I was at the UPS counter taping a box shut when my friend’s husband walked in carrying a box of his own. We both knew why the other was there. Our kids were away at school, and we were mailing them things they didn’t strictly need.
The clerk weighed his package and asked what was inside. He looked at me. “Tell them what’s in the box.”
I don’t remember what I said. I remember the clerk’s face. Two grown adults mailing decorated college care packages to kids who lived within walking distance of a grocery store, and neither of us the least bit embarrassed. She thought we’d lost it. Standing at that counter, I would have told you she was wrong. It took me a while to understand she was only half wrong, and about the wrong half.
The first Box Club was started by someone else
The first Box Club wasn’t mine. A friend started it the fall my son left for college. Six of us, all from the PTA. Five of them had daughters. I had the boy. That turned out to matter more than I expected. The boxes filled up with nail polish and hair ties and fuzzy socks, and then everyone would get to my son and pause. So they’d grab him a gift card and call it done. It was kind. It was also more work for them, and I could feel it. After two years, when he moved out of the dorm, I stepped back and started making his boxes myself.
Which is when I got a little unhinged about it. Five dollars, and I’d spend an afternoon turning every item into a small joke.
- Lemonheads, “for when things go sour.”
- A Kind bar, “because college is hard and you should be kind to yourself.”
- At the bottom, the only line that wasn’t a pun: “you’ve got this, and we’re all a phone call away.”
When my daughter left a few years later, I started it a my own Box Club
When my daughter left a few years later, I didn’t wait for anyone to start a club. I started it
myself, with my core people this time, and sent out the email, bring your calendar, we’ll sort
the themes at the farewell party. Five dollars a kid, same wine.
Here’s how it ran. We took turns hosting, one month somebody’s kitchen island, the next month somebody else’s. A theme for whatever holiday was coming. We’d fill the boxes, pour the wine, and send each other previews so nobody bought the same thing twice.
The only thing we couldn’t control was enthusiasm. “Full disclosure,” someone would text, “I may have gotten carried away this month.” Someone always had.
We would read the thank-you notes to each other
Then the boxes would land, and the thank-you texts came in, and we read the best ones out loud to each other. One girl texted her mom: this made me cry. Who gave me the llama Band-Aids? Those are amazing.
My daughter sent a photo of a traffic cone her floor-mates had commandeered, strung with the lights I’d packed, doing the job of a Christmas tree. The motion-sensor witch we’d sent for Halloween got stuck in the on position, EEEKKK on a loop at all hours, and the girls thought that was funnier than we did.
We were getting a glimpse of lives we couldn’t see anymore. I thought that was the point.
They’d both left on Saturday. She rode with her brother as far as his school, then caught a ride the rest of the way with her roommate. By Sunday the house had been quiet long enough that it had started to feel like the new weather, not a wound, just the temperature of things now.
I put the Christmas music on and started hanging the decorations. Moving was easier than
standing still in it.
That was the night I understood that the boxes were never the point
My phone buzzed. The group chat. Not a preview. Not a date for the next box. So does anyone else need some wine after saying goodbye to these kids? This does get easier, right? We answered one after another. Yes. Yes. God, yes.
Not one of us answered the actual question. That wasn’t what she was asking, and we all knew it. She wasn’t asking whether it got easier. She was asking whether anyone else was standing alone in a too-quiet house, and whether that was allowed to be this hard.
That was the night I understood. The boxes were never the point.
The boxes were just the reason we kept showing up
We told ourselves we’d built a system for mailing snacks to kids who could buy their own. What we’d built was a room full of women who could say this is harder than I thought to the only people who knew exactly how hard it was.
The grades, the homesickness, the roommate who wouldn’t clean, the internship that fell through, it all went into the chat, tucked between the previews and the llama Band-Aids. The kids got care packages. We got each other. The boxes were just the reason we kept showing up.
My son stayed in that town after graduation and took a job there. He wanted to know if he still got a box. Now and then, he did.
When we cleared out my daughter’s last apartment, we found a bin. Years of decorations. Felt pumpkins, string lights, shamrock garlands, a tangle of ornaments, all of it saved, carried from the dorm to one apartment after another. Five dollars at a time, and somehow it had come to this.
I stood there holding a string of lights, and I thought about the clerk at the UPS counter, sure we’d lost our minds over a box of snacks.
She was right that it was never really about the snacks. She just had the wrong idea about what it was about instead.
The author wishes to remain anonymous
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