How to Send Your Son Off to College – Lisa Belkin in NYT

Parent Cafe
1

<p>I’m not sure if this has been posted elsewhere. My son’s a senior and I couldn’t get through this without a few tears.</p>

<p>How</a> to Send Your Son Off to College - Motherlode Blog - NYTimes.com</p>

<p>(Be sure to check out comment #s 15 & 24.)</p>

<p>*1. Realize it is well past time to go shopping. Sit down with him and make a list, vowing to keep it simple. Remember that when you yourself started college, your belongings fit neatly in a station wagon. You lived without a Brita water filtration system and a flat screen TV and a mini-fridge. He can too.</p>

<ol>
<li>Take your compact and sensible list to Bed Bath and Beyond — along with the two-inch-high stack of 20 percent off coupons you have been saving since he started high school. Make your way to the College Registry department, where the very helpful staff will print out a suggested shopping list, complete with his school’s logo. Notice that this list is quite a bit longer than your own. Notice that they hand HIM, not you, the wand that reads bar codes, instructing him to simply press the green button at anything he wants to buy.</li>
</ol>

<p>Wonder if this is how your husband felt when the saleswoman handed you the registry list in the Fortunoff’s china department 20 years ago. Make mental note to apologize to your husband. And to use your good china more often. Understand, as you didn’t back then, that this ritual is about accumulating stuff, sure, but also about furnishing a new chapter.</p>

<p>March around the store waving the wand at high-thread-count-extra-long-sheets, laundry hampers, desk lamps, pillows, comforters, a shower caddy, under-bed-storage-bins — and a Brita water filter.</p>

<p>Leave the store with nothing but a list of everything you have wanded, along with a map from his new campus to the nearest Bed Bath and Beyond, where your items will meet you in three weeks. Marvel at the business model and wonder why you didn’t come up with it back when you shopped for college.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Try not to panic when you arrive at designated Bed, Bath and Beyond to find they have lost half the order. Recreate it, with the assistance of Kevin, the world’s most helpful store manager. Be secretly grateful for the complication, which serves to take everyone’s mind off the looming goodbye at the end of the shopping trip. Add a few items you hadn’t even thought of the first time around (Trash cans! An iPod alarm clock!) and cram everything into the rented SUV.</p></li>
<li><p>Pull into the assigned parking lot at the appointed move-in hour. Watch as a swarm of remarkably cheery upperclassman surround the SUV and remove everything — including the mini-fridge offered at the last moment by a senior who didn’t need it any more — depositing it all outside your son’s dorm room, three flights up on a humid southern day.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>Spend next few hours swallowing the words “back when I started college.” That means not mentioning that no one carried your belongings up the stairs; or that the telephone company rep has been replaced by a cable TV rep (fitting since there are no longer landlines in dorm rooms, but everyone seems to have brought their own 22” flatscreen); or that in your day you could not use dining-plan points to have take-out delivered to the dorm; or that you didn’t have locks on the front door, and the bathroom door, and the desk drawer, and the fact that he does both reassures you and makes you anxious.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Meet his roommate. Envy his roommate. This stranger gets to know the details of your son’s day. Find that you are not feeling any of the things helpful friends warned you might — no grief, no relief, no tsunami of worry. Instead what you feel is curiosity. Remember standing outside the house on the first day of kindergarten, after the bus had pulled away, wondering “Who is he sitting with?,” “What is he thinking?,” “Will he eat his lunch?” That was when the questions began; this is where they begin to end.</p></li>
<li><p>Busy yourself with making his bed. In rooms up and down the hallway, mothers are making the beds. Tucking, smoothing, plumping, it feels like it did 18 years ago, readying a bassinet for a life that was just about to begin. Back then the sheets were yellow and green, because you were not sure who this person was. You now know who he is — but not who he will become.</p></li>
<li><p>Hug him good-bye. Hold on tight as you recall — reinhabit — another hug, one you haven’t thought of for decades. “Back when I started college …” and you stood in this same moment, your father’s arms wrapped around you, sensing he was trying not to cry. Your father has been gone for five years now, but you truly know, for the first time, that this is how it felt to be him.</p></li>
<li><p>Wonder when your son will have that same understanding. When he chooses his own china? Hangs his own mobiles over a waiting crib? Will this hug become his dormant memory, one that surfaces only when it’s his turn to pass it along?</p></li>
<li><p>Imagine where he will be standing and who he will be hugging when he remembers.</p></li>
<li><p>Then watch him walk away.*</p></li>
</ol>

2

<p>OK, I’m crying already and we’re still a year away.</p>

3

<p>Drat! Crying at work…AGAIN! </p>

<p>Son started 12th grade today. We got out his first-day-of-kindergarten photo and recreated the shot by the same tree in the yard. I couldn’t frame the shot through my tears. H had to take over. :(</p>

<p>This is gonna be a long year.</p>

4

<p>Making the bed. LOL This will be good one when we arrive. I have told him many times how to do it. Take the plastic covering and put it on first to keep out the allergens. Then put the foam pad down. Then put the mattress pad down. Then the fitted sheet and top sheet completed by the blanket. Now, if I let him actually do it for himself? Throw the foam pad down on bed and sleep on it.</p>

5

<p>

</p>

<p>I didn’t cry two days ago when I was making D’s bed on move-in day, but I’m crying now. Thanks for posting.</p>

