Can my mom find out that I flunked out of college by contacting the school?

Parents Forum
1

I went to a state school that my highly controlling mother basically forced me to attend. I hated every minute of it because she also wouldn’t allow me to choose my major. Even though I could technically run away I didn’t because she told me she would commit suicide if I didn’t listen to everything she said and I believed her at the time. Now I’m very depressed and have finally flunked out.

MY QUESTION: Can she go to any of the school officials (admissions, financial aid, etc) and ask them if I got dismissed from the school? I heard there are FERPA regulations but thought that only prevented her from checking my grades. Do the FERPA, or any other regulations prevent her from checking if I’ve failed out completely? She is threatening to go ask them since I won’t talk to her. I can’t talk to her because of her own mental conditions as well as other personal issues that occurred throughout my life with her if anybody is curious.

I don’t know if this information is valid to whether the school can tell her but some of the tuition for my classes were funded through direct payments and some were through various loans. I am also NOT a minor. I am a 20 year old female.

2

the school can’t tell her anything at all.

3

Unfortunately I just read at my state school that they can disclose “directory information” unless I state otherwise and I can’t stop it until Monday so she’d be there before me. My school classifies "directory information as:

addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail address, photo, full time or part time status, graduate or undergraduate status, date and place of birth; height and weight of members of athletic teams; major, participation in athletics and student activities; dates of attendance; degrees, awards and honors; and the most recent institution attended.

I don’t know if “full-time or part-time status, graduator undergraduate status, and dates of attendance” blows my cover… ><"

4

Do you have a therapist or counselor you could talk to?

Would it be better to learn some coping strategies on how to deal with your mom, rather than avoiding/hiding from the problem?

You are an adult and you are entitled to your privacy. Your mom has rights as an adult, too, and that could include not supporting you. It doesn’t mean that she can ‘force’ you to do anything but you can’t force her to do anything either (and that includes taking care of her own mental health).

I’m not saying you should tell her right now. I’m suggesting that you get some professional help on learning how to cope with her in the healthiest way possible.

Good luck.

5

I encourage you to speak with a therapist immediately. Do you have insurance to help you pay for a therapy session? Obviously, you must know that your relationship with your mother is not normal. You can not live your entire life based on her threats to commit suicide.

So, you need a next step. The truth will probably find its way to your mom, and you need some professional help to decide how you will handle a conversation with your parent who is not functioning within normal parameters. Are you ready to admit your failure, call your mom’s bluff, and move on to whatever it is you feel is the best course of action for you?

Do you have any relatives, friends, church or school adults that you can trust to guide you? Do you have another place to stay if your mom kicks you out? Use your time to think of what your alternatives are, instead of just focusing on keeping your mom in the dark.

In a normal world, it would not be a child’s job to keep their parent from committing suicide. You are bearing a larger burden than you should have to deal with. Please ask for help from others. This is not normal, you are not responsible for your mom’s unhealthy thoughts and actions. She needs more help than you can give.

The alternative for you is to live your entire life dictated by a person who is mentally unbalanced. Once this crisis unravels, she will create more chaos. It won’t stop unless you choose to act independently of her. I know that breaking away from this dominating figure in your life won’t be easy. That’s why you need to find help from outside your family. Professional counselors are trained to help young people who are caught up in these kind of situations.

Take a moment to assess your situation. Do you have any money saved up? Do you have a safe place to live, or can you travel to another place where you could live with your father or another relative or friend? Do you have a job, or can you get a job to get money to live?

School may take more effort than you are able to give right now. You don’t know what it will take to resolve the situation of failing out at your last school. You may not be eligible to attend another school if you still owe money. Don’t race into another academic situation without resolving the underlying issues. If your mom is your source of income to pay for college, you can’t depend on her right now.

Your priority is your physical and emotional safety. Your mom is going to explode when she finds out the truth, which at this point she probably highly suspects the truth anyway. Get yourself as far away from her as you safely can. She might try to harm you as well as herself if she gets into a rage. Do you have any younger siblings that live with her? You need to try to alert someone that can protect them also.

Even if your mom is not going to go through with her threat of suicide, her manipulation of you is still not a healthy way to live. You need to find different options that will get you away from her immediately.

6

^^THAT!!! (thank you @powercropper).

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^ Agree with the good advice above. BTW, without being in school your loan payments may start to become due and your mom might find out that way.

8

First…this issue is far larger than one that can be solved on any Internet message board. You need to see someone to help you manage your situation…get that help.

It does no good to keep this a secret from your family. None. What were you planning to do next term? Pretend you were in college?

Did your mom take a Parent Plus loan? If so, HER payments will also become due if you leave college.

If you really flunked all of your courses, you will be ineligible to receive aid to attend next year…including all federally funded loans.

9

Agree that you need to get professional help – if you are still on campus, see if there is someone at the health service you can see. But honestly, you are going to have to tell her very soon. You can’t just hide it, she will find out.

10

Agree with advice above. Get help.
You will eventually have to confront your mother with the truth.
The school won’t tell her but she will figure it out when bill for next semester doesn’t arrive etc.

11

Secure a place to stay where your mom can’t find you.
Then find a therapist.

12

Completely agree that the OP needs to find a therapist.

However, I want to correct some misinformation in this thread about FERPA. If a student is a dependent for income tax purposes, the school may disclose any education records to the student’s parents without the student’s consent.

see question 6 at http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/faq.html

13

You’re getting great advice for dealing with a really awful situation. A good therapist will be incredibly helpful for figuring out how to deal with all of this.

