We don't yet own a suitcase big enough for our next major trip, which will be to take Sarah to college in the fall. I doubt that such a case even exists; how can you pack an entire life into a finite space? I expect that we will have to use more than one: We will stride onto campus together, Sarah in the middle, Larry and me at either flank, pulling her future behind us in thirds, as we walk up to the first room she will live in that is not down the hallway from ours.
The insidious thing about her leaving is how we endorsed the inevitable without realizing it. We taught her to flee, didn't we: Her first piece of luggage, the diaper bag, took her not just to the park but to the train station, to the airport, to places no self-respecting baby would ever go unless her parents packed her supplies and took her there. We taught her to take a look around, and once she's gone I will have lots of time to wonder why we didn't stick to the neighborhood, where we might have successfully raised a kid who never wanted to be more than a zip code away.
By the time she started first grade she had her own little flowered knapsack, into which she packed the things that mattered to her when we went on a vacation; eight or nine stuffed animals, a pad to draw on and colored pencils with which to draw. Once she got to middle school, she acquired a series of backpacks of increasing and worrisome heft. Those literally weighty tomes were the keys to the kingdom, though we didn't realize it at the time: Learn all this stuff, fill out a bunch of forms, graduate, and presto, you get to go to college.
I see now that the fulcrum of her life was the college tour she went on over spring break in her sophomore year, the academic equivalent of speed-dating - a college every three hours! Before the ink on the check was dry we were getting calls like this: "I'm on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 45th Street. Where's the restaurant with that cheese and tomato thing?"
The pace picked up dramatically after that. Temptation was everywhere, even in a mailbox that had ignored her for years. Suddenly colleges in cities neither Larry nor I had ever visited were sending seductive brochures addressed not to us but directly to our daughter - and she looked at them, and started to construct a hierarchy of desire.
And we, the reluctant but dutiful co-conspirators, bought her a file cabinet in which she could keep all the brochures and letters and applications, so that she would have an alphabetized plan for her escape at her very fingertips. The summer before her senior year, she signed up for a month-long program all the way across the country, and, as much as I didn't like the idea of losing her, I began to look forward to it - as I might look forward to root canal, which would hurt temporarily but would protect me, down the line, from a world of pain. Whatever a program like this offered our children, it offered parents an honorable experiment in being alone. This was a chance to build up calluses so that the real thing wouldn't hurt so much.
A few days before Sarah was supposed to come home, she called to say that her throat hurt, so she was going to sleep for the afternoon, because the next day was full of wonderful events she could not possibly miss. It was a half-and-half call; the little girl who wanted her mom to make the sore throat go away, and the busy young woman who had to get over it fast so that she could get back to her life. We went through the regimen - liquids, rest, staying away from contaminated surfaces, compulsive hand-washing - and then we got to the truth.
"I really want to see you and Daddy, and you know I miss you," she began, "but I wish this could go on for another month."
There it was: If she had the choice, she would have stayed away a while longer, which did not mean that she no longer cared about us. It took me a moment to find my breath.
"Somebody asked me if you were having a good time," I said, "and I told her that if you could find a way to stay in the dorm room and start your freshman year in the fall, you'd do it. And that would be okay with Daddy and me."
I could not believe that I had said such a thing. I could not believe that I meant it, but in fact, I did. This was startling to me. Faced with a truly happy child, my complaints vanished. Faced with a truly happy child, I could not mention such pinched and irremediable concerns as missing her, as wishing that time would stand still, as wanting just for a moment to have a toddler in my arms.
I can't hang onto it; blithe will not be a word anyone uses to describe me once Sarah goes to college. I'm sure I'll call too often, I'll send an email for no good reason, I will find compellingly irrelevant excuses to visit, and sometimes I will be hurt if she's too busy to talk. I will feel all the things I felt this summer in miniature: Lost, lonely, old, irrelevant; and, yes, capable, rested, focused, and occasionally even well-groomed. It was, and it will be, intolerable and appropriate. Painful and a vicarious thrill. Heart-breaking and elating. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function," in which case I am in the midst of a very smart season.
Karen and her Daughter, Sarah.
Excerpt from "Proof of Love," in The Empty Nest: 31 Parents Tell the Truth About Relationships, Love, and Freedom After the Kids Fly the Coop, edited by Karen Stabiner. Voice/Hyperion, May 8 2007