* * *
The packing-list items James and I had stockpiled—towels, extralong sheets, shower flip-flops, hangers, winter coats and boots, a medicine kit—had been boxed up, addressed, and shipped to the wilds of upstate New York. All that remained to tend to were the few personal and precious things he’d take with him on the plane—his laptop, his lacrosse gear, his duffel bag, his guitar.
“Well,” Jeff said ceremoniously, opening the front door for all of us to exit, “I guess this is it.”
“Are you sure you’ve got everything?” I said to James, my high, strangled voice betraying my own uncertainty.
“Yep…let’s go,” James said. At over six feet, in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, he looked so tall and confident to me then, and at the same time, gangly and vulnerable, and so young.
James took one last look around the front hall of the house, patted our golden retriever, McCoy, goodbye, and stepped out the front door. The finality of his leaving felt like a kind of vortex we were all leaping into, blindly but hopefully. In mid-May a phone call from the lacrosse coach at St. Lawrence University had given him the confidence to accept the academic scholarship he’d been offered there.
“So, you want to come all the way out here and try out to play division three lacrosse for the Saints?” the coach had said. “Well, okay then.”
So instead of enrolling at Santa Clara University in Northern California with his older brother—his original plan—he’d be 2,846 miles away at St. Lawrence. To get there, he could fly from Seattle to Syracuse (changing planes at Chicago’s O’Hare), and then catch a two-hour shuttle van north, or fly to Ottawa, in Ontario, Canada, and catch a shuttle van south. Out of curiosity, James and I had Google-mapped the route: it stretched all the way across the continent of North America, unspooling from the far upper-left corner of the map to the upper right like a thick blue worm, its head nearly reaching the Canadian border. It would take forty-five hours to make it across all those rivers and plains and mountain ranges by car, without stopping.
“Maybe I’ll drive to school my sophomore year,” he’d said.
“Great idea!” I said, playing up the adventure.
“Are you kidding me? His car would never survive the trip,” said Jeff, always the realist. “That baby’s got a hundred and sixty-two thousand miles on it.”
“Maybe I’ll have saved enough for a new one by then,” James protested.
“Better start saving, bud,” Jeff said, laughing.
* * *
The Big College Drop-Off, the culmination of the separation process that all of us, as parents, have to endure, had started many years earlier for my husband and me. The New York City Montessori preschool our sons attended on the Upper West Side took a hard line on the beginning of that process, even holding a “what to expect on the first day of school” training session for clueless parents. Separating from your children will be easier in the long run, the school’s administrators suggested, if parents said goodbye to their kids outside the school. “Whatever you do, don’t enter the classroom,” we were advised in a pre-orientation. “Once you cross that line, there will be no, we repeat, no turning back!”
The Montessori method, developed more than a century ago by an Italian physician and educator named Maria Montessori, contends that given enough freedom—and an optimal environment—very young children (specifically, kids two and a half to six years old) are capable of self-directed learning. Parents, the theory goes, disturb the optimal learning environment. There was a very Montessori-like ritual at our sons’ school’s front gate, where the headmistress would greet each diaper-clad student by name (“Good morning, Sam,” Ms. DeAlwis would say, pronouncing the name of our oldest son, Sam, as Sahm, in her clipped Sri Lankan accent—and even bending down to shake his pint-sized three-year-old hand). Then Sam’s teacher, Mrs. Marikar, would smile and take Sam’s other hand, leading him from West Ninety-Eighth Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side through the school’s front gate, the two of them disappearing inside the building.
What the teachers failed to explain was that while it might be easier on three-year-olds (not to mention the school’s narrow entry-way, lined with cubbies as orderly as a ship’s) if parents didn’t cross the school’s perimeter the first day, this first “goodbye” could be heartrending—even traumatic for some of the kids and most of the parents no matter where it transpired.
