We just dropped our son off for his freshman year at college.
Nights before flying back east to plant him in a new state, we went to dinner as a family in the city.
We got all dressed up because we were celebrating. Here he was — off to exciting new things! A big fat start to something! That’s what we were toasting: beginnings.
But I couldn’t stop feeling an ending.
He was still right here, sitting directly across from me, in this space, talking and laughing, but it felt like he was already there. And I couldn’t stop thinking about what that space would be like when he wasn’t in it.
The negative space he’d leave behind.
“Ah — look at this — the whole family,” the waiter initiated his tip-generating banter, smiling as he filled our water glasses.
“Oh, almost…” I answered, rearranging the utensil scape in front of my youngest because he would not be needing a knife. “But not the whole family — we’re missing one. Our oldest is on the east coast.”
“Oh — okay,” he answered politely. He didn’t need or want this information. I knew that. But I couldn’t not correct him. I had to say it — a learned compulsion in our divided family life. I’d been submitting this fact to some imaginary stenographer since my youngest had been born, always needing to establish that he was here — he existed! — but he just wasn’t here.
Let the record show that this is a fraction of the family, not the whole.
The waiter headed off to get our rainbow of drinks — a margarita, a glass of wine, two fun! mocktails, and a glass of milk — and when he stepped away, we realized our view: a sweep of the Bay, the belly of the Bay Bridge.
An eye-full of California, the state where my son came to be and soon no longer the state of his primary residence, headed a country-length away to continue his becoming…
This was the way I couldn’t stop myself from thinking — sweeping, melancholic, dramatic. Taking any noun and turning it into a stick or a stone to hurt me. The Bay — the same waters my son had sailed on a 6th grade field trip. The Bay Bridge — the stretch we’d sat on in traffic uncountable times, on our way to the mountains, all of the kids behind us, affixed to seats, and therefore moving in our same direction.
A fork — how many meals had I made him?
A water bottle — ah, he’d lost so many Nalgenes at practices! As if that was ever a thing I even liked about him.
I just couldn’t stop infusing every little thing with nostalgia.
Though here I’ll add an important note: I thought I had zipped through radiation — it was partial, it was short, it was a breath-holding challenge, that lung inflation my heart’s only protection — but pretty much only that. And now a week later — as others had warned me — I was an unfamiliar kind of tired. A wall-hitting kind of tired that puts tears at the ready. A kind of tired that was providing an unhelpful baseline for an already emotional goodbye.
Especially as our family strolled up and down Memory Lane in those last few days of summer, talking about the big experiences and the little funny things, telling stories to each other we all knew by heart, just to remind each other of where we’d been, what we’d done, how we’d felt when we’d been all together.
Every era. This was our tour.
And sure, I liked all of these songs. I sang them in my head all the time! But was anyone else noticing that all of this telling aloud was itself just a little…upsetting? A certain implied past-ness? A retrospective feel, like something important that we couldn’t get back was finishing?
After dinner, we posed in front of the restaurant for a picture that I’ll someday find and think oh, everyone was so young.
Driving home, we passed a restaurant on the Embarcadero that we’d gone to before a Cirque du Soleil show when the kids were much younger.
The outing had been a stab at Family Cultural Night — we’d left our youngest at home with a sitter to be out in a twinkly city, to exercise some table manners, to be dressed up and to put some new stuff in front of little eyeballs. That our kids were ages that would mean their enjoyment would inversely correlate to our night’s efforts — that was beside the point! Sure, a movie night at home would’ve been easier, cheaper and far preferred by all, but this — this was good for them.
The restaurant was — due to this writer’s poor planning — too far from the show given the small sets of legs in our mix.
So pressed for time after paying the check, we got into (onto?) a pedicab. A nice guy doing this to make money for an engagement ring with calves the size of — I don’t know — actual baby cows, let all five of us pile in the not-enough seats behind him. It didn’t seem like it should work — surely the math was off? One guy pulling not-quite-the-whole family?? Not possible. And yet it was. Our rickety rickshaw went strangely fast towards the creepily-peaked tents. The kids shrieked that roller-coaster shriek, the delight of a perceived but contained danger.
Every performer in that exaggerated tent stuck their landing that night, more-narrowly-than-we-knew surviving another show. And the show was long. And extraordinarily sensory — a fidgety challenge for the kids to sit through. Each trick was better than the last, the constant fireworks-finale drama making any one best moment un-selectable.
The whole thing felt like one big explosion.
And so, the highlight, the dominant family memory of the night, became the getting there — our minutes racing through the nighttime city in the open air under stars and moon. We’d hit rewind and play this experience over and over again — Remember the way he took the turn? How we went up on two wheels? Remember we thought he might fall out? Remember how her hair whipped in the air above her small head?
Who knew that would be the imprint. The smallest part of a big night. As parents we aim for the grand, magical things to fill little heads, trying to pack the memories just so, rolling everything tight so more fits. And then often enough that’s the very stuff kids cannot or do not remember.
So what would my son would pack for school? Beyond the piles of t-shirts and joggers and hoodies laid out on his bedroom floor, what memories would he chose to take out and unroll as he started his life beyond childhood?
