I just dropped middle kid off at school. Why do we, as Americans, take such pride in sending our kids off to far-away, over-priced liberal arts colleges? I was talking to my sister about this. Why don't we, as she suggested, send them to community college and then to the local state school? It would be easier on the wallet and the heart. For the price of 2 liberal arts educations we could have gone on many fancy-ass vacations and/or purchased and maintained a second home in a tropical paradise. The third one hasn't decided where she's going to go to college. We can only hope that she aims low.
I had fun in Nashville with boy one and boy two. The time between graduating from my expensive liberal arts college and sending my boys off to theirs doesn't seem like 30+ years. If I subtract that number from my entry into college, that equals 1956. That's crazy. The time between 1956 to 1986 was warp years longer than the time between 1990 and 2020. There is not equality in the differences. In the south, we'd often say "same difference". This is most definitely NOT the same difference. That means that when my kids and their friends look at me and my husband they see old, irrelevant people. I went out to bars and listened to live music and played pool and did jello shots and had questionable judgement. I'm still that person, right?
I took son one and his friends to dinner on Thursday night. They were the nicest group of boys (men? at ages 19-20 some might call them men) I'd ever met. One of them asked, un-ironically, who was going to say the blessing before we ate. They all thanked me and asked me thoughtful questions and asked how my trip, to drop son two at his school, went. They were talking about the stock market and summer internships and fluency in second languages. They reminisced about where they were and what they were doing when they received the first e-mail telling them their semester had been temporarily suspended and the subsequent one evicting them from their dorms for remote, virtual learning for the remainder of the semester. Sitting in that mediterranean restaurant, I realized these kids are better than we were.
Son two seemed melancholy prior to depositing him in his mountain retreat for the next 3+ months. He spent 3 months away at school then 3 months back at home with his friends from high school. As all first year college students do, he was having some buyers remorse: "Maybe I've made the wrong decision? Maybe I should be with all my high school friends in the college town 2 hours from home" Secretly, my heart leapt with glee, thinking to myself, "Absolutely you should transfer straight away! As a matter-of-fact, you should never leave home at all." Knowing this might have been the response he and I both wanted to hear, but also recognizing the irresponsibility of this statement, I did the right thing. I told him everyone feels this way at first and he will find his people at school and his friends from home will remain his friends and get closer over time. Then we went and spent about $500 at Walmart, Target, GameStop and Piggly Wiggly on crap for his dorm and by the time I left him, he didn't look back and he was content to be rid of me.
We spend the first half of our life anticipating the next phase and the second half of our life reminiscing about the times we were so eager to pass by. How could this be the same boy, boy two, who screamed every time we placed him in his car seat and begged for McDonald's just for the Happy Meal toy and required so many trips to the emergency room? How can boy one, the one so adjusted in his second year away from home, be the same kid who cried if I was 2 minutes late to pick him up at the end of the day and who refused to get out the car in middle school until I told him I was going to call the truancy officer and who floated in the pool with me one summer night when he was 13 years old and lamented about his perceived lack of friends.
After dropping boy 2 and visiting with boy 1, I flew to my ancestral home to visit my dad and my step-mom. I hadn't been there in 4 and a half years. I hadn't seen my dad and his wife in almost 2 years (cursed pandemic). Dad picked me up at the airport and with a few wrong turns averted ("I don't make it too far from home any more and my reflexes aren't what they used to be."), we made it back to their house. Forty-eight hours really isn't enough time. Mostly we sat together and chatted and he showed me You-Tube videos of animals and I looked up locations he and my step-mom could get their vaccine and showed them how to put Amazon Prime on their Roku stick. I used to marvel at how neat and orderly their house always seemed to be but there was never a bunch of kids around to f*ck it up. I went down to his wood shop with him and looked at the wood turnings he's been working on and I cherished the orderliness of their lives. Every tool had it's own home on a peg board or in a series of PVC pipes he had constructed for his wood-turning instruments. All the bins were labeled. They have a rhythm and they always have and it's taken me to the age of 52 to truly appreciate it and recognize the beauty. I demonstrated to my father the proper technique in binge-watching a series on Netflix (no, you can't just watch 2 episodes) and we played songs on his speaker and cavorted with my canine brothers. I see my mom several times a week but this trip forced me to reevaluate the lack of frequency with which I attend to my most important relationships. Not a minute could be spared. My sister came over for dinner the second night and we caught up as much as we could in an hour and a half and we compared notes on raising teenagers (young adults?).
I've always been sentimental. I came out of the womb that way. The cancer was a gift that reinforced certain choices. I'm glad that my hand was forced to reevaluate and reprioritize. Just like we didn't, our kids won't stick around forever, fancy liberal arts school or not. I can only hope they'll want to come back and spend time with Lee and me. It's been time well spent, this life. I hadn't wanted to get reflective, but, as I said, that is who I am. And if my kids don't want to come visit me, I can always get a dog, binge watch Netflix (if I can figure out how to use the remote control), finally get out my label maker and organize my life, and watch dog YouTube videos.
