[Butter]

Update from Post #84:

My son has not done particularly well. He LOVES the part of college that is him living on his own and making his own decisions and such.

He does not love the class part. He is taking 13 credit hours at this point after dropping a class, and I fully expect him to fail at least 2 of the 4 full time classes he is taking. BGSU has an option to take classes as Pass/Fail which don't count against your GPA.

He has finally come clean to me about this after hemming and hawing for months about grades. He blames it on depression. "Dad, I was so depressed some days I wouldn't even get out of bed".

But when I ask him about was he attending class every other day that he was able even if he didn't feel like it, he said no.

He was not taking his medicine on a regular basis, and still isn't. I know this because he went up with a 30-day supply and has not gotten any refills since late August.

He blew through about $1000 in "meal plan" money in the first month. He got a job at Wendy's, then quit after 2 weeks, then got a job on campus in his dorm at a food place and has kept that one. He still has "meal swipes" that he is rationing out which work out to about 1.5 meals a day for the rest of the semester.

He broke his phone at one point, which his mom and I did replace. Other than that, we have held fast to not giving him any financial support really...I told him going in that we were getting him the best meal plan, and putting enough on his campus account to make copies of papers and stuff all semester, and it was up to him to portion it out. He was broke by early October.

He has told me a few stories about how there were things he'd like to do but he couldn't because he's broke, my reply has basically been sorry about your luck but you shouldn't have blown 4 months' worth of money in a single month.

When we talked about next semester's schedule, he sent it to me after meeting with his advisor. Then he sent a revised one to me without "classes that I know I wouldn't do the work in" which included one in his major. I said if you aren't going to do work in your major, then what are we doing here? He added it back in, grudgingly.

I have suggested that he should use this last month to try to get back on track. I don't know if he's doing that, I imagine I will see on the report card in mid-December.

He is doing so poorly in school, in fact, that he is almost resigned to the fact that we will ask him to come back and go to community college after winter break. My wife and I haven't decided what we will do, but personally I want him to go back for another semester to see if he can apply any life lessons at all from semester 1 to semester 2. But I am not optimistic about it.

He loves the being on his own part, but seems far from willing to take on anything that resembles "hard work" at this point to straighten things out.

So there's that. I guess we'll have another update in January. The thing I'm wondering now is what I do if he comes back home intending to go back in January, but we end up deciding he should come home.