<p>You will forgive your husband soon enough but we, the CC posse, will always remember that jerkified response.</p>
<p>Probably blames you for the Middle East problems…</p>
<p>Shoulda, woulda, coulda. He needed to pay attention in the beginning and it is NOT your job to summarize the details for him. He sounds way to much like my husband and I am simply ignoring his buffoonous comments about S2’s college choices. I learned with S1 that H only listened to a 1/4 of the college info that I tried to relay to him. Twenty bucks says your H would just hold it over your head if he had to pay for a top college. I can hear him now “someone around here has to work to pay for junior’s high buck education”…blah, blah, blah.</p>
<p>I wish you joined CC earlier so we could have been there for you! </p>
<p>Ask your son to narrow it down to 3 and then you two go have a mother/son road trip.</p>
<p>My kids use the penguins’ mantra from the movie Madagascar to get through any annoying conversation: just smile and wave.
In a couple of weeks, your son will have all of the decisions in, he will make a great choice, and then everyone can live happily ever after. This is a uniquely stressful time in many households, even with good news in hand.</p>
<p>I’m a student, and just wanted to remind parents that, as hands on as you may be, your child is applying to college, not you! My parents are not involved in my college process at all, so I guess if I get waitlisted somewhere, I can blame them, right? Not! Whether you spent every waking moment helping your son apply, or couldn’t name a single school he applied to, the outcome is not your fault! College apps are a crapshoot, and your hands-on approach wouldn’t change how your son’s scores/grades/EC’s appear to adcoms. Seriously, don’t worry about. A waitlist is no one’s fault, and frankly, some people don’t even get that much out of their college app process. Don’t sweat it, and remind your husband that this is your son’s process, not yours or his.</p>
<p>…I love it! …As you said, flush and move on.</p>
<p>Reading your post, I had to laugh because our ‘family dynamic’ is quite similar. We’ve both taken little jabs at each other at different points along the way. But, there’s a lot of second guessing as to how you might have done things differently.</p>
<p>I too have been the one to gather every detail and carefully present the facts to the family. Early on I grabbed the bull by the horns and steeled myself for this very long, ongoing process. One thing I am certain of- without all that I learned from cc, it would not have been possible.</p>
<p>In reality, I think DH and S have simply grown weary of all the college talk. They’re wanting to move on to March Madness and the upcoming baseball season!! </p>
<p>Things will begin to roll pretty fast over the next couple of weeks…So, hang on!</p>
<p>I’m in the midst of the same garbage myself. D was outright rejected at 3 schools, one of which really should have been a safety. I’m the breadwinner, and H, who is underemployed, has done virtually nothing other than drive her to a few schools to visit. No time on CC, no meeting with the GC, no researching where she might actually get in. So now he’s saying I shouldn’t have put down that we needed fin aid, because HE would have told them he didn’t (just to get her in at non-needs blind schools) THEN he would have asked for aid. Brilliant. And this is after me telling him 5 or 6 times that I was spending hours on the weekend filling out financial aid forms, etc. And asking him for financial info to fill out financial aid forms. He does the classic strategy mentioned by another poster – do nothing, wait, then jump in and criticize.</p>
<p>H, not D, is a Pathetic child.</p>
<p>This is a classic male/female disconnect. You have to remember that most men learn to prioritize through competitive things like sports, backyard fights, and the military, in which success is everything and excuses, explanations, and feelings have no place. There may be crying in softball and field hockey, but there is no crying in baseball.</p>
<p>OP - ask your husband if you blamed him when he didn’t get a raise or promotion, maybe he didn’t work hard enough or smart enough? (if you did, then I wouldn’t ask him)</p>
<p>I work with men all day long. This is more in the zone of control freakery/passive-aggressive manipulation with some verbal abuse on the side. Stand back, let the other person do the work, then jump in and criticize.</p>
<p>I actually think, when you get right down to it, it is SCHMALTZ fault! 
It must be.</p>
<p>There’s a reason the term “lottery school” comes up so much.</p>
<p>You were absolutely right to not do ED, especially if the kid was not ready. Hang in there!</p>
<p>Poetgrl, you sound just like Mrs. Schmaltz (a.k.a. the luckiest woman in the world).</p>
<p>And you sound just like Mr. Poetgrl, though he would be beyond horrified to be called that. So, I will do it again. Mr. Poetgrl. :p</p>
<p>Classof2015–I didn’t know you were married to my H!</p>
<p>It sounds like breathedeeply is married to my husband. I’m not going to excuse his behavior because it is obnoxious, immature, and demeaning. That said, he’s also frustrated. He wanted all of this college stuff to be easy and to be “taken care of” by you. Unfortunately, it’s not like ordering room service and it’s not that simple - things don’t always work out as planned. Easier to blame you than to deal with the “problem.” </p>
<p>This is probably not the first (nor the last) time this has manifested in one way or another. If he’s like my husband, he’ll get a grip tomorrow and you’ll all figure out a game plan going forward. You have it right, breathe deeply!</p>
<p>breathedeeply, how much of that hard-earned money will your H have left when he has to pay a divorce lawyer?</p>
<p>Classof2015, I guess your H didn’t pay attention when you told him that if your kid said on his application that he does NOT need aid, and then apply for it after being accepted, he will probably be denied without them even reading the FA paperwork. Not to mention that the deadlines to apply for FA are long past by the time your kid would get their acceptance. Unless you have a significant change in financial status after submitting the application (job loss, death of a breadwinner) they will NOT appreciate your kid LYING on his application. So your H can take his brilliant plan and put it where the son don’t shine, because it would be the opposite of helpful. (There have been numerous threads on CC on this same topic, BTW).</p>
<p>Sounds like a lot of husbands do this, even Stay-at-Home-Dads. ‘School’ is the wife’s business. I’ve been lucky in that my DH went to every parent-teacher conference, was there when the going got tough, when our D was diagnosed ADD, went on school visits, you name it. </p>
<p>And yet he <em>still</em> pulled the ‘what do you mean she didn’t get into X? What did you do wrong?’ bleep. Then he tried to tell me what we should do next. He’s not spent a minute on CC, hasn’t looked at <em>any</em> of the college websites for the schools she applied to, doesn’t know thing 1 about the admission process, etc., etc. I asked him flat out if he wanted to take over. He hushed up real quick and pulled the ‘why does this have to be a fight?’ stuff when I tried to explain the steps that were reasonable. </p>
<p>Fortunately, D made a wise decision before we got any more fractious. The squabbles were when she was out of the house so that’s not why she decided. But I’m glad she did.</p>
<p>Thankfully, I’m not experiencing this w/ my husband b/c my S did a lot of the college process work himself, although I’ve become addicted to CC, particularly the parents’ thread. I tried to get S to join CC but he refused. (I did download for him the xiggi SAT materials and that was a huge help.) And my husband is savvy enough about the college process just from reading the Choice blog on the NYTimes to know that college acceptance is a matter of luck, even at schools you presume are matches/safeties.</p>
<p>But, if my H were to say anything of the sort that you are describing, I would have certainly taken offense – this guy is coming in with too little, too late.</p>
<p>As an aside, I did just completely crack up when i read the exchange between schmaltz and poetgrl. Thanks for the best laugh of the week. i’ve got tears running down my cheek.</p>
<p>So he’s the breadwinner? Do you get to comment on how come he isn’t already CEO and raking in even bigger bucks (hey then you could have hired Hernandez for college consulting for $40k!). If not, then he should apologize.</p>