I think when I was in undergrad I was somehow subconsciously primed to find my life partner before graduation and boy did I try. (I don’t think at the time I would have described what I was doing in quite those terms but I wasn’t interested in casual dating and was pretty much always attempting to be dating so…) In hindsight I think it was kind of a distraction. It’s too bad that the time in your life when you have the most access to resources for learning (and the luxury of spending time learning!) is also the time when you are most hormonally charged AND have (unless you’re straight and going to same-gender school) proximity to a wonderful pre-selected pool of likely partners. WHO DESIGNED THIS SYSTEM?
I also (perhaps not unrelatedly) had a bumpy social start to college. I’m remembering now that there was a window at the beginning of freshman year when people were still looking for their people. I, however, had come to college with a new boyfriend, latched onto his RA group (because I didn’t find myself relating as much to most of my suitemates), and didn’t really spend much time getting to know other people. When that relationship started to crater, I looked around and realized that the friend groups were kind of set and I wasn’t really in one. It actually took me a couple of years to find my for-life friends in college and I remember sophomore year being particularly miserable. The thing I know now is that one doesn’t need to find all their BFFs (or their life partner) during those highly charged 4-5 years.
Separate topic: we dropped off the kid. And it was kind of epic and excruciating. First, my husband decided that we were going to do the entire trip in the electric car. It’s a ~12-hour drive to Seattle from the Bay Area and with our vehicle, you need to stop and charge every 150-200 miles. The charging takes 40 minutes. There are whole theories about how often to charge and how low to let your battery go (it charges faster between 0 and 50%) and my husband was happily geeking out about this while I suffered from extreme range anxiety. There is charging infrastructure at fairly reliable intervals along I-5 but sometimes the chargers don’t work; many of them aren’t fast chargers; sometimes they are already occupied. So you have to kind of embrace the adventure and be prepared to wait around (and maybe don’t pin all your hopes on one station and leave yourself with a very low battery on a very hot day? not that we did this…)
Our kiddo drove almost all the way to Seattle. I wedged in back with all his worldly goods; Pop sat in front and co-piloted, which was an exercise in restraint. The vibe felt awkward. I think S25 was anxious/excited/ready to be free of the focus of his parents. Limbo just isn’t a comfortable place and we had 2.5 days of it together.
We did finally get to move him in on Wednesday. He’s in one of the newer dorms and although they’ve made many of the doubles into triples, there still seems to be plenty of space. One of his roommates is local and basically showed up for half an hour on Friday, dumped his stuff, and then disappeared home for the weekend. But the other is a kid from Brazil who (in contrast to my kid) showed up with basically a suitcase and spent his first night in the dorm with no sheets or pillow even! (we took him to Target to help him find the basic necessities.) He seems like an interesting guy and they immediately hit it off – discovered they liked similar music and both enjoy cycling. S25 was helping him buy a laptop the day after they moved in together, and they’re working on finding him a road bike. My husband was working in the local office of his company on Thursday and Friday while I wandered around Seattle and moped, remembering adventures we’d had there together when our kid was younger and more portable/pliable. We finally said goodbye for good very quickly Saturday morning and headed home.
Some thoughts on this process: I like the fact that he is going far-ish away for school. It’s a significant drive and a different city (but not a long flight). I think for our son, not being in the same urban area where he grew up and his parents still live will be healthy. (it’s healthy for us too.) I do hope that in the long run we live closer to each other, though!
I won’t miss trying to parent a young adult. It was so awkward in the end – he wanted to be free and independent and eat when he felt like it and do things without having to explain them to us. I do wish I had a bit more confidence in his ability to adult. I don’t think he fully realizes how much scaffolding we provided for him. I wish we’d had a more gradual transition to adulting…that said, better now than later, and better late than never.
What I miss is the sense of being so central to his world – I miss the times when I was the first person he wanted to talk to about things. It’s a heady experience to be so essential to someone else, even when it’s also overwhelming. And I think this feels a little bit like a break-up might – you know intellectually that it’s for the best but you yearn for the early days when things were different. I’m also realizing that my husband and I are really going to need to rebuild our relationship, now that we’re not first and foremost co-parenting.
We are on the fence about “family weekend”, which is basically in four weeks. It seems way too soon – we just dropped him off! My gut tells me he’s going to want more space before he’s ready to show off his adulting and let us into his world again. Plus he’s coming home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’m going to let him lead on this one – if he wants us to come, one or both of us will hop on a plane. If not, we will hold off.
So…onward? onward!
(I can actually see her being happily single and having cats!)
I think he would tell me if he was having an disasters, but he also might be blissfully unaware. I’m trying to loosen the reigns, though.
