Sending Your Last Acorn to College?

I woke up in a hotel in Missouri and stared at the face of my youngest child. I was leaving her at college today, and I cried like I was watching an ASPCA commercial.

Panic descended as I realized that today was the day I stopped taking kids to school and going to soccer games and braiding hair (just kidding – due to my lack of skills my daughter has fixed her own hair since she was two).

How could I leave my littlest acorn in a place that was seventeen hours from home? How could I leave her after the briefing the campus police gave us on finding “safe” places if she’s being followed? How could I leave her knowing the amount of alcohol I consumed in my first year of college?

I knew the brief terror she’d face when we drove away, because I felt it when my parents left me my freshman year. Dad hugged me and said, “I’m going to miss my little redbird,” which confused me because he’d never called me that before. Then he started to cry. Mom hugged me and shoved me towards the steps of my dorm in her gentle, motherly, I’ve-had-enough-and-you-need-to-go-to-college kind of way.

As my parents pulled away, I wanted to chase the car like a dog. But instead, I turned and faced my future. And by that night I was leaning out my window looking at the faces of college guys as they screamed for my underwear. It was great.

How to Let Your Baby Go . . .

Leaving kids in college is hard enough, but if it’s your only child or last child, there’s more at play than you might realize. You’re letting go of the most exhausting, amazing role of a lifetime; you’re releasing the final vestige of youth.

Now, when you show up at a high school football game, you’ll just be the sad older person with a quilt and a thermos who can’t let it go.

All your excuses for staying young are being dropped at the front of a college dorm.

So, how do you handle it?

Here are my top six recommendations for letting that acorn drop . . .

1. Don’t cry for them, Argentina. Know that your child is now surrounded by thousands of hot people her age. She will cry for about 4.5 seconds. Once your car turns the corner, she’ll be running towards her future.
2. Give yourself permission to grieve. That’s right. Once your baby is out of the house, you’ll find yourself doing weird things like wandering around the city asking complete strangers, “Who am I?” You’ll order books like “What Color is My Parachute?” and become obsessed with anybody who can give you something concrete to hold onto . Do what it takes. Let yourself absorb the feeling – because it’s that loss that will soon turn into your new beginning.
3. Relish the silence. After my daughter left and my son went to work, I was alarmed at the quiet that blanketed my home; it was as if a fog descended upon it. Absorb the vastness of a quiet life. Before you know it, somebody’s going to show up with grandkids.
4. Don’t get old. I think I did, a little. I stopped exercising, and spent most of my time watching “Friends” while eating Dill Potato Chips.When I was talking to a colleague about something funny that Chandler said, and he asked if Chandler was my neighbor, I knew that I needed to get involved with real people.
5. Rediscover your spouse or friends. Arrange some dinners – you know, the meals you cancelled for the past twenty-five years due to school schedules and illnesses. Find your friends or your spouse and go eat something the kids hated. Get a double-martini. Pretend you’re on “Mad-Men.” Have fun.
6. Get ready – you’re going to like it. I mourned on and off for probably a year . . . although menopause elongated the experience by slamming me with hot flashes and lethargy. I had been going at breakneck speed for so long, I had forgotten what freedom was like. Now I go to Barnes and Noble, get a book, buy coffee, and READ FOR AS LONG AS I WANT. I see other mothers with their kids pulling on them and smile in a sadistic, not-as-much-fun-as-I-was-remembering kind of way.

Your littles acorns might call a few times because they’re lonely, but know that they are learning how to live without you, just like you’re learning to live without them.

And like two oaks with their roots intertwined, you will both become stronger without ever breaking the bond.

Because below the surface of life, and underneath words like “Mom, you just don’t get it,” you know that your roots are holding on to each other as tightly as possible.

Whether our little acorns like it or not, we’re forever intertwined.

Now go sip on a drink and read a book.

Not because you have to, but because you can.