6

<p>This was very moving for me. Made me cry, again. We have the final good bye this Friday with S1 - he will be more than 1000 miles away and two plane rides. I am reading the other thread “dropped S off, feel fine” to get a different perspective on this leave-taking. Still have wonderful S2 home for four years - thank heavens. </p>

<p>I especially liked “Envy his roommate. This stranger gets to know the details of your son’s day.” That is what I will miss - being a part of his daily living, knowing what makes up his day. I helped shape those days for 18 years - now that is gone. I am proud and pleased though as he enters an incredibly exciting chapter of his life at a wonderful school. This is what I wanted for him and he has achieved it.</p>

7

<p>I cried as well, even though we are four years away from the moment.
Son started HS today in a city a good drive away from us. I decided to drive him there on the first day and I am also picking him up. Can’t wait to hear all about his impresions.
When he goes away to college I know that he will not call to tell me how his day went. Trying to enjoy it while I still can.</p>

<p>To balance it though - I am enjoying the quiet of my house today :)</p>

8

<p>I react to this the way I react to a lot of Lisa Belkin stuff. She is a very good writer, and seems like a nice person whom I would probably like. But she is a CONSTANT apologist for traditional sex roles and for a kind of High Suburban culture. NO ONE needs to run through Bed, Bath & Beyond to go to college. All of that is parental choice and parental values, and they don’t happen to be mine.</p>

9

<p>DS is a senior and I totally surprised myself when I burst into tears when hugging goodbye in the parking lot- never expected that to happen this time! Maybe because he seemed to be in the best shape of any of the four years in terms of mood and living arrangements? Maybe because this time he might never come home to live again (if he’s lucky with a job)?</p>

<p>We did happen to pop into a BB&B to see if they had a couple of things but mostly stocked up on necessities at the local Target. </p>

<p>I enjoyed that article! Especially making the bed - make it once in the fall, put fresh sheets when we take him back after winter break.</p>

10

<p>Whoa! I’m not TOUCHING that bed after move-in first year! (But then “we” have never “taken him back” farther than the airport after winter break.)</p>

11

<p>Go ahead and make that freshman boys bed, it will be the last time it is ever made lol!
Back in S’s freshman year at U South Carolina, we did the nice BB&B run,shopping our local NY store and sending everything, we thought,to S Carolina.Turns out the nice helpful young man in NY sent everything to some college in Texas!
But the local BB&B equiv of “Kevin” was able to retrieve the order list and recreate it!</p>

12

<p>Yup, I always make the bed. That’s my job. Except this year (he’ll be a junior) he’s driving himself back to school. The goodbye will be here at the house - or he might stop by my office on his way out.</p>

<p>Dougbetsy, you are wrong. <<this is=“” gonna=“” be=“” a=“” long=“” year=“”>> No - this year is going to FLY by in a big blurry parade of “lasts.” You just went thru the first of the lasts: the last “first day of school”.</this></p>

13

<p>It’s cool for me to see her sending her son off to college. We met (she would have no recollection of this) when our husbands temporarily worked together before mine bailed out of the specialist world and into something more like “street” pediatrics. Her kids were teeny tiny ones at the time; mine were the ones weirdly older for a peds cardiology fellow to have. I guess she’s catching up to me now! :)</p>

14

<p>

</p>

<p>This has to be a repeat of an older article. It sounds dated, not to mention upper class (who does a college registry?)</p>

15

<p>I remember making the dorm bed on move-in day freshman year. At this point, I’m happy if son has a bed, period. He stayed in his college city the summer after freshman year to work, and slept on the floor of someone else’s apartment. He stayed there again after sophomore year and slept on an old camp cot in his own, but unfurnished, apartment.</p>

<p>Now he is back on campus, and in a bed, but it is no doubt not completely made.</p>

16

<p><a href=“who%20does%20a%20college%20registry?”>quote</a>

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I thought that part was referring to the thing with BB&B where you go to your local store, scan everything you want, and pick it up at the BB&B near college? I think that’s pretty common to do if you’re far away and know about it…</p>

17

<p>The bed/bassinet story made me cry…</p>

<p>And the photo session. Actually, with child #4, I don’t think we HAVE a 1st day of kgn shot. I do remember the one we took of DD (child #1) at the door with her backpack. One sock neatly pulled up and the other falling down. So cute.</p>

<p>Maybe I’ll take a “first day of senior year” photo for my poor neglected last child. :D</p>

18

<p>“Then watch him walk away.”</p>

<p>I dropped mine Sunday after a 16 hour trip with him, a precious time.
As I watched his lone figure shrink into the distance after an all too brief embrace and good-bye (why did it feel like the last one ever?), I saw him open his cellphone.
In a few seconds, my phone buzzed with a new text message: “Enjoy the empty nest.”
I could barely see through tears as I texted back “Thanks, kid. Enjoy your freedom. I love you.”</p>

19

<p>Post 17. last line: Good luck with that. I tried it yesterday with my youngest, and she tore out the door so fast I couldn’t get the lens cap off in time.</p>

20

<p>When will I learn not to read threads like this at work? And I was so very proud of myself for how well I’ve been doing this summer now that DS#1 is a big college sophomore. Really no planning, he’ll do some fill-in shopping in the next day or two. Didn’t even decide til last week if DH or I would take him back. But I teared up when “Landslide” came on the radio this morning. (???) And I leave on Saturday to drive him back. And at least I’ll be alone in the car for the drive back home on Sunday. My darling little boy.</p>