The People and Places of a Parents Weekend

We just returned from older son’s parents weekend — he’s a sophomore but this was our first parents weekend at his school since last year his and my daughter’s were head-to-head and because she was a senior, we went to hers.

I flew alone with my youngest, a way I am more and more traveling. The airport was crowded. On our way to our gate, I bumped into at least eight friends bound for kid visits on other campuses all over the country. When a stranger behind me in line for coffee wondered aloud why the airport was so busy, I told her it was the parents weekend at maybe 82% of schools in the country and we were witnessing Thanksgiving-level air traffic in reverse.

My son loves to travel. I often think an airport gives him an amusement-park kind of delight, every personal interaction a pleasing ride, like the teacups maybe. Shifting views. Something new every time you look. Every person an opportunity. When I travel alone, I slip into a me v. world mindset. When I travel with my son, I’m reminded: the world is much better when you work with it.

“What’s your name?” he loves to ask anyone/everyone.

“And what’s your last name?”

“Hey, want to hear a joke?”

His questioning always strikes me as an if/then decision tree, a filtering-of-people process: if they keep answering, then we can decide they are probably a pretty nice person.

So the pretty nice people, which it will comfort you to know are the most common kind, tell him their names, and their last names. They listen to knock knocks and tell him he’s funny. Seriously serious TSA agents break form, smiles cracking and brightening their bored, grumbly faces. The guy going through our bag to make sure these medications we’re toting aren’t secret explosives is swabbing the bottle with a testing strip and giggling at my son’s PREGNANT! punchline. (Q: “What do you call a three-humped camel?”)

It’s all a light and airy adventure. And a highly warm-hearted one. In the time between getting out of our Uber at the curb and boarding the plane, my youngest told me I love you ~ 67 times, as if I was caught in a meteor shower of affection, bursts of love streaking my sky every few minutes.

“Do you want a hot chocolate?” I asked him once we were through security.

“I love you. And yes.”

“Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

“I love you. And no.”

“I’m going to go right over there to buy a sandwich.”

“What? I love you.”

“Can you sit here and wait?”

A long pause, followed by no attendant answer, and then: “I love you.”

Because of excellent sight lines at SFO, I could leave him sitting on a bench while I went and got that sandwich on one side of the terminal and then crossed to the agent desk on a quixotic mission to wrangle better seats than 37 B and C (nope! the windmills won!).

I left my son sitting there — appearing a gangly guy with his legs crossed, headphones in. A teen, obviously, probably listening to rap or country music, clearly old enough and fine enough to be left alone. What’s in his cup? Probably coffee.

And then, of course, obvious things aren’t always true. My son’s old enough but not fine enough to be left alone, and though I’m not right next to him, I am laser-staring at him the entire time we’re apart. He’s not listening to rap or country, he’s listening to, as he calls them Sesame Street’s old records. He’s not drinking coffee. It’s that hot chocolate we bought.

But couldn’t he fool you?

I looked around the terminal and on top of my airport-usual my god where in the world is everyone going, I wondered how different everyone else here was from how they looked. I realized it was probably true to a person: everyone is fooling everyone.

Maybe the buttoned-up business-y woman whose shoulder bag fits neatly atop her rollie of the exact matching color is actually a mess; maybe the confident-sounding guy talking too loud on airpods doesn’t really know what he’s talking about at all. Maybe the easy, happy baby cooing on a lap is anything but. Maybe that baby even has a catastrophic seizure disorder, because, and I learned this firsthand, a baby can look easy and happy, and this can still be true.

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The day before we left for the east coast, my youngest, a deep believer in the life and emotions of inanimate objects, talked to Target as we passed it on the highway.

“Hi, Target!” he yelled at the sight of that most magical bullseye.

This meant I was now playing the role of Target so I said, “Hi, L!”

“I’m going to buy toys in you when I get bigger!”

“Oh really? With what money?” Target with the reality check!

“With the money I get from my sports,” my son said plainly, as if Target was being a little dumb for missing something so obvious.

“Wait — you can get paid for sports?”

“Yes! I’m taking my sports to a whole new level!”

“Amazing.” What else could Target say?

Back home, with no unemotional way to decide which of his emotional cars would get to travel with us to Vermont, my son held a race-off. After much high-stakes drama, he congratulated the winners heartily, putting them in their hard-won spots in his backpack. He then talked to the cars that hadn’t made the cut, assuring them that we’d be home soon, that maybe next time they could come.

Cat Panther, a stuffed toy purchased in the campus bookstore last fall in Vermont, also made the east coast travel team. My son believes Cat Panther to have been born to the large statue of the same fixed above the school’s football field. My son calls this statue Cat Panther’s Mommy, and though she could be considered a cold and unmovable kind of mother to some, I prefer to think my son sees that she’s strong, that she always holds her ground.

