My Daughter Left for College and Yeah, I Dissolved into a Puddle and Evaporated Into the Ether
It's bad, guys.
Greetings.
How are you?
I hope you are well and even if the afternoons are full of carpools and dinner making and laundry folding and you feel right on the edge of overwhelmed and overworked, that your family is happy and healthy and everyone is living under your roof and that the children you have raised are tucked into beds that are very close to you at night and that they still sleep with their blankies and go to school no more than a few miles away and return home to you each day.
This past weekend, we went to visit OUR OLDEST DAUGHTER who, for the past month, has been living away from us, AT COLLEGE.
Supposedly, raising children is all about getting them to some point where they don't need you as much? Something about independence? Lauching? Adulthood?
It’s still unclear to me.
What is clear?
That sending a child off to college is both one of the most wonderful and terrible experiences I have ever had in my life.
In so many ways, wonderful.
But for about 36 precarious hours, it was also very very terrible.
Not for her. Just for me.
Ever since my oldest daughter was, oh, I don’t know, in 5th or 6th grade, just the mention of her going to college brought me to tears. Real actual tears. Something about this phase of life being over, about our family changing forever, struck a nerve even then. It became a running joke with the kids through the years, and anytime they wanted to tease me or see me tear up they’d mention it, except they found out real quick what wasn’t funny about those emotions four weeks ago after we dropped her off and I cried for almost two days straight.
There was a very cute time in life when my daughter said she never wanted to leave home and she asked if she could go to the university down the road and I said something really horrible like, “of course you can live at home as long as you like, Honey. But some day, you might actually want to go away to school.”
I know.
You see, we have these children. Especially our first ones. And yes, I’m including all of you even though I don’t know your situation or personality because absolutely every mother that I’ve got within two feet of in the last four weeks who has already taken an oldest child to college and has found out that I just took mine has reacted in the exact same way: they’ve said “ohhhhhh …” and then their bodies begin to physically curl in on themselves, as if protecting their hearts from the memory of being impailed by an emotional jousting lance.
There’s pity in their voice. And compassion. So much compassion.
So we have these children, right? And we raise them, and then we’re supposed to put our money where our mouth is, as the saying goes, and actually trust God with them like we said we were doing all along. Actually trust that God loves them more than we do, cares for them, has a plan for them, protects them, provides, goes before them. We have to trust that our children will always be our children, but that at the same time, they aren’t always ours, and that this dynamic is good and right.
You guys. It’s as hard as you think it is.
I feel like I should repeat that simply because I want to warn you.
We left our daughter at college and I dissolved into a puddle and disappeared.
It is a terrible wonderful thing to raise a child and send them into this world without you.
(Ohmygoodness yes, yes, yes, it’s also good and exciting, too. I know. But come on. No one needs that kind of positive objectivity when it feels like my heart is breaking.)
After we got to her dorm last month, unpacked her things and I made her bed and her room was all set up (which took way faster than everyone told me it would), we walked back to the parking lot where we said goodbye and I love you and I’ll see you in a month (along with I’m so proud of you and always stay in a group and don’t pick up a drink you’ve put down and buddy system! and have fun and be good… ) But it all felt so rushed. It’s hard to pull a bandaid off slowly when the girl who isn’t hurt is oh so ready to fly.
If this sounds dramatic, then you are on the right track. But there would still be an infinitely wide chasm you’d need to cross to feel what it actually was like. But I’m guessing you’re starting to get the idea.
About a week or so before she left, Chris and I took a page out of Krista Gilberts’s book and set one night aside where just the three of us had a firepit in the backyard. The younger kids came to roast s’mores, but then were then told to leave.
This was intentional time just for us. Of course I wrote some things out, things I wanted to say to my daughter, things I didn’t want to forget to say. The practical. The deeply personal. Things she has heard all her life, I hope, along with words of affirmation and encouragement for this specific change.
We took our time, both Chris and I, speaking into her, telling her what we see as her strengths, her gifts, how uniquely God has made her. She asked us questions, we answered. It was a night I’ll remember for the rest of my life for how simple and sweet it was, even through tears, to bless my child’s wings.
The five of us came home from visiting her for the first time for Parents Weekend this past Sunday. If I could have just held her hand and smelled her hair and kissed her forehead for 48 hours straight, I would have been the happiest, wierdest mom on the planet. Instead, we all ate college food and tailgated and went to a football game and stayed up too late.
But it was only one of us who was startled awake at 2am by a small but ominous black silouette whispering “Mom, Mom …” until I opened my eyes and heard, “I threw up on the toilet…”
“ON the toilet?” I asked, suddenly very very awake.
“On the toilet,” my youngest said.
She led me to the hotel bathroom, to a crime scene of blue-raspberry shaved ice mixed with minimally digested fried calamari, tortilla chips, and Sprite. She had made it to the bathroom (+). She didn’t have time to open the toilet seat (-).
After I put her back to bed with a lined trash can at the ready, I went back to the bathroom for a short pity party followed by an enormous amount of dry heaving.
I grabbed towels I would have buried six feet deep in the woods had I had a shovel handy and then, in that bathroom in the middle of parents weekend visiting the young adult I miss so dearly, I did what all of us mothers do, regardless of how we feel about it — exactly what the moment requires.
I drove all 4 to school today, and thanks to this post instead of being on the edge of losing my mind to the song choice, window choice, breathing choice moments—I am both bothered and so very grateful to have a car full with all of them, and one where I’m still the driver 😅. And sending you a hug for having no choice but to be brave in this crazy, hard, terrible, wonderful journey of motherhood.
My oldest just turned 10 and my youngest just started kindergarten and I had a breakdown over the summer at the knowledge that one day this perfect (read: exhaustingly, overwhelmingly, want to rip my hair out some days perfect) season of life will be over when my oldest leaves for college. (So he doesn’t feel left out, I should mention that I do also have a middle child.) I am now the mom who cries at the mere thought of it. So, thanks for writing this. Gut wrenching as it is, your words and solidarity (even if I am not there yet) are a gift.