Drop Offs and Little Things

And College, AGAIN

It’s The Fall and I just did a Drop-off; not The Drop off, as no one is a freshman this year. But a drop-off, bringing half of my kids back to the east coast for another year—my oldest to start Real Life as a new college graduate in the city of her alma mater; my next to start his sophomore year of college in what he considers the wilderness, but what other people commonly call “Vermont.”

Obviously, both of them are old enough and independent enough and could have done this alone. Those small children who used to needle me straight across the country on flights to Boston while I hoped against reality that the batteries in their portable DVD players would persist until we landed are no more, replaced by people who now fly easily without me, lightning-charged phones in hand, often delighting in the next generation of excitable toddlers in seats nearby.

When we fly together, my kids point the cute ones out to me. And I nod and only half-smile, because I’m not fooled by traveling small persons with ringlet curls, the drooly paste of chewed up Goldfish and precocious things spilling out of their mouths. Little kids are cute to entrance us, cast a spell and trick us into thinking they’d be lovely to fly beside for six hours. If I express it as if I’m a financial institution, I have 40 years of experience flying with under 10 year olds. I know better.

But now that my kids are legitimately lovely to fly beside, they don’t need me beside them, the ongoing corollary of parenthood. So yes, my young adults could’ve dropped themselves off, done this without me because they can do just about everything without me, barring, in the case of my son, placing phone calls to select customer service 800 numbers.

And I think They might say I should’ve just let them go. Each is returning to new situations, but familiar settings. They might say I should let them go spread their wings, flap out of this nest and fly. Just make like a bird, I guess, and go figure it out, presumably because birds are exceptional at this.

I know why I still have this They aura, hear this They echo—it’s because this amorphous entity was the governance of my young motherhood, back when I had the impression that They were lying in wait, a set of judgy judges, with, I imagined, severe bangs and large glasses, always lurking, watching me, taking notes, ready to issue unfair scores, not always appreciating the difficulty of my years-long floor routine. That though I might have landed a complicated dinner-bath-bedtime tumbling pass, my final score would suffer messy-kitchen and bedtime-books-read-too-fast deductions.

But in old-ish motherhood, nay experienced motherhood, They are just a hint of an old belief system. The non-gift-bearing Santa of a bygone time, who never actually saw me when I was sleeping or knew when I was awake or witnessed much else of anything I ever did, because, like Santa, They didn’t exist.

More, in experienced motherhood you’ve exited the highly visible era of motherhood, escaping the constant feedback loop of mother’s groups and playgroups and preschools and elementary schools, where while you’re still pretty unsure about what you’re doing most of the time, you’re flooded by what everyone else is doing.

Now I hardly know what my friends are doing, never mind anyone else. Everyone’s kids are all over the place. The empty nesters I know are out flying all around.

And some of my friends brought their non-freshman kids back to school this year and some didn’t, and in each case, the decision was perfect because by the time your kids are college-bound, you are a certified expert. Maybe not about all kids everywhere, but certainly about your own.

And you can parent like you should dance—like no one’s watching.

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I live a Pixar-heavy life with my youngest. Movies that most of my friends regard as sweet little long ago viewing with their sweet little long ago kids are regular fare for me. Which is why at drop offs, I think of Nemo, when he ventures into The Drop Off, gets taken and becomes the focus of a 101 minute search. The Drop Off is a real thing, the place where the protection of the Great Barrier Reef ends and the open waters begin. Where dangers wait. Where the water beyond is described as abyssal.

Obviously, a freshman drop-off, The Drop Off, holds all depth records. There are so many unknowns on both sides of that ridiculously hard goodbye, and the emotions go as deep as that unknown water feels, which is to say wayyyyyy farrrrrrr downnnnnn.

When I was saying goodbye to my oldest at her freshman drop-off, I felt like there wasn’t one hug good enough to be the very final one, and in this way, it’s a wonder she and I are not still standing on a curb outside of her freshman dorm hugging.

And then this experience counted for nothing when it was time to say goodbye to my son three years later. It wasn’t easier. The reps hadn’t made me stronger. I hadn’t exercised my emotions such that I was in rock hard saying goodbye shape, like I had a Departures Six Pack or something. In ways, it was more difficult at the second drop-off because on top of missing another highly singular person in my life, his leaving was proof of a system. My oldest could’ve been a fluke! But my son’s departure confirmed something: that this college thing was real and that kids would keep leaving.

That’s why every subsequent departure hits and stings. Why, even though it’s easier to send a kid back to a place they know and have hopefully grown to love, the repetitive sending underscores a familial shift that feels more and more permanent.

