When Your Parent Has An Undiagnosed Mental Illness
“You’re not going and that’s FINAL.”
I’d somehow known it was my mom, but had answered my dorm room phone anyway. I’d been irritated enough to try and piss her off on purpose, so I told her I was going to visit a friend at another college for the weekend and needed to end our conversation before traffic got heavy. I let my inner 13-year-old loose with an overdramatic sigh as my response.
“Well, as long as we’re paying for your college education, we have a say in what you do with your time and where you drive that car,” my mom said.
Timing really is everything; it may be one of the only truly accurate cliches. Since this was late 2000 (pre-free long distance on cell phones), I was attached to a cord and forced to listen to her lecture while standing next to my desk. I had started cleaning to quell my as-yet undiagnosed extreme ADHD and at the moment the words “we’re paying for your college education” hit my eardrum, I was looking at the financial aid letter I’d gotten earlier that day.
I’d known that I paid for half my tuition through a scholarship I earned with grades and a good SAT score and that I had received some grants because my parents weren’t wealthy. But I had never really looked at the numbers until I decided to add a second major and realized I’d need a “super senior”…
