(The Meat and Potatoes of Life)
During the summer after our first child, Hayden, graduated from high school (his third in four years as a military brat), I had a sneaking suspicion that he’d been abducted by aliens. Strange creatures from a far-off land had lured him to their institution, garbing him in their apparel and claiming him as their own.
To make matters worse, our son went with them willingly.
Even worse than that, my husband and I agreed, through a complex combination of loans, financial aid, the GI Bill and possibly human sacrifice, to pay these aliens more than $64,000 a year to keep him.
No, we hadn’t fallen prey to a Vulcan mind warp. The Galactic Empire hadn’t injected us with the RNA brainwashing virus. We hadn’t been hypnotized by Sleestaks. We merely took Hayden to his college’s summer orientation weekend.
When we arrived at Hayden’s chosen university — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in upstate New York — the institution’s seemingly friendly staff separated us from our son immediately, whisking him off with the other starry-eyed newcomers to “start a memorable and important time in their academic and professional journeys.”
We knew that they were really intending to erase Hayden’s memory. Eighteen years of our hard work, down the drain.
In order to placate the dazed and confused parents, they pumped us full of coffee, plied us with shiny new pens and herded us around to “informative sessions” such as “Letting Go” and “Money Matters” in a suspiciously space ship-shaped building they referred to as “EMPAC” — The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center.
While the parents were locked in the EMPAC mother ship with the institution’s leaders, our children were off playing “icebreaker” games with legions of bubbly upperclassmen dressed in matching college T-shirts and well-worn sneakers that could use a sprinkle of odor-absorbing baking soda. The incoming freshmen were encouraged to become “independent,” i.e., to make all decisions without involving their parents other than to send them the bills.
RPI’s leaders tried to allay our fears, characterizing the terrifying experience of handing over our flesh and blood to complete strangers as a “normal rite of passage.” They told us not to be concerned, because our children would have all sorts of “advisers” to guide them. There would be Student Orientation Advisers, Resident Advisers, Academic Advisers, Graduate Assistants, Learning Assistants and Peer Tutors. But all we were thinking was, “Yeah, sure, that’s terrific, but who’s going to tell him to wear his retainer?”
They said our kids would be well-nourished with a variety of meal plans ranging from the “unlimited access” plan, otherwise known as the “Fast-track-to-morbid-obesity” plan, to the “custom” plan, commonly referred to as the “Go-broke-on-takeout-after-you-expend-your-dining-hall-allotment” plan. Rest assured, they told us, the students would never go hungry thanks to an impossibly confusing supplemental system of “flex dollars” and “student advantage dollars” which could be used to buy an endless array of well-balanced meals (most commonly pizza, chocolate milk and potato chips) all over campus, 24/7.
They paraded a series of experts from the health clinic and campus security before us, telling us that, without our adult children’s express consent, we were not permitted to know if they got arrested, or pregnant. And lastly, we were informed that we had no right to access our children’s grades, despite the fact that we had to take second mortgages on our homes to pay their tuition.
Finally, we were released into the blinding sunlight to find our newly-indoctrinated children milling about the quad with suspiciously authentic-looking smiles on their faces. Then, in order to squeeze every last dollar from our increasingly shallow pockets, we were funneled through the campus bookstore, where we bought Hayden a lanyard with a hook large enough to hold his student ID, his military ID, his room key, his bike lock key, his asthma innhaler, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a stick of lip balm, a thumb drive and — most importantly — a framed 8-by-10 photograph of me, his mother.
Six short weeks later, we surrendered our son to the alien academic institution for good, and hoped that Hayden would heed the words of one well-known extraterrestrial and always remember to “phone home.”
Read more at themeatandpotatoesoflife.com and in Lisa’s book, “The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com.” Email: meatandpotatoesoflife@gmail.com
