Chapter Nine: You're Doing WHAT at College? PART I

Ch 9: You’re doing WHAT at college?

     My daughter leaving for college was something I tried to brace myself for. The experience was as traumatic, I am sure, as it is for most parents. We brought her to the city in a car packed like the family donkey at the end of “Fiddler on the Roof.” It was crammed full of stuff that she would make me take home on subsequent visits. For a while, we weren’t entirely sure she was in the backseat during that first drive down. Discarded McDonald’s wrappers indicated that she was.

     I didn’t want to leave her dorm the day we dropped her off. I cried before we exited the building. As a matter of fact, I cried for three months. Certain things triggered tears: passing a school bus, driving past her elementary school, walking into her bedroom or seeing an empty place at our table. Rob got used to nightly crying jags at dinner.

“Stop going into her room,” he said, gently taking me by the shoulders. “Besides, there’s nothing left to clean in there!”

     Indeed, the room was spotless, until she came home for a visit. Somehow in ten minutes, her bedroom became Dorothy’s farmhouse after the twister. I didn’t care. She was under our roof and all was right with the world again.

     We realized that life without a college student was very different from life with a college student. Something happens at college that changes a teen’s sleeping schedule completely. My daughter must have inherently known this because she avoided choosing any classes that began before noon.

When she was at school, I’d often call her in the afternoons.

“Hi honey, it’s me. What are you doing?”

“I just woke up.”

“It’s 2 o’clock!”

“I know. Class isn’t until 3. I wanted to get up early and grab some breakfast.”

Other times, I’d call her in the evening before we went to bed. 

“Hi honey, it’s me. What are you doing?”

“Getting ready for a party. What are you doing?”

“I just changed into my pajamas.”

“Already? It’s 10:30!”

     When she came home to visit, our schedules really clashed. We tried to stay up with her to watch television, but by 1 am, my rear end fell asleep and my eyes were rolling back in my head.

She’d shake her head and say, “You guys are lame,” and pop a handful of Nerds into her mouth.

     There were late nights when she came home at curfew (which happened to be two hours past my bedtime). Her entrance would send our pets into a frenzy of running, barking and meowing in a raucous welcome. My daughter would rattle around the kitchen, frying herself some eggs and making a chocolate shake in the blender.

     She was responsible for doing her own laundry at college. But amazingly, when she was home, piles of dirty clothes grew exponentially.

“Your dirty laundry is going to walk downstairs by itself pretty soon. Can you please do some wash?” I asked.

“But Mom,” she whined, “I have to do it myself at college.”

     However, when she came home in the summer, she brought the same bottle of detergent we gave her in the beginning of the school year, and it was three-quarters full. I estimated she did two loads of laundry in nine months of college.

     Attending college in a big city is daunting for both parents and children. At orientation, the guides took the students on the subway, warned them to travel in groups, to stay within campus security lights, to clutch their backpacks and to ignore strangers even if they were bleeding on the street. The day we dropped my daughter off, the dormitory building was swarmed with carloads of parents and students unloading vehicles and moving boxes up to dorms. Campus security guards were everywhere, assisting people and directing traffic. We noticed a man across the street, lying on his back on the concrete steps of a church. He wasn’t moving and his body was twisted at an odd angle. We were alarmed and brought it to the attention of a security officer.

“Do you think that man is alright?” we asked and pointed.

     The security officer gave a quick glance across the street. With a wave of his hand he said, “Yeah, he’s alright. Just sleepin’ it off.”

     Sure enough, two hours later the prostrate man was gone. We’d succeeded in branding ourselves as a bunch of country bumpkins! 

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