That somehow a summer of everyone home and a hallway full of full bedrooms has now become the temporary part.

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My two oldest had turned my parents’ east coast living room—the room we used for discordant piano lessons and dress-up holidays when I was growing up, the room we were not allowed to eat in—into an ill-organized storage facility. Since May, the stuff too big to bring home to California and otherwise summer-useless sat in boxes and bags amongst wingbacks and china plates. My parents claimed to not mind this accrual at all; claimed they didn’t, every time they walked by the doorway to head upstairs, see the stuffed room strewn with bedding and stray batting gloves and almost kicked bottles of shampoo as a mess, but more a reminder of two of their favorite people and exciting fall lives to come. Placeholders for people they like to hold. Grandparents!

But I am not grand; I am a parent. And I was eager to return this room to its museum-like state. So when we arrived, my daughter, son and I waded through, sorting all of this Stuff, dividing it up. My daughter is a natural-born culler, so most of what was here had already made her discerning cut in the spring. But as my son surveyed all this freshman detritus, he wanted very little of it, was ready to Marie Kondo 100% of it as 0% of it brings him joy.

In general, he wants less this year—fewer bins and hooks and t-shirts. He doesn’t want that weird cube that I’d stocked with extra toiletries and cleaning supplies and medicines and a flashlight and a tape measure last fall; the one he never opened, but is now also, somehow, broken.

He returns to me the small fake plant I bought him for his desk last year, when I was trying to pretend things in his basement dorm room could immediately feel super alive and lively and organic. He knows something now that in my need for him to feel at all settled last year, I’d ignored: it’s not really the stuff that makes it home.

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My son and I leave the next morning in a packed rental car, leaving my daughter to live with my parents for these weeks until the lease on her Boston apartment starts. I hug her goodbye and feel that hint of the abyssal swell up. I’m still squishy. Still no six pack. But I’m comforted to know I’m leaving her in the company of other people who love her best.

My son and I drive the three hours to his campus and check in to his six-man suite. This bright space with its many paned windows and leafy views make his freshman dorm feel not just a campus, but a world away.

We unpack the car while the building fire alarm sounds every 11 minutes. No one seems to know how to stop it so everyone’s just ignoring it. The maintenance crew is handing out earplugs. I don’t like this conditioning—a fire alarm becoming white noise—because what if there’s a real fire? But I don’t say this out loud.

My son and I tinker with the arrangement of his furniture, pushing his bed to the window wall which seems a nice way to wake up everyday, but I don’t like how the shelves are hung over his bed because I worry he’ll hit his head if he sits up quickly. I do say this out loud. He tells me he will be fine. And I let it go, because I recognize this as the work of experienced motherhood: to let Them go by letting a million little Its go.

My son goes to practice and I go shopping for stuff for his room. While he doesn’t live in the wilderness, he doesn’t live in a place that sells duvets or rugs within the town limits either. So I drive an hour north and go to Target where I do something incredible, unthinkable: I buy only what I need. I push my cart around and I see that extra cozy-looking pillow and that possibly comfy chair and that pack of shiny hangers but I deny it all. Because I’m haunted by visions of it all just sitting in my parents’ living room next summer. And because I remember he doesn’t need any of it to make him feel settled.

I return to campus with what I consider essentials: a standing fan, a 700 inch tv for his common room that would’ve cost thousands of dollars in 1988 when I went to college, but is now priced about the same as the very cheap rug I also buy, and a bunch of non-perishable snacks.

That night, my son assembles the standing fan, interacting with the step-by-step directions only lightly. In so doing, he uses almost all of the screws. He plugs it in and it does work. But then we realize it sort of sways, like it’s drunk and trying to keep its feet, or it’s about to faint in a hot church.

“It’s blowing itself away,” my son says. As soon as he says this, I pick up his words and tuck them in my Beloved Collection of Little Things.

In geology, there is the Zipper-rift hypothesis which accounts for lasting similarities between continents once connected and now separated by thousands of miles. It explains how two shores now on opposite ends of the ocean thanks to monumental drift might share similar flora and fauna because at one time, they were fused. They were once one.

When college departures unzipped the continent of our family, I thought about this constantly. What, having been one at one time, would my kids retain? What that we’d shared would they reflect as they drifted? What Little Things would persist despite, or even because of, the distance?

This is why when we’re together, I pore over their shores, looking at the shape of leaves, noting the kinds of birds singing. Observing Little Things.

This is why when they say something I wish I’d thought of or that just delights me, I save it like a found treasure, a lingering hint of when we were one.

And I am a fan.

