Heidi Stevens
Tribune News Service
When Viki Noe was preparing to send her only child to college, it was dirty clothes that kept her up at night.
“I remember silently panicking more than once,” Noe told me. “Does she really know how to do her laundry?”
Sometimes laundry is a metaphor.
“I spent the summer saving quarters for the laundry in her dorm,” Noe continued, “only to find out upon arrival that the laundry room used a debit-type of card.”
Which meant her daughter was suddenly in the possession of a clunky, if well-intentioned, reminder of home. And Noe was suddenly the beneficiary of another reminder: that what our kids need when they embark on their exciting new chapters isn’t always the same as what we needed when we embarked on ours.
Then Hurricane Sandy hit. Two months into her daughter’s exciting new chapter.
“She was in the part of Manhattan without power, heat or cell phone service,” Noe recalled. “It took three days for us to get her back here until the school and dorm reopened.”
Guess how they corresponded?
“She somehow found one of the last remaining pay phones in New York City,” Noe said, “and used her quarters to call us. My saving wasn’t wasted.”
Of course it wasn’t. Love never is.
Noe shared her story with me because she knows, through my social media posts and columns, that I’m sending my first-born to college in August. Sending is a funny word. Driving, slowly, and then clinging to her leg and sobbing when it’s time to leave while her new roommate, who I’m sure is lovely and I’m not the least bit jealous of, shoos me away is maybe more accurate.
Anyway, Noe reached out to offer a little wisdom.
“It’s hard on them, too, you know,” she said. “Because underneath all that excitement is sheer terror. So remember, you’re not the only one whose emotions are all over the map.”
It helped. I wanted more.
I put out a call in my Balancing Act Facebook group for advice from parents who’ve launched their kids after high school — to college, trade school, military, gap year, you name it. The answers poured in.
“Settle down about what dorm your student gets and how much stuff to send with them,” Carole Delahunty wrote. “It’s a blip of time in the college experience and not worth all the stress and time.”
“Here is what we don’t talk about enough,” Sheila Storrer Mercer wrote, “the fun of having college kids. The visits, learning new things from them. Getting to meet their friends and their friends’ parents. Parents weekends and the football games and the newness of a new place and experiences. I didn’t expect this because I was so heartbroken when my oldest left for college, but it’s a really fun new chapter for us parents too.”
“The best advice I was given was to immediately take a mini-vacation somewhere with my husband,” Karen Haney Jacobs wrote. “Don’t go right back to your quiet house, where you will want only to walk into your kid’s room and hug their pillow and cry. Leave the college campus and spend two or three days together some place totally different. … By the time you get home, you’ll have already climbed a lot of the emotional hill, and hopefully you’ll have spent some good time practicing for the next phase of your life.”
“When I dropped my oldest off at college I had the exact same feelings I did when I dropped her off at kindergarten,” Katy Coffey wrote. “Will they take care of her? Will they know when she’s hungry she says she’s not hungry but she really is? Will they know when she needs some quiet time? Will they know that she’s really smart? Will they know that her confidence is not a show? All my questions and fretting were pointless. She knew and that’s all that mattered. Oh, I also told her to be the first to text me. I didn’t want to hover. I was sobbing in the cab on the way to the airport and got a text saying, ‘Hi, mom. You can text me now.’”
(Now I’m sobbing.)
“I’ll tell you a story about my own experience being dropped off at college,” Allison Clark offered. “My parents unloaded my stuff into my dorm room and then my dad basically hugged me, said goodbye and abruptly left to head back to the car. My mother stayed a little bit longer and then left as well. Months later I told my mom that I was a little hurt that my dad left so quickly when they dropped me off. ‘Oh, Allison,’ my mom said. ‘Your dad was about to cry, and he didn’t want to cry in front of you. He was very proud about not ever being seen crying.’
“I will forever be grateful that she shared that insight with me,” Clark continued, “because it both corrected my memory of what had happened and made me feel so much more understanding of his experience as a parent. It also meant that when I dropped my own child off in that same freshman dorm 34 years later, I made sure to both linger and openly cry before I left.”
Gorgeous.
“I found I would sometimes get phone calls that centered on fears, drama, failures, anxieties,” Joanie Lamb Callahan wrote. “I listened, tried to not give advice and then found myself feeling fearful, anxious and worried for them and whatever situation they were in. They were far away and it could keep me up at night or preoccupied during my days. Usually a day or so later we would be in touch to check in and there would be no mention of the situation. When I asked about it, they would say ‘What? Oh that…all good!’
“After a time,” Callahan continued, “I learned to take in their ‘laundry’ — stains, dirt and all — and let it fall from the phone into an imaginary basket and just put it out on the back porch. Someone else always found a way to deal with it and I was able to get on with my life and the kids with theirs. They are now in their 30s, and that darn basket occasionally fills up and I’m glad to have it handy.”
Sometimes laundry is a metaphor.
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Heidi Stevens is a Tribune News Service columnist. You can reach her at heidikstevens@gmail.com, find her on Twitter @heidistevens13 or join her Heidi Stevens’ Balancing Act Facebook group.