Things I’ve Learned in Sending My Daughter off to College, Part 1

1) When you set out to write a blog about sending your child off to college, you shouldn’t invite your child to read said blog.  In sensitive children, learning online about one’s mother’s anxieties tend to replicate those anxieties.  So much so that said mother either has to start lying, fast, or take a long vacation from blogging.  I chose the latter.

2) There is nothing more agonizing than an orchestrated farewell.  Because parents these days are highly invested in their children, many find it almost unbearable to bid them goodbye at the college gate.  University administrators have found parents wandering around campus, dazed and teary-eyed, days after Orientation.  One mother was living in her daughter’s dorm-room closet for more than a week before she was discovered by a sharp-eyed resident assistant.  So a growing number of schools, RISD included, have instituted the group farewell, wherein parents and students gather together and, in RISD’s case at least, an upperclassman with a bullhorn counts down to the Final Farewell.  (“Ten, nine, eight — OK, parents, give your students a big hug now — seven, six, five — Come on, I want to see those hugs — four, three, two, one — OK, parents, follow the young man with the staff, goodbyes are over now, follow that good-looking young man to the chapel to meet the president, that’s right, that’s right . . . “)

3) Never give your child your entire pack of tissues during the orchestrated farewell.  This will leave you with one sad, soggy kleenex that you will punish with repeated nose-blowings until you don’t know whether you’re crying because you’ve just been forced to leave your beloved child with people insensitive enough to institute orchestrated farewells or because you’re sitting in a chapel with other weeping parents, essentially wiping your nose with your own fingers.

4) Things change.  Yes, you will cry on the drive home all the way to the Merritt Parkway and, yes, you will sob when you first spot your child’s empty bedroom.  And yes, you will grieve for the loss of your child, her childhood, your role as Mother and Protector, and the Only Life You’ve Known for the Past 18 Years.  But in a week’s time, you’ll be crying because your daughter is texting you that she misses you and her father, she misses her high school friends, and she feels so lame because everyone in college has made friends except for her.  And then, a month later, when she tells you she’s happy and has friends and is right where she’s supposed to be, you won’t cry at all.  Until she comes home for Christmas break and then you have to let her go all over again, in, of all places, the Newark Amtrak station.  This time, though, you’ve got an entire box of tissues with you.  Proving that the learning process does, indeed, continue over a lifetime.  And then, when you’ve finally adjusted to your child’s absence again, she will call to say she hasn’t adjusted to Winter Session, and she’s feeling lonely, and having problems with her roommates, and you’re crying again, dammit, which is really wreaking havoc with your sinuses, not to mention those blasted undereye bags that seem to have increased exponentially in bagginess since September.  And then you gently remind yourself the one thing you’ve learned over the past five months: Things change.

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