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I can’t stay on the east coast for long because half of my kids are still on the west coast.

My 8th grader is back home and about to start his new school year, nervous about many things, including the noisy boys bathroom. My high school senior is also back home, embarking on the swirl of stress and fun that is this capstone year; or, let’s be honest, she’s not exactly home, but in the general vicinity of home. So I need to get home! To wait in the kitchen! In case she comes home! And wants to talk! And tell me Little Things!

And these competing needs highlight another great misconception of my younger motherhood.

I mistakenly thought the early years of four kids would be the most challenging—breastfeeding one while potty-training another while stopping another from climbing a too-tall tree while admiring the artwork of another [Difficulty: 3.1 Execution: 6.9 Deductions: 1.0 for saying the drawing was “pretty” instead of asking my daughter how making it made her feel].

Back then, I thought of myself as spread thin. I told myself I was spread thin. I said it in my head over and over, an unhelpful mantra. I pictured myself like too little cream cheese for too big of a bagel, unable to cover the entire round in any sort of satisfying way.

I thought I was in a difficult phase and that those competing needs and demands of multiple smaller kids would ease and simplify as they became bigger kids. I was partly right—everyone eats on their own now and no one needs emotional feedback on drawings anymore—but I didn’t appreciate that my divided attention would get, in some ways, more challenging. That as the kids got older, and as each of their big, full lives had overlapping big, important things happening, I’d feel more and more torn.

On a given fall weekend, I could visit that one, stay home with this one or go to a writers conference. Which big thing is the most important thing? The answer is: YES. Which is confusing. And calls for tough choices. And, you know: thank god no one’s watching.

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On an emptied-out feeling Saturday of Labor Day weekend, my youngest walks by the vacant bedrooms of his siblings and comes downstairs cheerfully as he generally does.

“Good morning, Mommy! Is it Thanksgiving yet?” This is the new line in the sand, the next time he knows our hallways will be full.

Later we Facetime his siblings for updates of the east, to hear about my daughter’s move-in and my son’s practice. A Little Thing report. My youngest looks at his brother on the small phone screen, noting the unfamiliar walls behind him.

“Are you at college AGAIN?” he asks exasperated. I’m reminded that my youngest and I are victims of the same terrible system.

Later still, as if our house doesn’t already feel underpopulated, we drive my husband to the airport.

We pass a car dealership and my son recognizes the sign looming over the highway. “Tesla! I’m going to have one someday!”

“Yup! Someday!” He won’t. Thanks to his seizure disorder and cognitive disabilities, he probably won’t even drive, but, as I’ve established, we are not disabusers of harmless aspirations. Half the crazy things most kids say they’ll do they won’t end up doing—otherwise the world would be 97% veterinarians and astronauts. My son deserves the same day-dreaming latitude afforded any other kid.

“Do you know who started that company?” My husband asks, and I always think it’s interesting what each of us considers important to impart. Here I would think my son could skip knowing about this guy and still live a great life.

“Um, no…”

“His name is Elon Musk.”

“But this makes him sound like a great person and he is not one.” I feel compelled to add because of all parts of this moment, I consider this the most teachable.

My husband is more focused on the innovation though, “Elon Musk had the idea that cars could run on electricity and he made it happen.”

“Yes,” my son says, in a yes-yes I’m well aware and I concur kind of way. And then he asks, “And was there a little girl who helped?”

“What do you mean? Who are you thinking about?”

“Like Emily Elizabeth? Or Cindy Lou Hoo?” my son offers, academically.

My husband and I try to walk back over the neural pathways that made him arrive at this question, a kind of walking I do that, if measured on a Fitbit, would show I get on average 10k steps per day.

“Oh wait—do you think that a story with a happy ending needs a little girl rooting for that happy ending?”

“YES!” He exclaims, delighted we’ve found the trail.

For days, I can’t stop thinking about this Little Thing my youngest has unearthed. I tell all his siblings, as I always do when his innate smartness charges through, refuting all the labels the world would place on him.

Emily Elizabeth is the deuteragonist in Clifford the Big Red Dog. Cindy Lou Hoo is the same in the Grinch. My son would’ve never heard of a deuteragonist—the second most important character of a narrative—and, as the Worst English Major in Modern History, neither had I until just now. But here my son was pulling a thread, cross comparing, identifying themes, like a burgeoning literary analyst.

I hear a familiar birdsong on this shore.

And I am blown away.

Jen.

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❤️ A note of love to my local community of readers and especially my long-standing bookclub family as we miss, remember, grieve and search for ongoing ways to support our friends in their loss.

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