The scene at the airport was
a heart-twister: Luca’s twin sister’s face contorted with the supreme forlornness
of separation from the person with whom she’d shared the womb and so much
since. As she clung to him in a
symbiotic clutch, I was tempted to irrationally call the whole college thing
off.
His big brother was there, too,
proud and misty-eyed. Their relationship
was long fraught with a disdainful leniency but eventually blossomed
into a mutually respectful fraternal bond.
His two best friends had also
come to see him off, awkwardly bumping fists and knocking shoulders, eventually
even slinging arms around each other: “Mach’s guet.”
The fact that my second son has
headed off to study in a land far, far away – even though it is the country of
my birth and the actual city in which I myself forged unforgettable college
memories – makes me sadder than I could have imagined. The Atlantic
Ocean has never felt so wide or the six-hour time difference such an
impediment. The 6,017 kilometers (3,739 miles) between
here and Boston today seem insurmountable though I’ve made that flight
countless times over the past 30 years with nonchalance.
In reality I was nowhere near
ready for this next, natural step in the growing-up process. And as I watched him sleeping in the hotel
room we shared ahead of move-in day, he appeared so young and vulnerable that
it was all I could do not to scoop him up and flee protectively back to
2005.
But I could neither go back
in time nor stop it and soon we were unpacking, setting up his dorm room, making
one final shopping run to get forgotten items.
Embarking on an exhaustive orientation program that was often rather
disorienting in its intensity. The parents
of the first-years all attempting to convince and console one another with talk
of the wonderful opportunities, the nurturing environment, all the support
services offered at the school. How our
children will doubtless manage the challenges maturely -- and how we’ll be
spared dealing with most of the less wise decisions they may make. I know that mine will be learning all
manner of fascinating things: classroom knowledge, life lessons, and street
smarts – all equally valuable – and that this is a priceless exercise in
independence. But still.
Luca made me promise not to
be emotional about it and orchestrated our farewell to take place on a busy
sidewalk in the midst of rush-hour pedestrian traffic. I could hardly speak for
the lump in my throat but what was there to say in this moment? Which words would’ve been appropriate,
anything but trite? I hugged his skinny
frame hard and cupped the prickly back of his newly shorn head. I don’t know how I possibly
let go of him but of course I had to, and as soon as I had turned away the
tears started flowing.
There may well be another 2
million mothers currently going through the same distress but this is scant
solace. What I want to know: How does
our society survive the strain on all those maternal souls each September?
A former English professor of
mine, in sharing his own experience of relinquishing his daughter to the transformative
forces of the American higher education system, wrote in U.S. News & World
Report:
“…the parent’s tears and the child’s are not
quite the same. For the child, those
welling eyes signify anxiety, fear, incipient homesickness. The parent suffers sympathetic versions of
all of these, but something else as well.
For the parent, they are the tears of loss and momentousness, the tears
that attend all the great rites of passage and honor the relentless one-wayness
of time.”
Indeed.
Indeed.
