How are you surviving college dropoff?
Dropping your child at college looks to me like winning the parent lottery.
Your child is alive (alive!) at 18 and about to access a whole new world of thought and knowledge and friendship and memory-making and mistake-making and perspective-shifting! They might fall in love! They might find a career! They might find their life’s purpose! Their hard work got them here! Your hard work got them here!
This is, by every measure, success!
Except it also looks awful. Really, truly, heartbreaking. Like, the worst.
They might fall in love! They might find a career! They might find their life’s purpose! And then they might leave you for good! Who designed this?
I am one year away from this truly phenomenal and also terrible milestone. I have a rising high school senior. Once I recover from this landmark event/absolute travesty, I will (if I’m lucky and blessed beyond measure) do it all over again in four years. I also have a rising high school freshman.
I am watching my friends post photos from inside dorm rooms and beneath university arches and in front of college stadiums, and I’m thinking, “I am so happy for you! How on earth will you go on? How are you typing from the fetal position?”
They appear, mostly, to be experiencing a similar tangle of emotions. A lot of, “So proud! Hardest thing I’ve ever done …” captions.
“I am having the hardest time getting anything done this week,” my friend Pete Dominick tweeted. “We drop Ava off at college on Thursday. It’s all I can think about. Been connecting with so many parents who have been through it or are dealing with it for the first time now. She is such an awesome person.”
She is such an awesome person. Yes. That part.
I want big, awesome things for my awesome children. I also want them in my kitchen, showing me TikToks and making me laugh and challenging how I think and leaving me a mess to clean up.
“I love my girls,” Dominick told me when I called him about his tweet. “I want to be around them all the time. They’re 18 and 16 and when I see them in the morning or after a few hours apart, it’s like Christmas morning. I am elated.”
He was dropping his oldest at college the next day.
“You want them to be independent,” he said. “You want them to be confident. And guess what? It worked. It’s awful.”
Truly. My children seem utterly indifferent to my pending — proactive, really — suffering.
At a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison tour, as I marveled at the student union overlooking Lake Mendota, my daughter said, “You can’t move here to be closer to me.”
Rude! Also how is she reading my mind?
“If I go tell Ava I’m going to miss her, she makes a snide joke — which I trained her to make — and says, ‘I can’t wait to leave,’ ” Dominick said. “That’s what I want. I don’t want her to miss us or miss this opportunity or long for the past.”
Still, it’s lonely loving someone so much that you’d sacrifice anything in the world to help them thrive, and then realizing you don’t get to stand next to them for the thriving part.
This is true, of course, whether your kid goes to college after high school or your kid goes to trade school or backpacking across Europe or to the next town over to room with a couple buddies — buddies, maybe, you remember being small enough to need their hands held crossing streets.
“I’m usually pretty equipped for things I can see coming,” Dominick said. “But I’ve been looking for the book or article to help me through this and no one’s got the answer. Because there isn’t an answer.”
There isn’t an answer to arriving at the start of something beautiful and exhilarating and hopeful and transformative and realizing it’s also the end of something beautiful and exhilarating and hopeful and transformative. Not an easy answer, anyway.
“You can feel that you’re no longer important,” Dominick said. “That your purpose has been watered down. It can lead to a real depression — it has for me sometimes.”
He wonders, he said, if the flip side of taking his role as a father so seriously, so centrally, is that he’s a little directionless without his kids around.
“I remind myself that I’m always going to be necessary to them,” he said. “My parents are 80 and 79, and we’re still so close. There are so many ways to be important to someone and I know and hope I get to experience all of them with my kids. That helps me a lot.”
I think often about something Mary Dell Harrington, co-author of “Grown and Flown: How To Support Your Teen, Stay Close as a Family and Raise Independent Adults,” told me.
“Our relationship with our young adults will last longer than our relationship with our adolescents and little kids, God willing,” Harrington said. “My mother’s 92. My relationship with her as a young adult and adult has lasted many more decades than when I was a kid. Over time, we’ve gone to being friends and confidants, and I’ve asked her for advice, rather than her telling me what to do.”
That has framed the way I raise my kids while they’re still at home — helping me view their first 18 years as a foundation for our lifelong relationships, rather than as a task I need to ace and complete. I like it as a way of framing the next few years as well.
Still, it all looks very hard. And if you’re going through it, I see you. I will be among your ranks, if my tremendous good fortune continues, very soon. I plan to hate it and love it.
Meanwhile, I don’t see any harm in looking at real estate listings in Madison. I mean, that lake really is gorgeous.