Empty Nest: Stressing Out at College Orientation (Me, Not Him)

My parents didn’t go with me to college orientation, for the simple reason that my small, experimental liberal arts college in New England didn’t have one. There weren’t any get-to-know-each-other games or campus tours, and there wasn’t anything for parents to do but write that first, heart-stopping check. Now, of course, things are different. Our invitation to orientation came soon after Sam was accepted. I was of course delighted, because this was my last way to stave off the inevitable. I RSVP’d online as directed, found cheap airfare, and started building the only summer vacation we could afford around it.

I’d already conducted an experiment in letting go completely, with mixed results. Because Sam graduated with high grades and has been a stellar kid, we let him go to Bonnaroo [2]—“a four day, multi stage camping festival held on a 700 acre farm in Manchester Tennessee.” Before he left, I checked the weather reports obsessively; they called for torrential rain. While he was gone, I took little solace in the Facebook mom friend who also had a son at Bonarroo and kept asking, “Heard from Sam yet? Jake says his phone has run out of juice.” I tried to sound calm when Sam phoned and in the course of the conversation told me that two people had just tried to sell him opium. (“And there’s a new drug that is supposed to simulate the light you see before you die ...”)

So, orientation seemed like a stress-free interlude, which would allow us to continue pretending that we would be going through Sam’s next stage of life together. True, the literature from the school tried hard to dispel this illusion. Don’t expect to see your kids during this period, the postcard warned. They have things to do. But for a little longer, we could still hope.

We flew into New York and coped with nerves in our usual way, with retail therapy. Sam’s favorite place in Manhattan is not the Statue of Liberty or Rockefeller Center or Ellis Island or the Museum of Modern Art (hell no!), but H&M, the clothing discounter that has become almost as ubiquitous in the city as Starbucks. He bought three slogan tee shirts—a white one with the word “peace” in many languages was his favorite—and a canvas bag for the clothes he’d be wearing during the three-day, two-night event. He was assembling a costume for his new role, and the Eddie Bauer roller bag from Target that had been so cool for the last few years just didn’t make the cut. I’d had a similar fashion crisis before we’d left—we’d be meeting faculty and administrators at a major university. Should I wear my journalist jeans, an earth-mom sundress, a working-mom suit? I wound up packing a full summer wardrobe in order to put off the final decision.

I’d been visiting Manhattan fearlessly since I was a child. But walking the streets as the mother of a teenager who was going to live there gave me a whole new perspective. I watched grown women (and men) checking out my handsome, oblivious son, got caught in a few sudden thunderstorms, and listened to harrowing tales of unemployment. Before long, I started wondering whether Sam should have gone to the small school in Oregon that had been his second choice. Whose idea had it been it to choose college in Manhattan—Sam’s alone, or his parents’ subconscious desire to satisfy our own unfulfilled dreams? “Gee, I hope he likes it here,” confided my husband, John, who lived in New York in his 20s. I responded with some sort of maternal/post-therapeutic nonsense, like “I’m sure the school wouldn’t have taken him if they’d thought he couldn’t manage.”

I have to hand it to the school. They knew exactly who they were dealing with: a bunch of overly anxious, overly educated, proud, and doting parents. The schedule had been created both to reassure us that our child would a) be well taken care of and b) well educated. But also, in a subtle way, the grownups’ orientation started working at loosening the bonds we’d all been holding in a death grip for almost two decades.

The orders were to drop Sam off at his assigned dorm on Tuesday morning, 9 a.m., which we did after a wordless breakfast and a quick subway ride. It was a cool, cloudy day, and the place was easy to spot: It was the building with about 100 18-year-olds out front, looking pie-eyed and terrified, as if they were going on the Bataan Death March instead of embarking on the most carefree years of their lives. Sam gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and then allowed himself to be swallowed up by the crowd. John and I looked at each other with what I have come to recognize as a newfound tentativeness, the caption of which could read, Now what do we do? We had the whole day to ourselves until the first parent session at 5 p.m. We went to Starbucks, read the papers, had lunch with an old friend, and generally tried not to feel like amputees. It wasn’t that Sam hadn’t been away from us before, but at those times— travels with friends, his service trips to Mexico—we’d always known, as much as anyone can ever know, that he was coming back home.