Sure enough, although several of the preschoolers took Mrs. Marikar’s hand gamely, others clung to their parents as tightly as barnacles, wailing hysterically until they had to be peeled off limb by limb. Sam, independent by nature, was one of those toddlers who allowed himself to be led down the path and straight into the building. In his brown corduroys and navy-blue Patagonia jacket, he looked like a little man with a large coconut head on his way to work. The only giveaway was the diapers.
“How do you like that? Your son didn’t even look back!” a dad we’d never met said to Jeff.
That was it? I felt numb, but also relieved in a way at how seamlessly our child had separated from us. But then we saw Anne, a mom we knew, standing on the sidewalk weeping, her husband’s arm around her in a sort of helpless surrender. Her sorrow was contagious, and I realized with a sudden shock that watching our son disappear was simply the beginning. It was only the first step in what would be a long string of separations, some as ritualized as this one, and some as seemingly casual, though symbolic, as handing over the car keys for the first time.
Moms stood on the sidewalk afterward, trying to compose themselves and dabbing their eyes, while the dads smiled bravely. Then, since it was New York City, pretty much everyone rushed off to work. Jeff and I caught the No. 2 subway together. (He’d take it all the way to Chambers Street, then get off and catch a series of elevators to the sixty-second floor of the World Trade Center.) “Bye, Bug,” he said, giving me a peck on the cheek as I jumped off the No. 2 at Times Square. The shiny doors slid shut, and the train sped off down the tunnel. I walked across town to my office at Travel & Leisure magazine. A mix of emotions—excitement for Sam, a bittersweet sadness about time passing, and a visceral need to know what was going on in that Montessori room, even though it was Sam’s world now, separate from Jeff’s and mine—left me feeling ill at ease and twitchy all over.
* * *
Flying east eighteen years later to take James, not Sam, to his freshman year at college, I find myself worrying more about me than about him. I sip tomato juice and watch our plane’s path on the in-flight monitor as the three of us speed farther and farther away from home, passing over Canadian outposts with names like Moose Jaw and Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Thunder Bay. James will be one of the few students in his class from west of the Mississippi, but he’s a confident kid I tell myself—he’ll be fine.
Jeff, earbuds in place, looks utterly relaxed. I, on the other hand, have a familiar unease: it’s a prickly sort of distractedness, like a mean case of hives mixed with PMS, the specific physical sensation I’ve come to recognize precedes each major life separation from our boys.
I’m a cool Seattleite now, I tell myself. I’ve trained myself not to be a maternal embarrassment to my sons. I don’t allow myself to think about the impending Big Drop-Off. I don’t even think about the precise moment when James and I will give each other that last hug and casually say “Goodbye,” much the way his older brother stepped into his first school, when he was three. But it isn’t easy sending your kids off to college, facing the empty nest for the first, or even the second or third time. Fortunately, lots of my friends are packing their sons and daughters off too, which has given me some sense of perspective, even some small comfort.
I thought some of us parents, especially the mothers in the mix, might be celebrating—happily pushing our demanding teens out the door, looking forward to reconnecting with our spouses, and our own lives, perhaps our careers too. But mostly what I hear is wistfulness, regret: “I can’t believe our family will never be the same again!” “He’s gone.
” “Her room is so quiet!” “I miss him terribly.” “I can’t help thinking of all the things I haven’t taught them yet.” “Where did the time go?”
My beloved friend Ellen (who somehow manages to be chic and wise at the same time), having sent two kids to college and launched a new career, had emailed me a few days before our flight: “Are you sad? Don’t forget to have a good cry! You’ll feel better afterward. Remember—this is what we WANT for them!”
“I cried yesterday from eight thirty to two thirty,” my friend Janet, a former software executive, had confessed a few days earlier before taking her twins to college.
“See this?” her husband had chimed in, holding up a small notepad. “We call this the cry counter.”
“You don’t,” I’d stammered in disbelief.
“Oh, but we do,” her husband had said, smiling.
“Did you cry?” is the first thing moms ask other moms who’ve survived the Big Drop-Off.
I didn’t cry when we took our older son, Sam, to college in Northern California. And though my friend’s advice seemed sound, I wasn’t sure I wanted to cry this time either—or even could.
