<p>POIH – I bet you’re an engineer, aren’t you? </p>
<p>In a marriage, nobody is ‘in command’. It’s a team. A wife isn’t reporting up the chain when she talks to her husband, though she may choose to consult him on areas of his expertise. He doesn’t give orders…or vice versa…not in a good marriage. </p>
<p>You are leaping to many conclusions, chief among them is this idea that OP ‘hid’ the ED process from her husband. For all we know, she tried on numerous occasions to talk to him about it and he blew her off with an ‘I’m too busy to think about it’. See? I can jump to conclusions too. </p>
<p>He screwed up by not taking a more active interest in his kid’s future until it was too late for him to do anything but complain. You can ‘what if’ and posit gender roles til the heavens fall but it still comes down to: he screwed up when he said what he said. Easy to come in after the fact and criticize but don’t expect it to be accepted in a cheerful way by any woman of spirit.</p>
<p>POIH, why do you assume OP “hid” the ED issues from her H? Maybe he wasn’t paying attention. The son didn’t want to apply EDII. At our house, if the kid says no to that strategy, the case is closed (and that did happen with one of our kids; the school was one of his top two choices. I will admit to holding my breath and hoping applying RD didn’t backfire.).</p>
<p>Just because sh** happens doesn’t mean that someone is to blame. Just because a couple may take on different tasks doesn’t absolve the other from making him/herself informed. I do all the bills, but I can tell you that DH knows where we spend every penny. </p>
<p>BTW, an 8% acceptance rate (Harvard, HS class of 2008) is not a “probability” of acceptance…it’s a remote possibility. </p>
<p>The <em>only</em> other thing I could have done as a parent to improve S1’s chances would have been to tie him to a chair to complete stupid art projects involving downloading copyrighted material for Honors English. Not happening. But then again, his academic life was not focused on the goal of getting into a specific college, but of learning and growing. He certainly did that.</p>
<p>xposted with BD – you go, girl! Your S has quite the role model in you!</p>
<p>With all of these posts . . . I can only pray that OP will take it easy on her DH, especially during the cleanup after a cocktail party! Just sayin’,</p>
<p>I said if the parent have decided to divide the tasks then it’s responsibility of the parent in charge of the task to keep the other parent in the loop. Hiding information is equivalent to not respecting the “mutual respect”. It’s a two way street both parent need to be respectful of each other.</p>
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<p>I do understand 21st century American women but I don’t understand “Alexandra Wallace (UCLA)” type of women (American or not) and I hope you are not referring to those.</p>
<p>I think you won’t find a more liberal area than California Bay area in the world.</p>
<p>Does that mean everyone who got in instead of DS actually had created fabulous resume without any meaningful contents?</p>
<p>I never questioned your DS success. I know if he has been raised well he will be successful but that is not the point of the thread.</p>
<p>The point was just whether you had made any mistake on part of your responsibility being the leading parent during the college admission process. You think your DH is obnoxious because he is blaming you for something which you don’t think is your fault.</p>
<p>My contention is that since you didn’t involve him in the process by hiding from him the fact that said school had two ED process, hence you have made yourself prone to blame.</p>
<p>If you had any respect for DH you would have involved him in the process. Since it’s clear from your post that you consider him a lost case anyway then I think the point of this thread is futile.</p>
<p>I don’t think OP and OP’s DH has any “mutual respect” for each other, so there is no point arguing about this. My points are valid only for those parent who have mutual respect for each other and don’t consider their spouses as dead beat.</p>
<p>A marriage is a team work similar to a professionally run companies where there are multiple departments with different heads. No department is more or less important and in order for the success of marriage everyone has to put in effort and be respectful of everyone involved.</p>
<p>I don’t think OP has any respect for OP’s DH and so we can safely assume that the vice versa is also not valid. </p>
<p>which is where H messed up. In any business organization the emphasis is on the solution going forward, not on what happened in the past. </p>
<p>But, and this is where a marriage differs, the appropriate response is “Oh man, I’m sure you are disappointed. How is Breathdeeplyson doing? Is there anything we can do about this? Or do we just wait?”</p>
<p>I think this is the point of contention. I’m of the view it is the responsibility of the parent who is handling the task to involve the other parent in the process.</p>
<p>But you seems to put the onus on the absent parent to know what’s going on. </p>
<p>I don’t know where you have worked but I’ve never experienced that with 6 companies including 2 Fortune 50s. In fact if ask any politically astute person who holds all the power, department admins is the correct answer.</p>
<p>But a business can’t move forward properly if the mistakes are not uncovered. There has to be a post mortem process before going forward, so that the mistakes are not repeated.</p>
<p>The best response on OP’s DH part should have been
“How’s is OP’s DS holding up? Let us go through what happened and find out what could have been done better and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again.”</p>
<p>If OP’s DH was not intelligent or respectful enough and resorted to blaming OP, then the best OP could have done
“I do agree that it was a mistake on my part to not appraise you of the fact that the said school had ED as you might have been able to provide more information to DS which could have made more sense for him to apply ED. But it’s still not over and why not you also look into this and we might be able to find a way to help DS achieve what’s best for him.”</p>
<p>Ignoring DH is not the way to go in this scenario.</p>
<p>Your home is your HOME…it is NOT a business. If you treat your family members like subservient employees (and POIH…it sounds like you advocate for this), you have bigger issues than a kid on a waitlist at a college.</p>
<p>^^^: Certainly a home is a HOME. But providing business analogy while working on a task is not same as running home as a business.</p>
<p>Both are not synonyms. One can apply concepts from business in many aspect of the personal life. Doing that won’t make the home same a business. It is just that you can find parallels in many situations.</p>
<p>Do you make this stuff up as you go along, and then try to justify your thinking with it, POIH?? Where did you get the notion that OP or her son were hiding anything form the dad? You think they should report in like underlings to a supervisor? Maybe he should show some interest in the process! Maybe he should inquire!</p>
<p>You may live in a liberal area, but as you know you cant go from group data to individual inferences. Your area may be liberal-thinking, but your thinking seems quite provincial.</p>
<p>It is not one parent’s sole responsibility in helping out a kid. If one parent should decide to sit out on the side line than he/she doesn’t have any right in blaming the other parent when things go south. As far as the father being the breadwinner, the mother was also busy running the house. More often than not, the person who is working has more time (like lunch hour or during those long boring conference calls) to get online to research any college information (like me).</p>
<p>If the husband had said, “I am sorry that I left you to do this all by yourself. The result is not what we wanted. I would like to help out now.” I would maybe let him have an opinion, but not if he is to blame me for the result.</p>
<p>I did assume that OP hid the fact about ED to the college from OP’s DH.
If she didn’t than she would have told him so and the point of this thread would have been futile.</p>
<p>It was become evident from a later post that OP has no regard what’s so ever of OP’s DH opinion as she consider him a low life. Which strengthen the assumption that she would have not told DH about it fearing that he might try to influence DS to apply ED there by eliminating any chance to matriculate at an Ivy (which is again an assumption on my part based on the few post by OP).</p>