Dis-orientation: A Future Empty Nester Goes to College

Dis-orientation: A Future Empty Nester Goes to College

Posted to House Bloggers by Nancy Lee on Thu, 09/03/2009 - 12:14pm

I’m racing through campus. I’m late and I have no idea where the building is, let alone the lecture hall. Have I even made it to class this semester? Good Lord, is the final today? In this nightmare, I usually wake up around this point, in a sweat, totally disoriented.

But this is no dream. I’m participating in freshman orientation, New York style, where parents actually get to stay in real dorm rooms, eat cafeteria style and stumble around campus while their hapless progeny have a separate but equal experience.

I want to be a team player, I really do. But at the end of the day, looking over my monastic room, the lonely twin bed with its 17-thread count sheets on a non-pillowtop mattress, I suddenly want to weep. There is a sign on my bathroom door explaining that “no means no.” A suicide hotline number is prominently displayed by the wall phone.

My daughter is entering a whole different world than I did. Back in the 70s, my parents drove me to campus, helped me unpack, said “see you at Thanksgiving,” and went on their merry way, no doubt doing a little happy dance now that their youngest had finally left the nest. Today, there are separate orientations weeks or months prior to the start of the term with full itineraries for both student and parent, with a lot of handholding for those of us with separation anxiety. But isn’t that anxiety warranted?

Back then, we were concerned with far different topics: Kent State, with police officers killing students versus Virginia Tech with students killing students. The dean sending home disciplinary notices about fake IDs versus text messages warning of an active shooter on campus. Computer dating versus online predators. The Pill and free love versus condoms and HIV testing.

I shouldn’t be so unhinged. After all, this is my second experience in sending a child off to school. With my oldest, Jess, I found myself tearing up every time I passed a Bed, Bath and Beyond in the weeks before she left. We ran into an acquaintance in Target while doing last minute shopping and she casually asked if Jess was looking forward to college and I was horrified to find myself crying. Jess even more so.

Her father and I drove her to school, and schlepped her belongings up three flights of stairs. As we were preparing to leave, she gave me a warning look that said “I am not going to start crying so don’t you dare.” And I’m flashing back to my brave little five-year-old, climbing the steps to the bus that long ago September morning. We had just moved to the area and didn’t know a soul. She squared her tiny shoulders, got on the bus and never looked back.

Which is just what she did at college. About two weeks into her first semester, I received an email telling me that because of all the wonderful friends she had met she now “considered this cinderblock cell” her home, I was able to relax. A little. Which was quite a statement since her dorm looked to me like a minimum security prison. (And a bargain at just $22,000 a year — roughly the same amount to incarcerate a prisoner in New York State!)

She has thrived as I know Lauren will. But driving her to Binghamton to start her freshman year, wasn’t any easier. I found myself hyperventilating, as if all the oxygen in the car had been sucked out. I thought of my three daughters, my three blessings, scattered off in different directions: one in Delaware, one in Binghamton, one at home but not for much longer.

I thought of the Harry Potter books, and the trouble Lord Voldemort got into, breaking up pieces of his soul — his horcruxes — and storing them for safekeeping and realized this is how I felt about sending my daughters off on their own. I know I have to let go, but it felt as though I was splitting off critical pieces of me. Driving that long upward slog toward Binghamton, I wondered how I would ever survive.

But of course I did as generations before me have, much easier now with the benefit of cell phones, email and Facebook.

And we’ll all be together for Thanksgiving.

Two down, one to go.