Perfectly idiotic, but she’s a mom. It’s her job to be unrealistically positive.
Your mother told you that you should not accept a full ride to Northwestern in Chemistry because you would miss the Andy Hardy wonderfulness of senior year of high school. That blows the job description to hell, but your parents had no expectations at all for you because you were a girl. She fucked up her job.
Yeah, she’s a bitch. We knew that. And those beliefs were growing antique, even as they foisted them on you.
Both assumptions were unrealistic, but you choose to make fun of MY mother?
One of Dale Carnegie’s precepts is, “Arouse in the other person an eager want.” Tell him he is better than he actually is. Make him want to prove that prediction accurate. Yes, I’m currently unemployed, but I have consistently worked, including education and training, to be the best in my field, and generally succeeded. I wasn’t there to take care of the babies? TFB. I was in school and you were at home. And, after 35 years in the workforce and years since the kids left school, you are answering phones for a big-box retailer.
You are my wife and my love, but do NOT insult my work ethic or self-absorption because you had to buy gas this morning because neither of us noticed the gas gauge.
How would accepting a full scholarship to Northwestern have made your wife miss her senior year of high school? Presumably you don’t get accepted to college unless you’re also planning to graduate high school.
My best friend’s daughter started her first year of college last year, passing up her senior year of high school. She had the grades and credits; she would have just been taking elective bullshit if she had stayed her senior year.
At first her father was dead-set against it. Discussing it one night, he came out with the old standby - “I don’t want you to miss the experience of your senior year in high school”. Her reply? “Why do you think I want out? I hate high school. I hate the drama and the bullshit. I don’t want to waste another year - a useless year - doing something I hate.”
Her dad gave in. She had a 4.0 her freshman year in college. Smart kid.
How is that even possible, though? I know that in New York State, for example, you have to have had four years of English and history, so if you’ve only had three years of high school, wouldn’t you be missing classes that you need to have a high school diploma?
Lots of people take high school level courses starting in 8th grade, if your district allows it. You can also take credits during the summer if you’re intent on graduating early.
And it helps to be really, fucking, smart, but it hurts to be a minor, dependent on your parents’ ideas based on bad movies.
This left us at the strangest starting line: her a genius, and me pretending to be one. Except her parents expected nothing from her and mine expecting everything from me.
“No, you can’t REALLY speak Spanish,” said her mother, of someone who has done it, daily, on the job, for 30 years.
Re. the scholarship, keep in mind that the rules change, by location but also with time. Those kids who got Bachelors’ in their teens didn’t follow the usual path, and in the 1990s in the US I had lab coworkers who were HS seniors (they were taking both HS courses and university courses, and doing lab work with graduate students; some of them got publications during their first or second year of college - but the articles had been sent while they were still HS Seniors). If NWU wanted droplady that bad and she was missing HS credits, they could have arranged things with a local HS to have her wrap up the missing requirements.
There is a shocking amount of contempt in this, even if it’s joking. I hope that you recognize that your marriage is in a very bad place, and if you want to grow old with this woman you both need to start tending to your marriage very, very seriously.
I’m not at all saying that means you were wrong or are the bad guy here or anything like that. I’m saying your feelings are shifting in a direction that has no good end, and if you don’t take active steps to redirect them, it’ll be the end of anything positive in your marriage.
And I hope your wife one day finds a place where she can show her intelligence. If I’d spent my adulthood mothering and then later answering calls–while watching my SO have the kind of career I could see myself having if things had gone down a different course–I might be a bit bitter too.
Is this pit in response to a one-time petty snark-fest or an ongoing thing?
dropzone, in this and every recent posting you sound drunk and incoherent. I find it a struggle to discern your point, and I don’t remember that about your postings in the past. Today, you also sound very angry.
I hope you are feeling better soon, and are able to find work.
Separately, I think you should stop demeaning your wife for working retail. Sounds like she’s paying the bills with that shitty nothing job you like to insult.
Oh, and I also don’t get how delaying college for a year (adhering to the path that 99% that most college bound kids follow) would mean foregoing all scholarship offers. If she’s that smart, she’d have had a myriad of offers from a slew of great schools, especially in fields that are dominated by men. Schools love to post how diverse and inclusive they are.
BTW, as a parent of a 17 year old girl, I can see perfectly valid reasons for not wanting her to traipse off to college early, even if she could handle it academically. Do not underestimate the importance of having a social life with peers at that age, Plus, there is a huge amount of maturing done between the ages of 16 and 18.
Also, even if she was armed with a chemistry degree from Northwestern does NOT mean that she’d land a great job. The people who land the best jobs are those capable of promoting and marketing themselves. Others, even brilliant others, get left behind.
I could have started college after my Junior year. At that time the colleges I was looking at required a HS Diploma OR a GED OR a certain score on the ACT. I don’t remember the score except that mine was much higher than necessary.
My best friend left her Junior year of HS and between testing out and High School A/P credits she started as a Junior at Stanford while the rest of us were still HS Seniors.
I can certainly see how her life would have changed dramatically if she’d spent that year wasting time, being bored, and losing motivation. Especially if she’d done it under the auspices of a parental unit constatntly taunting “See, I told you so! You would have failed if you’d gone off to college!”
I think what your wife may be trying to say is that she deserves some credit and support from you, rather than having to listen to you pointing out her relative lack of success. She gave you children and raised them, and you don’t even argue the point that you didn’t help much. Do you really expect that she should simultaneously have out-competed you in the job market?
You are feeling like crap right now, OK. Quit taking it out on her, and start showing some frickin’ gratitude. Whatever your Mother may have accomplished, she also managed to raise a spoiled entitled brat who thinks it’s OK to flog loved ones with his discomfort.