Good luck.

14

Great advice here, summed up wonderfully in @powercropper s post. Read through it carefully several times.

Do you have some place you can stay for the weekend?

I want you to hear clearly that there is help for you. You don’t have to be going through this. It will take the strength to reach out for the help, and to follow through. But you can do that.

15

Hello everyone,

I really do appreciate all the responses that I have gotten up to this point. You are all very nice, and the responses were all very helpful - particularly powercroppers. I’m sorry I haven’t developed a comprehensive response for any of you yet but I saw all the responses very soon after they were posted and am taking you all very seriously.

I just need a little bit more time to get my thoughts together because I would like to talk about my issue more but it’s just very overwhelming to get my thoughts into a form that can be understood because a lot of what you have written thus far is not new to me, yet I have not been able to come to terms with it for a few years now because I have a lot of internalized/repressed content in my mind about it. I am having trouble getting the memories back to my conscious mind enough to interact with it and writing about it requires me to do that. Regardless I hope I can stay in touch with some people on here about the issue a bit. I’ll write within the next few days. Maybe in like 12 hours from now? I need to sleep soon. Hope everybody understands.

My mother is really complicated personality, her claim of committing suicide way back is not all there is to the story. I think a big part of it may be because she is from Asia. I am a half Asian American. My dad is also an immigrant - but from Eastern Europe. I have always felt amidst an identity crisis within but nowadays I’m really starting to feel torn apart. I have a sister as well but she has disabilities and this has always made my mother cling to me even harder. On top of it my father literally ran away a few months ago and says he isn’t coming back. He basically forced a divorce and never told anybody why. He isn’t supporting us anymore either.

Just for the record it doesn’t look like she’s gonna find out I failed out but I’m now wondering if I even care whether she does because yes she suspects so and hasn’t committed suicide or anything and I’m just so confused…… I hate everything I am and ever was.

16

You are dealing with a lot of complicated emotional issues here - your parents divorce, your father’s abandonment, sister’s disability your academic problem, and your relationship with mom. It’s a lot to handle for someone of your age. Go see a therapist if possible. Is it too late to talk to your advisor about your academic issues? Maybe they would put you on probation due to your family issues (divorce and such) and allow you to switch your major. I would also like to suggest for you to keep a certain distance from your mom for a while. You need some space to sort things out.
Best of luck.

17

In the midst of your crisis, you still managed to write a mature response. We are here to “listen” when you are ready to “talk”. Or not. You don’t owe us an entire explanation. And, we are not trained therapists. Most of us are parents of college kids who got hooked on CC and just never left.

But, if it helps you to write it out to strangers, we will be here. This is the kind of thing that you would unpack over time with a real therapist, and that person’s knowledge and training would give you much better advice on your situation.

Life has dealt you a miserable situation. There is always hope, but it can be hidden under the pile of misery and despair.

Be thinking about the adults you interact with in your life, and decide if any of them can be trusted with your situation. A relative, a teacher from high school, a neighbor, someone from church (if you attend).

Therapists all have unique personalities, and will approach you and your situation differently. I wanted to make you aware that you are not bound to stick with the first therapist you go to. It is important to find a good fit. That may mean having a conversation on the phone with a therapist to gauge them before you meet. Or going to one session and get the whole experience of how they operate.

An adult would probably gather recommendations from others, but you will most likely have to rely on what you can read about them on the internet. You will have to decide if you want someone who is the same ethnicity as you, if you want someone who has lived the life and felt the pressures you have felt growing up. Many therapists will specialize in certain areas of therapy, so you do want to know something about the person you make an appointment with.

Therapy without insurance is very expensive. Do you have access to insurance? If so, you want to find your “in network” options for therapy. Those people will charge you a co-pay at each visit, and your insurance will kick in and pay them the rest. If you choose someone who is “out of network” or if you don’t have insurance at all, then you will be expected to pay a large fee at each visit. (We recently paid $140/visit for a therapist out of network.)

Could others chime in with less expensive ways for OP to get access to a therapist if there is no insurance? Are there organizations that OP could contact to get low cost therapy?

18

@powercropper There would be the typical governmental agencies but also many times religious organisations. Catholic Charities an off shoot of my local diocese runs therapy sessions on a sliding scale ranging from low cost to free. Locally, clients need not be Catholic to avail themselves of the services nor is therapy religious based.

19

Everyone has access to insurance these days. If the school insurance goes away (and generally it stays active for a few months after you leave) then Medicaid is a possibility. Go to a hospital financial counseling office and they will sign you up for health insurance.

The thing that’s hard is that you have a relationship with your mom, and you grew up in that relationship. It affects you in ways you cannot yet be aware of, and you yourself become part of the dance. For instance, you react to a suicide threat in certain ways, and then she reacts and so on. Detachment is different from separation, and takes years to achieve. A really good therapist with whom you can feel comfortable will really help.

If it is any help, and I doubt it is other than to let you know you are not alone, I know two young men in their early twenties dealing with mothers with this kind of scenario. One is living with his mom because he worries about her and feels guilty, and is thereby sabotaging everything. The other is living in an apartment in the same city as his mom, takes calls all day, but called 911 the last time she threatened suicide, which causes a significantly positive effect ultimately in their relationship and his life. There is no right path but getting help will be your first step, and I hope you can do it. It doesn’t mean you are the problem, it just means, that for yourself, you have to be part of the solution.

20

A therapist will help you come to terms with your situation. That is part of their job…and a very good reason to see someone ASAP.