She was the triplets’ mother, which was exactly what she’d sought to be. And lest she forget, it had taken an act of will—many acts of will—to make that happen. Making that happen had been the signature achievement of her existence.
And here it was, nearly at an end, and also—finally, even she was forced to admit—some form of a failure.
Not because the three of them looked incapable of negotiating the world of adulthood, or were not good people. Not because they were hooked on drugs, had criminal records, or ran away from home to spend wanton nights at raves or in Tompkins Square Park. None of the three had so much as lifted a ChapStick from a corner bodega or failed a class, let alone gotten a girl pregnant （or gotten pregnant） or been caught selling a bag of weed （real or faux） like her own brother. Not one of them had even cursed at our parents or failed to present himself or herself for the rare command appearances in the combined Hirsch/Oppenheimer calendar: Hermann and Selda’s anniversary, Johanna’s mother’s birthday dinners （increasingly sad as she retreated into dementia）， the Seder hosted by Debbie and Bruce. Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally were normal young people in just about every obvious way, well educated （despite what even she recognized as Walden’s worst tendencies）， globally aware, and not even particularly acquisitive, despite our astonishing privilege. Individually they were a credit to themselves, if not to her.
But as a family, they were still a failure.
And when they left, which was now on the not-so-distant horizon, they would not come back. They would keep on going.
She remembered something she had once read in the memoir of a famous writer. After he left home for college, he never went back to visit, or even called his mother and father. Why not? He hadn’t known he was supposed to.
It was her greatest fear, and the anticipation of it her greatest pain. Still, it didn’t occur to her that there was anything to be done about it, anything she hadn’t already tried, and not even the one thing that would seem so obvious to all of us, in retrospect, and which might have been done at any point while we were growing up, not left to its absurdly latter-day implementation. That, not one of us would understand.
One spring morning in the triplets’ eleventh-grade year, our mother went to a parent meeting in the gym on the top floor of the school, where at least a hundred chairs had been set up. This was their introduction to Walden’s college counselors: two young people hired from their first admissions jobs at Harvard and Princeton and the department head, a woman named Fran. Fran had been at Walden so long she actually remembered a time before the arrival of the first helicopter parent, a time of “well-rounded” students each submitting five or six handwritten applications （one to a safety school that truly was a safety school）。 She was a tall and lean woman with a long gray braid, artfully arranged over her shoulder. She stood before the crowd with a beatific smile.
That didn’t last long.
The purpose of this meeting, Fran explained, was to make a preemptive plea for calm before the parents hurled themselves, lemming-like, over the cliff of madness.
Maybe it was supposed to get a laugh. It didn’t. Even at Walden, that lemming had bolted.
Colleges loved Walden students, said Fran to her palpably tense audience. They always had! Walden students were independent thinkers, intellectually robust and thrillingly creative. Walden students had been admitted to colleges and universities all over the world, some of them with famous names, others less well-known but perfectly suited to that individual applicant. Every Walden student would receive the focused guidance of one of the three college counselors, and individual meetings would commence at precisely the right time, which was now, in the spring of the students’ junior year, when a holistic approach to finding the right fit for each young person would be applied. Every Walden student would receive personal attention and custom support. Every Walden student would be treated as the unique and capable young adult he or she was. And when it was all over, every Walden student would be admitted to a college that would eminently fulfill his or her needs. That was a promise she felt very comfortable making!