Ways to help your adult child have a soft place to land

All across America, frantic, frenzied parents are driving their borderline adult children and their stuff to their next station in life. Whether they’re heading to college or to first apartments, the highway is a mashup of U-Hauls and SUVs piled with lamps and laundry baskets, wishes and worries, pillows and parkas, hopes and heartaches, as caravans of parents head off to help kids fly the nest to build their own.

Last weekend, my youngest daughter, Marissa, 22, and I were part of that bittersweet brigade.

Raising kids to the point where they can launch independent lives means we parents have done our jobs. It also means our jobs are done. So while I pat myself on the back with one hand, I dab tears with the other.

“So,” I ask Marissa, “what do you have for your new place besides your clothes?”

I’m trying to imagine what all she might need to furnish the one-bedroom condo that will be her home through grad school.

“A French press and a spatula,” she says.

Fortunately, DC and I have some cast-off furniture, vestiges of our move to our new house last November.

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I have said loudly and often: “Parents, your kids don’t want your stuff!” And that is still true. Except for when they do.

We load a rental truck with hand-me-down furniture, boxes of Marissa’s clothes and books, and her first official furniture purchase: a full-size mattress, box spring and bed frame. “Good-bye twin XL!” she cries.

Then I climb into the UHaul, and she gets into her tuna-can of a car, and we begin our 12-hour, 700-mile migration from our home in Orlando, Florida, to her new, first place in Nashville, Tennessee.

I make a phone call to my friend Missy Tannen, founder of Boll & Branch, a company that makes purecotton luxury bedding.

“I want to order bedding for Marissa’s first place,” I say.

“I’m getting tons of calls like this right now,” she says, “mostly from mothers sending care packages to their daughters.”

I order organic-cotton sheets, fresh down pillows, a waffle-weave blanket, a down insert and a duvet cover in white cotton with a shore-blue band.

Tannen, a mom to three daughters, gets it. “Moms do this so they know that at the end of the day, no matter what else happens, their kids have a soft place to land.”

Actually, that’s what this whole move is about. Like other parents, I battle the twin desires of wanting my daughter to work for what she wants, while also wanting to get her off to a good start — the eternal parental conundrum.

At the condo, we unload the truck. After a run to Walmart for groceries, hangers and a shower curtain, the condo looks right as rain. I fly home Sunday. The care package arrives Monday.

That night, when Marissa gets into bed, she calls to thank me: “I feel like I’m sleeping inside a giant marshmallow,” she says.

Having set up a few first places, I marveled again at how little you need to start a life. Here’s a first-apartment checklist:

KITCHEN BASICS >> Dishes, cups, glasses and flatware for four. Cooking utensils (a wooden spoon, spatula, tongs, whisk). A tea kettle or coffee maker, depending on your brew. A small set of pots and pans, a few cutting knives, mixing bowls. Dish towels and pot holders. FURNITURE >> A kitchen table and chairs. A sofa and small table. A lamp or two. A bookshelf. A bed, a mattress and box spring. CLEANING SUPPLIES>>: Mop, broom, vacuum. Bucket, allpurpose cleaner, sponges, detergent. Paper towels, trash bags.

HOUSEHOLD >> Batteries, scissors, clothes hangers. BATH ITEMS >> Towels, shower curtain, toilet paper and sundries.

PLUS >> Something that reminds you of where you came from, like a family photo. Syndicated columnist Marni Jameson is the author of three home and lifestyle books, including “Downsizing the Family Home — What to Save, What to Let Go.” Her At Home column is published weekly. Contact her at marnijameson.com. To see all of her columns, go to mercurynews.com/author/ marni-jameson/