Though my son swears he googled the subject and found that no mother ever died of sadness, due to being abandoned by her beloved son for a college education, I am not so sure.
After all, broken-heart syndrome was just discovered in the last year or two, and in case people don't remember it, scientists argued that hearts can literally break from sadness. (I am not making this up, I swear!)
And I have to apologize right away to all of those people here with sons and daughters in the military. I feel guilty even whining about sending my son to college, when I know many of you are dealing with much, much harder separations and that the danger to your children is real and ever present. I am in awe of the courage that must take every day. I know what I'm facing is so little compared to what you're facing. So please forgive me for what follows.
I left my beloved son, a Freshman, at Clemson University yesterday.
First, let me say that we are lucky. Very lucky. He's only about 45 minutes away. He was accepted by Georgia Tech, but the financial aid just wasn't there. Davidson turned him down. (Only school to do so.) And as a pre-engineering major, he decided Clemson was the best place for him.
I am ridiculously glad he's only 45 minutes away.
But he's still not in our house. His room is half-empty and looks like someone was given 30 minutes to gather up his most prized possessions and then flee, because he packed at the last minute.
I hate just glancing in the door and knowing he's not there.
And yes, I know it's pathetic.
He's 18 and more than capable of being on his own, and I know he'll do well at college and learn a lot and have a great time.
I am truly happy for him. I'm thrilled. Honestly.
And so sad for me.
He's my 1st-born, my son, my fabulous boy. He's funny and silly and happy almost all the time and insanely good at math, the kid who always has an idea and talks all his friends into doing things. The kind who fills up the house with his friends night after night after night. So I'm not just losing him. I'm losing a houseful of boys, big, loud, funny, silly, wonderful boys, who are scattering all over the place, from Vancouver to Manhattan and many points in between.
Yes, I still have a daughter. She's 15. I live in fear of her auditioning for and getting into the Governor's School for the Arts next year, which in South Carolina is a boarding school for high school juniors and seniors. (Could the world be this cruel to me?)
I never thought I'd be one of those women who became a stay-at-home mom. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, my own mother worked full-time, even then, when hardly anyone else's mothers did. I expected to have a great, important, high-powered career and decided when my son was only a few weeks old that I was desperate not to leave him at all and the feeling did not go away. So I set out to rearrange my life to enter the baffling world of stay-at-home mom-dom, something not a ton of mothers were doing when he was born in 1989.
By the time he was three, my husband and I had made it happen. I was home with John and a new daughter, Laura. Home for the first time ever with two small children, in a town where we didn't know anyone (Greenville, SC) and not working for the first time. I gave up the newspaper world to try to write fiction.
So, I've been home with these two kids for the past 15 years, and I wouldn't have traded this life for anything. A little more financial security would have been nice. A little more of a life outside the home would have been good, too. A little more career success... yeah, I could have stood that.
But I was here, every day, and I wouldn't have traded that for anything.
I sent him off yesterday thinking, He is my gift to the world, and he may well accomplish incredible things and help tons of people, and now I have to give him up and let him go and do great things.
He's gifted in math. (We're talking 99th percentile for years and years of standardized testing.) It just makes sense to him in ways it doesn't to normal people. Although he's starting out in pre-engineering, he still talks about medicine as a career. I tell him fascinating things will be happening with genetics research and that I think he would find it interesting enough and always challenging, which is something he needs.
Aside from that, he's kind-hearted and will go out of his way to help a friend. He's stubborn enough to work really hard and loves to be right, thinks he almost always is. And I adore him.
I look back and I think, parents have been doing this for years. They all let go eventually. And all this time, I had no idea how hard that was, and yet they all survived it. So I will, too.
But the house is so quiet. Time seems to move differently. I think about him tons of times a day, just what is he doing now? Is it fun? Is he happy? Will he call? Please, let him call, just for a minute. (And literally, his phone calls are usually measured in seconds, followed by, "Gotta go, mom. But he does call.)
I tried to explain to him, you don't know how much you can love until you have a child. You can't comprehend. And I think of all of you just now having babies and think, You have no idea how fabulous and how hard this is. Years and years of worry and trying to do the right thing for them, hoping you do the right thing, hoping they're safe and well and happy.
My son has had a privileged and very expensive education, one we really couldn't afford, but did anyway. And I wonder if we showed him enough of what the real world is like to know how fortunate he is, to be a force for good in the world. (I think, Please God don't let him ever be a Republican!) Let him care about people less fortunate than him and have a strong sense of fairness and work to make this a better world. Let his generation give their children a better world than we have given ours.
And then I think, But does he have to go out into the world right now?
Yeah, unfortunately, he does.
Anybody else sending a kid to college? Want to whine?