With Sam we’d been sad anticipating his leaving home, and how different it would be having an empty chair at the dinner table—but the actual delivery of our first son to college turned out to be a festive occasion.
On the morning of move-in day we drove onto the Santa Clara campus just outside San Jose. A long line of SUVs snaked toward the main freshman dorm, an eleven-story tower in front of which families were parked and unloading what looked to be entire households: BarcaLoungers, beanbag chairs, couches, coffee tables, rugs, shelves, mirrors, refrigerators, microwaves, blenders, electric guitars, amplifiers—and to our clueless astonishment, complete entertainment systems: Nintendo Wiis, Sony PlayStations, Xboxes.
After Sam unpacked his one duffel and made up one of two narrow beds in his dorm room, we watched, transfixed, while the parents across the hall unwrapped a flat-screen as big as a Volkswagen. Outside, upperclassmen in shorts and flip-flops directed traffic while parties swung into gear in stucco bungalows across the street. Music blared. Beer-pong tournaments bounced. Girls in bikini tops lounged.
It was maybe eleven o’clock in the morning.
By the time we left our firstborn a few hours later, he was busy bonding with his dorm mates and clearly didn’t need us moping around. Jeff and I had an hour or so to kill before heading to the airport, so we casually said goodbye, then strolled around campus until we found a small courtyard, where we lay down on the grass, faces up, like we’d been shot.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Jeff said, shielding his eyes from the sun. “It’s kind of like that first goodbye, at Montessori. It sucks when they cling too much, and it sucks when they hardly notice you’re gone.”
Dropping off our youngest child, our last one at home, however, was a different story.
The day before the Big Drop-Off the three of us woke up in Ottawa, Ontario, and drove to Bed Bath & Beyond, a place so predictable, so generic it defies any specific notion of place and time. Parents and their teens prowled the store’s wide aisles, staring and disoriented, shopping for college. Everyone looked vaguely shell-shocked. The hunt for pillows and comforters should be fun, even comforting. But I was contemplating a Great Wall of mattress pads, feeling panicky. White bundles individually wrapped in plastic towered overhead.
Twin. Twin. Twin, I read, scanning labels. I tilted my head back and squinted. Queen. Queen. King.
Where are the extralong twins?
“No use buying any of that bulky stuff in advance,” Jeff had pointed out a few weeks before, skimming the pack list St. Lawrence, had sent. “We’ll just pick it up in Canada, on our way to dropping him off in upstate New York. It’ll probably be cheaper there anyway.”
So Jeff, James, and I were on the loose in Ottawa at a Bed Bath & Beyond in search of the unwieldy: a desk lamp, a shower tote, storage bins. And those infernal extralong twin sheets, the universal bed standard for college dorms coast to coast, and something only a family of NBA players might happen to stock at home.
Where were the extralong twins?! Stacked even higher, where I couldn’t see them? An infomercial blared from a shelf-side TV. It was chirping on about bedbugs—bedbugs were evidently on the rise in college dorms. “You can protect your child by investing in an entomologist-tested, impermeable mattress protector,” an insistent stranger proclaimed.
I found a metal ladder chained to the shelves and began dragging it over to the mattress pads. It wouldn’t reach. The infomercial was driving me insane. It’s as if the bedbugs were inside my head. I glared at the screen: If I bash it in and make it stop, maybe I’ll be able to hear myself think. Instead, I found a switch and turned off the TV.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
It was James, back with a cart.
“I’m going to kill your father!” I hissed. “I knew we should have ordered a mattress pad in advance. They’re out of extralongs!”
“Let me just ask the saleslady,” James said, suddenly the grown-up.
I always figure that in dealing with the unknown, you can’t be too prepared. What if we had to leave our youngest three thousand miles from home sleeping on a bare mattress? Chances are he wouldn’t even notice—like most teenagers he never made his bed anyway—but just the thought made me feel like my head might explode.
