And Then There Were None (At Home, That Is)

Some rambling thoughts upon taking my son to college this weekend...

I’m not new to this game of taking a child to college. I’ve done it one time before, which makes me a veteran college mom. Two years ago, the first time I took one off to college for the first time, I felt like there was so much I needed to tell my older son...stuff that he needed to know right that second. For whatever reason, the most important thing the day before we left to take him was that I hadn’t taught him how to iron, so I made him learn how to iron.  As far as I know, he hasn’t ironed since.  

Two years later, we’re here. Though, this time, it seems I saved all the advice giving for the last day. A day where we were packing, joking, eating obscene amounts of unhealthy food together (looking at you Mini Vermonster), was also the day that I decided it was time to impart all my words of wisdom to him.  And impart, I did.  In conversation, in jokes, in a heartfelt email.  But really, there’s not much I felt the need to tell him (or his brother, for that matter), that hasn’t been said in the past.  Yes, there are laundry tips, housekeeping tips and organization tips, but the lessons they need and should be leaving with should really be the lessons they were getting from us all along, right?  Be kind.  Be true to yourself. Take care of yourself. Work hard. Do your best. Call home. Did I miss anything?  

And now, it’s happened.  This moment that has been looming over us for the better part of the past year, happened today.  I’ve looked at it with excitement, I’ve looked at it with gloom, I’ve looked at it with trepidation and I’ve looked at it with an insane amount of pride that my son knew exactly what he wanted and went for it with the same gusto he’s had for pretty much every other thing he’s wanted to accomplish so far in his 18 years. 

I have read dozens of articles, blog posts, memes and pieces of advice about leaving our kids at college.  I know no less than 120 other moms in the same place we are this weekend...I’ve scrolled through their drop off pictures (and posted our own) on my Facebook feed and realize now that, while my house has a sense of emptiness that it’s never had before, this is the moment we’ve been building toward since, well, since having kids.  They aren’t meant to stay with us forever….I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t even like each other very much if we kept that same mother/child relationship well into their adulthood, because they’re suppose to go off, with baby steps, spread their wings and develop their own lives with the hope that the lessons we’ve passed on stick.  The good ones, at least.  In good ways.

Even President James Garfield had these same sorts of rambling thoughts in 1879 when he wrote of taking his own children off to school, “It will require no little self-sacrifice on my part to see and aid them in the work of separating these precious home ties. I begin to see how it is that parents come to regard children as their own decorations, given for their own selfish comfort. The severe lesson must be learned that they are given to go alone--to leave the parent nest and fly to trees of their own seeking."

I remember both of my kids’ first days of kindergarten as if they were just yesterday.  I cried big as the bus pulled away with my oldest, his brother in my arms crying along with me that he wanted to go too.  I was teary when I dropped off my youngest a few years later, but he was ready. He was ready then and he’s ready now.  I’ve worked at his school either as a volunteer or as a teacher since he was in preschool.  This year will be the first time in his school life that we aren’t just down the hall from each other.  That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?  But he's ready. His look of confidence upon arriving on campus yesterday was reassuring and I know he's going to be fine.

So, yes...tonight, I am a little bit sad.  And yes, I miss him already. And ice cream did help while we were driving home (as it usually does).  But I am not permanently sad.  This is a temporary loss.  A loss of a past, perhaps a loss of the childhood that was.  Knowing that others are dealing with real loss right now probably helps put this transition of sending our youngest off to college into a different kind of perspective.  And what I’m starting to realize is that sending a young  adult to college is really not the end of being a parent, it’s the beginning of being a different kind of parent.  

And tonight, we are no longer "empty nesters in training," we are full on "empty nesters."