I skipped the campus tour because of a business meeting, but John went, and happened to pass Sam with his group along the way. Sam looked happy, he reported—already chatting and laughing with new friends. Father and son nodded to each other, but didn’t speak. “It was like I was seeing him in a dream,” John told me, sounding awed and a little rattled. In the early evening we found ourselves on folding chairs in a lovely room with exposed brick walls, surrounded by equally enervated parents, listening to perfect strangers talking about our children. The speakers were all soothing and encouraging, but their language was the first indication that our jobs were over. No one used the word child, son, or daughter. Suddenly, our little treasures were all “students”—as in, Ask your student what is going on, because the school is prohibited by the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act law (1974) from telling parents about their child’s grades or mental states, for starters. (“We can tell you a lot, but please don’t ask us to break the law,” our speaker said.) We were introduced to various administrators, whose sole purpose seemed to be to make sure that our very own ... “student” had the best possible experience. Sam would have access to a full array of deans, professors, advisers, and peer counselors to help him make every decision. Briefly, it occurred to me that I had paid a therapist an enormous amount of money to learn to stop doing all those things for Sam, and now I was paying an army of people even more money to do it for me.

At the wine and cheese reception that followed, the most striking thing was this: No parent was particularly interested in meeting any other parent. At all. For anyone who had ever been a room mother, PTO officer, Halloween Carnival chairman, prom chaperone, etc., this was a watershed moment. The search for allies and the avoidance of enemies—the entire social framework required to best propel a child through school—had been rendered abruptly and completely moot with that college acceptance letter. There would be no trading of teacher gossip, no evaluation of the current principal, no opining over neighborhood real estate. “Maybe we’ll meet someone we might like to take to dinner,” John had suggested on our way to the event, but that wasn’t in the cards: We met some awkwardly divorced parents from Connecticut, some interesting parents from Cuba, but nothing really took.

Virtually all of the socializing was between parents and teachers, or parents and administrators. Here, the interactions were less like those at a cocktail party—no eyes roamed about the room—than those at a very nice sanitarium: Representatives from the school were aiming to reassure and calm. Suffice it to say that it was the first time in many years that I had a discussion with anyone about contemporary American poetry.

The next day at Parental Support 101, my anxiety level began to rise again. The Financial Aid speaker mentioned a Plan B (“In the event that one parent loses a job ...”). The Health and Wellness speaker informed us about binge drinking, and urged parents to ask their students whether they knew the signs of alcohol poisoning. (Just to make sure they do, a three-hour online course is required.) The difficulty of finding a private therapist in the city of New York was also mentioned.

Then came the housing discussion, which seemed to bring out the Big Mommy in everyone, even the dads. Not coincidentally, it provided a window into the coddled world of today’s teenager: Was there a linen service? (Uh, no.) Who cleans the rooms? (“I get asked this every year—the students clean the rooms,” our speaker declared.) Were the layouts of the rooms available online? (“No, but we’re working toward it ...”) What about nutrition in the cafeteria? Well, the lunch lines offer vegan, vegetarian, hypoallergenic, kosher, etc. If you listened carefully, you could hear the sounds—sort of like cracking icebergs—of parents losing control.

Sam’s reaction was the saving grace. He didn’t text often, but he did respond to questions from the audience. “All is very well,” he answered, when I sent him a message after 24 hours of radio silence. “Isn’t the new building super nice?” His classes, he said, were “SO COOL!!!!” When he met us at the end of orientation, he seemed to have grown five inches and five years. He was flushed with delight, full of stories about new kids and teachers, excited about academics for the first time in his life. He was ready to go, I thought. Was I?