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We landed in Boston and my son told me he loved me and we claimed our bag and my son told me he loved me and we got in a cab to head to my oldest’s new apartment and my son told me he loved me.

Our taxi ride was much more turbulent than our flight. Erratic driving on Boston’s erratic roads, our bag slamming around because the driver had put it into the back on its wheels for an unknowable reason. And all the while the driver whispering our destination over and over again under his breath, Gollum-like: North End. North End. North End.

My daughter was waiting on her rainy doorstep when we [mercifully] pulled up. She is living with three of her college roommates in this first Real Life apartment. One of her friends is a nurse, another an accountant, another works at the State House and my daughter is teaching while in grad school. They are a mini societal engine in a cozy four bedroom a few doors down from Paul Revere’s old house.

My daughter guided us around their serene little apartment with views over the bustling street below, a street that seemed to straddle real and imaginary, appearing like a set of some long ago Anne Hathaway rom com — twinkly lights, stuffed restaurants, passing and laughing people, honking cars (Boston!). When we finished our tour, we talked in the kitchen and I saw the butter house I had carried out of my daughter’s senior dorm on graduation day back in May, a little exclamation point sitting on the counter: this is now home.

The next day, we headed to Vermont. I had rented a tiny, over-garage apartment on a nearby lake when I thought it would only be me and my husband for the weekend. My son’s college town is storybook beautiful, but it is not bursting with accommodation options, a problem when the town is bursting with parents. So this little place was the best we could do and remained the best we could do even when my oldest and youngest joined us. I had to ask the airbnb host if we could double her oft-quoted MAX OF 2!! This idea didn’t excite her, but she was gracious about it. And when we arrived, our host greeted us in the driveway and said, “I opened the second bedroom for you.” — a room that was all along there but one that was usually closed to guests because it housed all the high chairs and cribs and toys for her grandchildren visits. Ah, the world works with you!

My older son came over to visit to both catch up and wrestle with his brother. He left at 1am to drive a quite dark 15 minutes back to campus which made me nervous because there are few things that my kids do out of my eyesight that don’t make me nervous! I am an uptight blessing!

But the thing is my son did have a flukey drive that night because halfway home he had to stop very short for a newborn calf standing and shaking in the middle of the road. If you’re wondering how he knew it was newborn, it is because its umbilical cord was still dragging along behind it as it crossed the road — not to get to the other side — but to lie down in the grass and, as my son feared, die.

My son texted videos of the poor thing to our family chat and said he was going to go knock on the door of the farm across the street to alert them this calf needed saving. I called him and begged him not to because while this impulse is kind, and maybe on paper a way I’d like to think he was raised to be, an unexpected visitor at 1am is more likely considered an intruder. And I’m governed by this: bad endings can start with simple enough beginnings.

But by the time I called, he’d already done it, letting two night shift farm workers know of the situation.

My son got back in his car, unsure if the workers had understood or cared. He got back to campus uneventfully, all well for him (all, at best, unclear for the calf). But the incident reminded me of life’s deterministic chaos.

Of all the disorder and irregularity.

Of all the things that can happen.

Of all the ideas a kid can get.

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Of course, colleges don’t put parents weekends on to heighten worries — like, hey, come survey of all you can no longer control! Hardly. These weekends are meant to be warm and fuzzy, intended to make you feel inspired, connected to your kid and the school.

Parents weekends are three day passes to the universe of a university (the shared root word here meaning whole which is quite nice to think about). Your kid lived in your world for eighteen years, and even if it felt as if that world often revolved around them, it was still a world of your design.

But now they have this new world of their own design.

Now you see the Little Things that don’t come across on text or in calls. Here, in person you can look for context clues about life on this campus. You meet friends, hear stories, understand what happens where. You learn that that building over there has a library with great views and a place to buy late night milkshakes made with maple syrup. Every detail is a stitch, and you see how your kid is weaving into this place’s fabric.

Meanwhile, the place, the beautiful campus is one thing, a nice thing but not The Thing. Because any college graduate will tell you: The Thing is the people. The way you live together and shape each other. The way you bring the way you were raised and your ideas and your experiences and add them to the mix.

At the tailgate after the game, this mix was swirling, a sunny lawn buzzing with a buzzing collegiate demographic. I had the same feeling I had at all my older daughter’s parents weekends: what an embarrassment of young people riches.