I couldn’t know. I only knew we needed more time to pack.
We passed the spot where that tent had been set up all those years ago. A big top just a black top now, jammed with the cars of Giants fan.
Our windows were down and we could hear the park erupt in a cheer. I thought of my son’s baseball career: a little leaguer, a Cooperstowner, a travel teamer, a high school player covering center in the big game on that very field.
I looked away, out my passenger-side window, holding my breath again while these thoughts radiated. Trying to protect my heart.
Two days later, after a dislikable amount of travel, we arrived on my son’s new campus.
As he headed off to his first team meeting, my husband and I drove to a kinda-local Target to get stuff for his dorm room. It was move-in day at another nearby university so the store was filled with college kids and parents.
Most of them were in a fight of some kind.
I passed a mother being unnaturally plucky, in the manner college drop-offs require, asking her son if he thought he needed another pillow for his bed.
“I don't know. And I don’t care. Can we please just get out of here.” the son answered, exasperated in the manner college drop-offs require.
My husband and I divided up, gathering stuff and filling the cart we’d stowed in the less-trafficky greeting card aisle. All around us, scurrying. Every kid here used to fit in the 2T clothes hanging brightly in the toddler section, teasing us. Every kid here used to have legs that were inches long. Now we were all here buying fans and over-the-door mirrors and single-cup keurigs for their lives miles and miles away from us.
My husband left on a quest for Febreze while I debated whether or not my son would appreciate/tolerate a little fake plant for his desk. I stared at the plastic ferns an abnormal amount of time, and then realized my husband had been gone an abnormal amount of time given his pursuit of just one item. He was maybe lost? Seemed hard to imagine. But, then again, he’d probably only been in a Target a handful of times; whereas I’d had dreams that took place in my local Target and, in them, the action played out according to the store’s true floor map. A small reminder that we were raising the same kids, but having a very different child-rearing experience. A larger reminder: how this college drop-off would feel to each of us, and how it would impact our daily lives.
On the way out of the store, we passed a mom loading small kids into her minivan. The baby had been clicked into the carseat base in the backseat and, as the mom folded the stroller and heaved it into the back, her 4 year-old was peppering her, perseverating on some snack they’d just bought.
She was telling him, like it wasn’t the first or second time, “I know there are a lot of flavors. And so — like we talked about in the store when we picked them out — we are going to try one each day.”
She finished loading her shiny bullseye bags stuffed with everything she did or didn’t need into the car, silently paddling her son back a step with her arm so the shutting trunk missed his head. Ah, this choreography. I know it.
“Okay, Mommy. But…” he was staring up at her like she was everything. “Can I have a strawberry now and a vanilla when we get home?”
“No — like we talked about in the store when we picked them out — these snacks are for preschool. We are not having any today — like we talked about in the store when we picked them out.” Ah, this script. I know it.
“Yeah but….” and then we were out of earshot. But I didn’t need to hear any more to know that that kid was going to bug her about those flavored snacks for the rest of the day.
“Ah, the inane conversations of motherhood,” I whispered to my husband after we passed. Did he know that she was a me of a million weekdays? Probably not. But I felt a little jolt of happiness that I’d just bought bins for my son’s college dorm instead of a metric ton of diapers, wipes and fruity snacks.
That’s why I kept on walking.
That’s why I didn’t stop to tap that young mom’s exhausted, drooped shoulder to tell her it goes fast.
That’s why I didn’t stop to tell her that five minutes ago I was in a Target parking lot in California with a spiky-haired kid talking my very ear off and that now I was expected to leave that very same kid here in Vermont.
That’s why I didn’t stop to tell her enjoy it. Because c’mon, Society! This is motherhood — not a beach vacation. Or some extra pink sunset. Creating and raising another whole human? It’s only sometimes enjoyable and always pretty hard.
Besides, no matter how much you enjoy it, it passes. Had I taken those days with my little kids for granted? Sometimes. Absolutely. Sometimes I just wanted to load the Target bags into the car. Sometimes I didn’t want to talk about snacks. It is all-the-times hard to appreciate anything that feels infinite in the middle of the infinity.
But I also know I enjoyed it when I could. I squeezed. I marveled. I walked into sunny morning bedrooms, bright and perfectly small people standing in cribs, arms outreached, just waiting for me to lift them.
And still.
It goes fast. It goes slow. It just…goes.
A science-y instagram account I follow to learn for the first time things I’m sure I should already know, posts about fractals, those infinitely repeating patterns found throughout nature, geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each a reduced size of the whole. How the veins in your hand can look like those coursing through a leaf.
Armed with the cursory understanding only social media can provide, I decide this — child-rearing, college drop-offs, life — is all a fractal.
Life mimics seasons. I’m at yet another college drop-off here in late August. But it also feels like I’m in some shoulder season of life.
Like the long, sunny days are getting shorter. Like I’m about to fall back.
And these kids we’re dropping off at college — they’re like fractals too. Infinitely self-similar iterations embarking on an infinitely iterative experience.
My son, his own person of course, but also a repeating of me, a repeating of my husband. Enough of a blend that if he is with only one of us, people will say to that one he looks exactly you.
