A friend of ours has a teenaged daughter. She’s bright, creative, and incredibly confident. She wanted to meet her favorite teen idol, to tell her how much of an inspiration the idol was to her, and eventually the young lady got to go on Oprah, tell her story (she lost a lot of weight), and meet this popular TV and movie actress.
Her mother and father are divorced, but the couple continued to share an apartment together to help save money – another friend also lives there, and our friend’s almost-thirty daughter from her first husband has a back room as well. The father is a remarkable man; at a time when stay-at-home-dads were still quite unusual, he did just that. He raised his girl while her mother worked. The communal arrangement that existed in the house provided a lot of love – despite the divorce, the girl’s parents remained close, and he supported his ex-wife in her business endeavors (she now works in the field of what we might simplistically call “spiritual healing”).
Because she was interested in working in theater and entertainment, the young girl wanted to go to California to college. She and her parents had a long talk about it. The solution: she and her father would move west so that she could spend her senior year there and be eligible for California residency, thereby reducing her tuition at the state-funded University of California system. She applied to a number of schools there, some private, most public. She was accepted at many places, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, no small feat. She’s going to Los Angeles.
Many aspects of this decision impress me. The young girl was willing to leave her friends behind and move to a place where she knew no one, confident either that she could make friends there, or that whatever social life that was there would be irrelevant to the main goal: doing well senior year and getting into a state school. Her father of course was willing to move across the country with her and find whatever work he could to support them. (The father’s girlfriend, evidently, was less thrilled, since she stayed behind, on the east coast.) Her mother also had to be able to let her go, and it was hard for her, proud as she was of her daughter and her accomplishments.
As someone whose family moved because of a job transfer, I remember the pain of being uprooted. I am sensitive to the concerns of my children, how well they would adjust if I should have to move from academic job to academic job. Given our financial circumstances, I hope my children are open to the possibility of taking classes wherever I am working. Would we move to another state in order to save tuition for our children? I don’t know, and of course our situation is different, since we are talking about two children, not just one, and it would be a family of four moving, not just a father and daughter. Fortunately we have some time for that, since our oldest is in kindergarten, but I hope we have the kind of foresight to come up with any unusual solutions to paying for college.