Departing for college: It's tough on moms

Sunday, September 5, 2010
(Updated Monday, September 6 - 6:18 am)
By Carole Perkins
Special to the News & Record



It’s Sunday morning on the day our oldest daughter, Caroline, is moving into her college dorm. My husband is behind the wheel of our red Suburban. I ride shotgun, and our middle daughter sits in the back. Caroline and her boyfriend drive her SUV, packed with the staples of college dorm life: a desk light, fan, office chair and clothes.
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We meet just outside Raleigh, where Caroline will be a freshman. She glances at me over the sub she is eating and says, “What’s wrong? You’re acting funny.”

Tears well in my eyes. I swallow hard, unable to speak lest the dam breaks, despite having taken a snippet of a “mother’s little helper” to get through this day.

“This is hard on your mom,” the boyfriend says, explaining the obvious.

Up and down we ride, packed like sardines in elevators filled with excited young faces. In the hallway, a mother brushes away tears like annoying gnats. I’ve planned my crying time in the car on the way home after months of staying so busy I wouldn’t think about Caroline leaving home.

To me, it symbolized an end of an era when the family was always together. A chapter of my life as a mother was ending. Tomorrow, I will set two places at the breakfast table with Nana’s rosebud china instead of three.

The boyfriend is taking this harder than anyone expected. Caroline pulls him over to a bench and pats his knee, whispering consoling words. Finally, we get into the car to go back to Greensboro. The boyfriend sits in the back and puts his head in his hands saying, “I can’t believe this day is finally here.”

I turn around in my seat to look at him. My voice shakes, and I plead, “Please don’t get me started.”

My plan to cry all the way home is thwarted. With the boyfriend so upset, I assume the role of the stoic parent. Besides, I have never mastered the fine art of weeping in a ladylike fashion. No, sir. If I am going to cry, I will sob, snort, and pound my chest. So, mentally, I stick my finger in the hole in my heart like the legendary Little Dutch Boy did to stop the dam from overflowing.

I travel to Raleigh the very next day under the pretext of taking our youngest daughter to visit. I go back on Wednesday to take Caroline to lunch. A week later, I return with her freshly washed and folded laundry. The following week I’m back with her boyfriend’s laundry that I shamelessly offer to wash.

And so the fall of freshman year passes. I learn the fine art of gentle weeping. I might be in Harris Teeter studying soup labels and the tears will roll down like a sprinkler on a timer. One day after wandering the town in such sadness, I run into a friend whose daughter has gone to college that fall.

“How are you?” I ask, touching her shoulder like a comrade in arms.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she chirps. “Lauren loves college, and she’s really happy.”

Cheated out of a bonding moment with another mom in misery, I drive away muttering to myself. How can she be so chipper, so positive about how happy her daughter is? Doesn’t she have a hole in her heart, too?

Christmas break for Caroline’s school is almost a month long. She fills the house with her friends and her big personality . One day toward the end of the break, I actually find myself for half a second relishing the thought of having our house just a little calmer. It is getting easier to let her go.

Two years later, our middle daughter, Virginia, is a senior in high school. One day while looking through some old photos for her senior page, some unforeseen force punches me in the stomach with the realization that she, too, will leave for college in a few short months. I sink to my knees and sit cross-legged on the floor, tucking my muffin top into my jeans as unconsciously as tucking my hair behind my ear.

I hold the photo of Virginia’s first day in kindergarten, standing with her sisters in front of the woody station wagon dubbed The Old Gray Goose. I smile through my tears at her as a toddler sitting in our driveway with a plastic shopping cart upside down on her head. The Beatles song “She’s Leaving Home” plays in my head as I imagine myself as the mother in the song “standing alone at the top of the stairs/she breaks down and cries to her husband/Daddy, our baby’s gone.”

Most of Virginia’s friends have left by now. I have a few precious days with her until we pack her up and move her almost three hours away to Spartanburg, S.C. It’s too far for lunch or laundry runs, and I’ll have to figure out how to manage a maddening condition whereby one’s buttocks kill after sitting any longer than an hour.

Such is the passage of time. One minute, all three daughters are piled in the bathtub at the bewitching hour of 5 p.m. Fresh, clean-smelling little girls in matching cotton nightgowns snuggle on the sofa watching Wee Sing tapes, and the next minute Father Time plucks them away one by one to lead lives of their own. As it should be.

So, when Virginia goes to college, I’ll try to celebrate a new chapter in her life as I struggle with painful buns, a spreading muffin top and a fresh hole in my heart. I will kiss her and hug her and turn for one last look. She’s leaving home. Bye-bye.

Carole Perkins is a freelance writer living in Greensboro. Contact her at CPGuilford@aol.com