Or maybe this is all a stretch. Maybe the math here is simpler.
“It’s subtraction,” my youngest deadpans of his brother’s departure.
I dislike how right he is.
I’ve feared this minus before. In the year leading up to my oldest’s college departure, I felt panicky. I didn’t want her to leave. I didn’t want our family to be fractioned up again. Our youngest’s health had finally stabilized. We were just learning how to be whole. We needed more time.
And then, without understanding the power of my thoughts, I started a global pandemic. My daughter barely got a freshman year — an all-around negative, away from us here, and in a no there there on campus.
Gradually though, the equation improved. Her life at school expanded more and more as the world opened up, and her happy dispatches filled me. I understood that’s what I’d feared I’d lose in the distance — the details. And that’s what I always wanted — the details.
Because I want to know what you had on your bagel this morning. I want to know what you listened to while you ran. I want to know the facial expression of that person you told that thing to today. I want to know what you learned — within reason — but also, seriously: was it butter or cream cheese??
Does this make me an attentive mom? Or crazy nosy? Or a stalker? Who knows!
I just know that this kind of dimension helps balance the equation. A filling vicariousness. A kind of addition.
We return home from the east coast, half of our kids settled in New England states for the year ahead. The front half of our house goes dark.
Even when we moved in a decade ago, even as I yelled nightly at kids to turn out their bedroom lights when they were not using them!!, I knew this would happen — that one by one the lights would go out on the second story of our house.
Now another bedroom will sit unlit, waiting for Thanksgiving and its hero’s return. The room next door knows what it’s like, to sit and wait and become a room whose floorboards creak with infrequent footsteps. Lucky to get a visitor on holidays. Or when the younger sister is looking to pilfer the artifacts of the once-living closet.
I think of my grandmother’s dedication to turning on lamps in front rooms. Never because she planned to use the light to read or knit — of course not! She was watching 60 Minutes in the other room! — but just to cast light for no one, so the house looked alive from the outside.
Even before I lived in California, I thought it was a waste of energy, both hers and the grid’s.
But now I see it was more about how the house felt on the inside.
I walk by our two newly empty bedrooms, fight my PG&E guilt and turn on a light in each. Just for a little while. Just to catch a feeling.
Later, I take the trash out the back door and look up to see my younger daughter’s bedroom lights on. I hear mumbly noises through her shut windows. A buzzing of bees. A trilling, as close caption TV has taught me to call the background noises of all night time insects. It’s only days into junior year, but because today’s students live an accelerated/ridiculous life, she has five tests within the next week. So she’s up in that hive, with music playing, a FaceTime going and her Apple pencil moving iFast across the screen of her iPad. I remember that I was not allowed to listen to music or watch tv while doing homework because both were considered attention killers. I guess this is the upside of the digital age — attention spans not dead, but made stronger by constant competing demands.
My daughter’s singing a little. She laughs her bouncy laugh. She’s fake yelling at someone.
I focus on the glow her windows cast down on the patio. The aliveness. I have another half of high school with those lights shining, that busy, bright and comforting industry happening over my head.
I can’t let that go over my head.
The second night we’re home from drop-off, we go to a concert with friends. They are entering their sophomore year of empty nesting, telling stories of travel and wine country. They’re not awkward freshmen any more. They’ve adjusted to this new life. They like it. They seem good at it.
As the band starts, we realize we’re in a sea of kids our own kids’ ages. We all agree our kids would love this — if only they were here. But they’re not. They’re off seeing other things, hearing other sounds. So we just nod along, dancing amongst a bunch of other peoples’ kids.
A few songs in, my older son FaceTimes from school. I pick it up and tell him to hold on while I run to the lobby where I can actually hear. It’s late back east. I worry something’s the matter or he needs something.
But nothing’s wrong. He’s just got some details for me.
It’s so loud. I have to choose between seeing his face and hearing what he’s saying. I take quick looks at him, lying on his new comforter, beside his new desk lamp, in front of the California flag I hung on his 3,000-miles-away wall only days ago, and then stick the phone back hard to my ear. All ears.
The live music plays on in the amphitheater behind me while he catches me up on practices and the kids he’s met and what he’s been eating and if that fan we bought is keeping the room cool enough to sleep at night.
When we hang up many songs later, I walk back into the show, high on vicariousness.
I fold back into the crowd of other people’s kids. I hope they FaceTime their parents tomorrow to tell them about this music, this feeling. The smell of weed wafting, the beer sloshing onto bumping shoulders, the riff of “Casey Jones” this youngish band played. I hope they ask Doesn’t Dad love that song?
And a notion just crosses my mind —
Something is over, and that does feel sad. But other things are just beginning, and that could feel…happy? exciting? not something to cry about all day?
Maybe if I look, I will see: there are lights on all over the place.
And then, like a fortune cookie cracked open just for me, the very next song’s refrain:
Everything is exactly where it needs to be.
Yours in the Going,
Jen.
Chuckles & tears. You always get me. You’re so good at capturing this illusive thing we call life.
So good and wise and true! Thanks for articulating! 💕