A Beautiful Blessing

The other day, while J was upstairs packing, I was puttering in the kitchen and Cute W was putting together some banana bread for her to take with her back to Smith. We could feel her excitement from downstairs, and we looked at each other and both chuckled about how thrilled she was to leave us. Like, we totally get it, but also, it doesn’t feel wonderful to know that your favorite people in the whole world are just absolutely desperate to get away from you.

So, I reminded myself, and I thought that some of my friends could use the reminder at this time of year as well:

M is already back in Iowa for her final year of college. After a semester away in Chile, she was practically levitating with excitement to get back. Because she’ll be living off campus, she didn’t have to wait for a specific date to arrive, so the clear choice was to get there as soon as possible. And now we’ve learned that she’s been approved to play soccer by her doctor, so her joy is complete.

J, starting her second year, managed to finagle an early arrival on campus by taking on a few shifts working in a dining hall. I dropped her off yesterday, which turned out to be a more strenuous undertaking than I had anticipated. Our car was packed with not only her own possessions, but various large and unwieldy items belonging to her friends who live much farther away, and once we arrived on campus and unloaded, we hauled two carloads of her friends’ stuff out of storage so that it would be waiting in their rooms when they arrived from the airport. Clearly she was ready to dispense with the moving in and organizing and begin the college fun as soon as they could.

I went back home and took to my bed.

Ha! Okay, yes, I literally arrived home and took a long nap, but that was more because of the four hours of driving in the pouring rain, navigating myself to the sandwich shop, three instances of tricky parallel parking, and hauling so. much. stuff. up and down so. many. stairs. I was exhausted, not mourning!

As much as I love my children, there are certainly things about them that I won’t miss. Like negotiating who will have custody of the only automatic car we own since they both gave up on learning stick. Or always having to disconnect and pair all the Bluetooth devices every single time we use them. Or finding an entire table surface taken over by a messy craft-in-progress. Or losing kitchen items because they’ve unloaded the dishwasher incorrectly even though we’ve been putting those things in that cabinet for literally decades.

Still: it is quiet. But the consolation is that I know that they are so happy. They love their classes, they love their friends. And it is so much easier to be long-distance when I know that they are profoundly content. And I feel like these days, more than ever, so many kids and their parents aren’t that lucky. There are so many mental health challenges, so many kids are anxious or depressed. I know so many kids who’ve struggled to find the right place for them, and I feel profoundly fortunate that my kids have had (knock on wood!) relatively smooth sailing. So I’m sending they-will-get-through-this energy to all the families who are anxiously planning for or struggling to navigate the transition away from home.

And for those of us whose kids are so fantastically psyched to move on to the next thing that they might low-key forget that we exist for a while, just remember that no news is usually good news.