We saw many people and friends we met at games last year and we met new families too. In the get-to-know-you chit chat, multiple people asked me if my younger son is an athlete too. I can answer that many ways. He is: he plays soccer and basketball and baseball and some percentage of the time he both tries and actually enjoys these pursuits! But he won’t be a recruited athlete, which is probably what the asker means. Then again, it wouldn’t be dishonest to say he recently told me [Target] he plans to be a professional athlete.

But couldn’t I fool you?

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Through a complicated formula of parental exhaustion and a realization that life is quite long but also far too short, it becomes true that younger siblings feel older at any given age than an oldest child did at the same age. My oldest, who was perfectly capable of staying home alone at 17, never stayed home alone at 17 because that felt too young to me. Scary, even irresponsible. I could conjure a ready list of all the simple ways something could go complicatedly wrong. But now, on this trip, I left my third home alone knowing she could probably run a small corporation or government branch on top of the household for three days. Because 17 is plenty old.

My oldest texted her home-alone younger sister on the Friday night, right after her high school upset a football rival in the big game asking if she was now going to have a party given that stars were aligning — empty house, no parents, big game win. What high school senior doesn’t night gaze looking for that constellation?

“The only thing stopping me is the wallpaper.”

I include this here because it was perhaps my proudest parent moment of that parents weekend.

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On Sunday morning before we had to head to the airport, I went for a run around the lake and because it was remote enough, I had no signal and could neither listen to music nor track in my running app.

Without music — a way I would never run unless forced — I heard birds, wind, leaves, my own breathing. The occasional F150 tearing down the country road and coming up fast behind me, a kind of speeding that would bother me at home, but here felt purposeful, respectable as if the driver was racing to harvest something or help birth a calf.

I heard a bunch of kids on a dock with their grandmother saying, “Yes, Nana, that’s what we should do today!” I slowed down in hopes I could hear what it was they were so excited to do, but that first little conversational swatch was all I picked up so I kept running.

I came around a curve to a house very close to the road, standing resolute and orderly, every inch of the property in use and maximized. Window boxes proud, three cords of stacked firewood waiting under a plastic tarp because though the place was feeling exceedingly gentle that day, it wouldn’t stay this way for long. A guy working on a tipped over lawn mower, blasting Tom Petty.

You belong among the wildflowers

You belong in a boat out at sea…

He looked up and raised one of his highly capable hands in greeting as I passed.

I felt really American. In a good way.

And I felt — wow, this place.

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We say goodbye to my oldest who will drive the three hours back to her new little home in Boston and we swing by my son’s dorm because my husband hasn’t seen ~the way it’s decorated~ yet. My older son is at practice so one of his roommate’s lets us in. Because my older son isn’t home, my younger son can’t hand him Cat Panther, whom my youngest insists wants to live in his birthplace, near Cat Panther Mommy. My youngest tells Cat Panther goodbye and tucks him into his brother’s bed, satisfied, the parting made easy because of the rightness of it.

After more fun introductions/knock knocks with airline employees and TSA agents and traveling strangers, we finally take off. My youngest stares out the window. “See you later, Tiny Cars and Tiny People!” he bids as we climb out of Vermont and into the sky.

Leaving the older kids remains sad and a bit surreal — like, really? we really don’t live all together anymore?? — but there’s something cozy, even deeply relaxing about flying with my youngest. I mean it’s not a physical brand of relaxation as he is constantly unfolding limbs that are too long for him to know what to do with into his neighbor’s seat, as if he’s an unmanageable umbrella popping open in too small of an entryway; or he is whisper-yelling “Boo!” in my or my husband’s ear when we’ve just dozed off, jarring us awake.

But there’s a kind of soul relaxation that’s palpable because for hours, my son will be content with exactly what he has — unlimited screen time, snacks and bottomless juice, and incredibly close proximity to at least one person he loves. Also he would never consider that anything could go wrong while 30,000 feet in the sky. The clouds look so gentle and cushiony, an ethereal play land for our plane to glide on through. And turbulence? Um, what is that? Oh, wait: the fun bumps? Those are exciting! And would never dent my son’s focus on his iPad. Sometimes, in extra rocky going, I nervously reach out to grab his hand, and he smiles at the glowing little screen and without looking away says, “I love this part, Mommy.”

I sit between my son and my husband, and our row of three is how we will be. A little less carefree than we would’ve imagined. A lot more care full than we could’ve dreamed. This is how we’ll wing out of our never-empty nest to parents weekends — to visit the flighted with our overflowing-with-love plus one beside us.

To think I once mistook the idea of this set up as somehow unlucky.

To think that, at first, I was fooled.

My son turns to me and reaches out, “Can you keep me company on your hand?” A much more beautiful way to ask to hold hands.

And I can.

And I do.

And we float along homeward.

Jen.