARE THE WORST MOTHER EVER!!” If Etta had ever talked to me like that in the past I would have grabbed a duffel bag, stuffed her clothes in it, thrown it on the front stoop, and told her not to let the doorknob hit her in the ass on the way out. But against all instincts I bit my lip, gave her a dark stare that said, One more word out of you and your life will be over in thirty seconds or less, and walked out of her room. Or really my room, she is simply a boarder on a fourteen-year lease—payment due immediately if she does not change her attitude and get these applications in on time.
I decided to believe Etta would do this college application thing right. I chose to be the best mother of an almost college-aged kid and back off. And guess what? IT WAS A TERRIBLE FUCKING DECISION! Because here we are. No early options due to crap essays and that means, thanks to my prima ballerina, more flack to be taken from Jean Georges and the bill collectors from the San Francisco Ballet School. I promise this: Today is going to go down in history as one of Etta’s least favorite days of her life.
“Mama, what are you doing here?” Etta asks, surprised to see me cut into her circle of friends as they pack up their backpacks at the end of physics. “Is Mrs. Chen not driving me to ballet? Poppy said she’s driving us today.”
“Hello, ladies.” I nod to Etta’s posse. “I texted Mrs. Chen. She’s picking up Poppy, but you’re coming with me.” I grab Etta by the wrist and pull her through the circle. I usually do my best not to embarrass my daughter in front of her friends, but today humiliating her a little feels a lot good. “We have a date with Krista. Wasn’t that nice of her to invite us both to meet with her in her office? We are going to have some tea, maybe a cookie or two, and hear all about how your essays stink. That sounds lovely, don’t you think?”
“Oh.”
“I hope by the time we get to Krista’s office you have a little more to say to the two of us than just ‘oh.’”
“Oh, no?”
“That’s more like it.”
Entering the college counseling center is like entering the television set of This Could Be Your Life. Pennants of dozens of colleges line the walls. A reader board announces the dates of all upcoming on-campus college visits. A beautiful bleached oak conference table is stacked with college viewbooks and laptops line the conference room walls, a quiet place for kids to take practice SAT tests or work on their applications. Any future seems possible in this center. How I wish I could go back in time and start over knowing what I know now.
Etta is biting her cuticles, the true sign that her nerves are rustling and that she’s related to me. My heart softens a bit. Yes, I wish I could go back and do things differently, but then I wouldn’t have Etta and I wouldn’t have had the chance to share the majority of my life with Aunt Viv. I have become a better woman given what I have learned from being a mother and a pseudo daughter. Aunt Viv has made me tough, self-reliant, willful, and able to find humor in the worst of times. Etta has made me softer, kinder, and more empathetic to others. I have matured into a pretty good combination of Aunt Viv and Etta, if I say so myself. Maybe I don’t really want another life. I think what I really want is to get to choose this life over others, not just have this life chosen for me based on a series of thoughtless events.
I knock three times. “Hi, Krista, we’re here.”
“Hi, Josie. Etta, nice to see your mother brought you here in one piece.” Krista smiles at me. Etta laughs uncomfortably. Krista and I both know it will only take one meeting declaring our disappointment that Etta has not risen to her true potential to get her back on the right path. I also know Krista is going to take the lead playing good cop and once more I’ll be left to reprise my role as bad cop.
“So, Etta,” Krista starts in from behind her desk, “I have known you your whole life at Fairchild. The good of that is I know all your talents and your exquisite personality intimately and I can share that with colleges on your behalf. The bad of knowing you so well is that I know what you sent me for your college essays is, well, garbage. And I’m not just talking about your writing ability. The topics and stories you have chosen to focus on, they make you sound like every other college-going kid in America and you, Etta Bordelon, are not every other kid. You have incredible grit, unmatched by any other student in your graduating class. You have used that grit to become an upstanding scholar, Fairchild community member, and exceptional dancer at the San Francisco Ballet School. With all that, why would you choose to write about your hamster dying when you were nine?”
Shocked, I burst out laughing. The laughter continues, a strong cover-up for the angry cop about to go ballistic. Wow, when Etta blows it she blows it big-time. As president of the mile-high club I can say this is one of the less positive Bordelon traits for sure. “Seriously, you wrote about Husky our fat hamster?!?! Why in the world would you do that?”
Etta turns her whole body to face me, completely ignoring the fact that Krista is in the room, or the fact that this is Krista’s office for that matter. Her voice is calm, and her body is poised.
“If you won’t take me wanting to apply to Juilliard seriously then I’m not going to take applying to the schools you want me to go to seriously. Why would you spend all that money for the past ten years of my life on ballet if you never wanted me to be any good at it? Besides, Juilliard is a great college and you won’t even consider it for a second.”
Etta’s adult composure is rattling me. I need to stay on top of my parental game despite the fury collecting inside.
“Of course I wanted you to be good at ballet. I want you to work hard and be good at whatever you try. That’s why we came back to San Francisco, so you could get a first-rate education and have all options open to you. I know Juilliard is a good school. Great, in fact. Great for kids who choose to put their art first and their academic studies second. That is not what is going to happen here, Etta. You will be putting your academics first. And let go of the idea that I don’t care about your dancing—that’s not true. All the universities I have on our college list have dance classes available to non-dance majors and have many dance troupes for extracurricular activity. Juilliard, on the other hand, offers only three majors—drama, music, and dance. A school like Dartmouth or UC Berkeley has, I don’t know, hundreds if not thousands of majors for you to explore and choose from. Back me up here, Krista, why should Etta limit herself to just dance? Baby, trust me on this one, you want access to as many choices as possible, to figure out what you really want.”