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—“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.