“Here you are,” a well-coiffed saleslady said, appearing from nowhere with a mattress pad. I stared: it was an extralong twin.
“Can I help you with anything else?” she asked smoothly, reaching up to restart the TV.
What I wanted to ask her was whether BB&B happened to stock any Xanax this time of the year, but instead I said, “Nope, we’re all set!” I then waved cheerfully, and pushed the cart down the aisle.
* * *
Upstate New York, that third week in August, was not sunny California. The three of us drove our rental car south across the Canadian border toward Canton, New York. The air was humid and thick. The landscape was boggy and flat; fields of potatoes surrounded farmhouses with sagging porches and peeling clapboard. Dairy cows stood ankle-deep in the mud.
Upstate New York is old-world, as opposed to California’s shiny new one, but we were excited for James. For a West Coast kid, this would be East Coast total immersion. We pulled into Canton, a rural community dating back more than two hundred years, with a three-block Main Street; we had just enough time to tour the St. Lawrence campus and get a good night’s sleep at a local guesthouse before James moved into his dorm the next morning. Before heading to bed the three of us sat up in the room Jeff and I shared, watching old Seinfeld reruns while James downloaded the latest version of Skype onto his laptop; it would enable him to connect in real time with us (we hoped) and, more importantly to him, with friends who were simultaneously moving into freshman dorms coast to coast. The scale of it, when you considered the thousands of kids leaving for school that August and September (not to mention the staggering cost of tuition, plus room and board), began to feel more like a military deployment than a seasonal rite of passage.
“Night, James!” we called as he finally closed his laptop and traipsed down the hall to his room in the old guesthouse.
Jeff had booked the rooms at St. Lawrence’s alumni house, a two-story white-clapboard structure, built in the late 1800s that had been restored for returning alums. The university left a key for us near the front porch. You let yourself in, signed a register, and were free to make yourself at home amidst the hallways hung with prints of legendary North Country snowstorms, a 1940s-era yellow kitchen with an empty fridge, and a formal living room stacked with piles of leather-bound yearbooks.
Our room was comfortable—and extremely traditional. A garden of red cabbage roses and trailing green ivy crept up the papered walls; the bed, blanketed with a matching cabbage-rose comforter, anchored the rest of the space, which featured spindle-legged, cherry side tables and floral upholstery. It was a
lovely place. We were lucky to be there. And yet, pulling back the covers and crawling beneath those cabbage roses couldn’t have felt more alien: in addition to the fact that we were about to leave our son in a tiny, landlocked town thousands of miles from home, I felt like we’d traveled back in time 150 years.
Around two in the morning, Jeff whispered, “Are you awake?”
“Uh-huh. I don’t feel well,” I replied.
That was putting it mildly. Usually a world-class sleeper, I’d been tossing for hours in a fit of anxiety over the big day ahead.
“My skin feels like it’s crawling,” I said.
“I’ll turn on the ‘air-conditioning,’” Jeff said, getting up.
The soothing hum of the wall fan came on. Jeff got back into bed.
“You can have a cry if you want,” my husband said sweetly. Was he on the verge of a breakdown too? “Um, do you want a tissue? I’d better get a washcloth,” he said.
I curled into a ball and let out a few muffled sobs. Here it is, I guessed, the Big Cry. Jeff got up, walked to the bathroom, and returned with a soft white terry square. He pressed the washcloth into my hand. I began to cry harder and let myself think about what was really happening: we’d flown all this way to leave our son on the opposite side of the country and formally cut the umbilical cord. He might come home for a summer or two—or, god forbid, longer if he couldn’t find a job after graduating! But our roles as day-to-day parents would never be the same.
It was a long time before I could stop crying. I was transfixed with dread thinking about the dawn, and overcome with grief as I wept for the past, our lost past together as a family. I dabbed my eyes and nose with the washcloth while my husband rubbed my back.
Jeff wasn’t crying, but he couldn’t sleep either, evidently.
“It’s a big moment. We could have another if you want.”
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