Early August feels like the middle of summer. A glance at the calendar confirms that this is so. Yet for a smattering of parents, these sweltering days are not so much the middle of anything as the edge of a precipice. The name of the precipice is Freshman Orientation Day, the first day of the first year of college and the last day of childhood.
In the middle of August, the newly enrolled student may be bouncing around between excitement and apprehension, and there’s no shame in it. For many parents it’s another story; though they’re bouncing between anguish and heartbreaking nostalgia, they dare not show it.
“Two weeks,” a friend said tightly, when I asked how long it was before her eldest left for university.
She had clearly planned to say more. Smiling, she nodded her head and flapped her hand, as if signaling that she had swallowed something hot and couldn’t talk just yet. The truth is that she couldn’t swallow; the lump in her throat prevented it.
“Whew,” she said, a moment later. “I go along thinking I’m doing fine and then suddenly I choke up.”
She has been trying not to count the days (“fourteen, exactly”). She does not care to note how many cozy family dinners remain (“eight, if you take away farewell parties and a weekend with my in-laws”). She has helped her son fill out his medical forms. She has taken him to buy linens for his dorm room bed. She has conducted innumerable small transactions to smooth his way.
And all through these nearing-the-precipice days, through the paperwork and the bureaucracy and through every interaction with her son, she is fighting the towering desire to grab the boy and hold on to him.
He’s 18, and it’s time for him to go. He is a man. Yet in his mother’s heart and memory he is also every age he used to be: A toddler with the vocabulary of a sixth-grader; a little guy whose face crumpled when he was dropped off at camp; a cool preteen with a dab hand at the guitar; a young man in a suit taking the bus to his first internship.
There used to be an AT&T commercial that captured this kaleidoscopic aspect of the parental heart. It showed a woman helping her daughter settle into her new dorm. When the girl briefly leaves the room she returns, in her mother’s eyes, as the 5-year-old she once was. A moment later, she’s a co-ed again. We see the smiling mother blinking back tears, and when she says goodbye to the girl she does it bravely.
That’s the ideal to which my friend aspires. However much she aches, she mustn’t betray her feelings. It would not be fair. She and her husband got to share their son’s childhood, but now he has the right to his own life.
For them to hang on, cloying and needy, would only mean misery for everyone. So they have wisely chosen to keep their melancholy to themselves. For sensible and loving parents, there really is no happy alternative to letting a grown child go. Still, it hurts.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@ washingtonexaminer.com.
