The sad and happy chore of bringing a child to college

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.