He picked a school eight and a half hours away. I packed a box of Kleenex for the drive home. I never needed it.
I packed a box of Kleenex in my son’s things. Not for his dorm room. For my drive home.
He was the first grandchild to leave for college on both sides of our family. My husband and I were the first to get married, the first to have children. Nobody ahead of us had mapped this terrain. I had exactly one friend who had already sent her children off, and I leaned on her harder than I probably should have.
Our son chose a school eight and a half hours away
My son was supposed to go to our alma mater. Two and a half hours away. Close enough
for an emergency drive, close enough to feel manageable. Instead, he chose a school four states and eight and a half hours away. I was devastated. I also knew I had no right to be.
His younger sister had her own thoughts on the matter. During the campus tour, while I was gently trying to talk him out of going quite so far, she pulled me aside. Don’t worry, Mom. I’m going to go farther.
I laughed. I filed it under things children say. She was not kidding. But I didn’t know that yet. So, I did the only thing I could think of: I prepared. I packed his room into boxes and bags and duffel bags, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I tucked in a full box of Kleenex earmarked, in my head, for the moment I’d be driving back through four states alone, falling apart at the wheel.
I told my friends to get ready to comfort me
My friends were briefed. Wine would be waiting. Hugs were promised. I had a whole infrastructure built around the grief I was certain was coming. What I didn’t know was that I was preparing for the wrong thing.
We drove down early because he was part of the honors program, which let him move in a few days before the rest of his class. A small mercy, given that he was bringing a small ton of computer equipment to a state where August temperatures would not have been kind to it.
We made his dorm bed while the rest of the building sat quiet and then checked into our hotel and grabbed dinner. I assumed he’d spend the night with us but after dinner he wanted to go stay in his dorm room.
I wanted my son to stay with us not in his dorm room
I protested. The room wasn’t fully set up yet. His roommates hadn’t even arrived. What was the rush? He thanked us, said he’d see us in the morning, and walked back to his building alone. I stood there for a second. He already knew something I was still trying to work out.
The next day we did what college parents do. Target. Costco. The kind of organizational sprint that gives you the illusion of control when what you’re really doing is staying useful for as long as possible. We got the room fully set up, the refrigerator loaded with his staples and plenty of toilet paper. The room was ready and his roommates started to arrive. We still had another night in town, but we were satisfied.
Our son’s attention turned toward getting adjusted to school
By the time we finished, the welcome activities had started. He was all in. Receptions, orientation events, introductions everywhere, his attention had already shifted forward, and he kept apologizing for it.
We kept saying: go. We are here when you have a minute.
So we did what the other parents were doing. We found each other, a loose group, all of us suddenly unattended at exactly the moment we’d driven eight hours to attend someone.
We had dinner and exchanged stories about what they were studying, where we were from, the basics. Afterwards, we walked around this new town exploring to fill the time. We took photos of things that didn’t include our children. He had dinner with his newfound crew, and we did not see him until the next morning.
We picked him up and went to breakfast before it was time to start our long trek home. He told us about the night: the people he’d met, what they’d done. There was excitement in his eyes.
And then it was time for us to leave
And then it was time. Before we dropped him off at his dorm, there were the letters. I remember during the tour they talked about how the students would paint these letters year after year.
A rite of passage. I wanted one last picture of him in front of those letters. Like when he was little and I wanted a picture in case he got lost. Standing outside at one of the campus landmarks, the big painted letters that students layer onto every year, one class on top of the last, I saw my son’s face.
He was smiling.
Not a polite smile. Not a performance for our benefit. Something I hadn’t seen in a long time, maybe since before senior year started, before the weight of applications and acceptances had settled over everything, before he’d spent months knowing he was about to leave his entire tribe of friends and walk into somewhere new without a single one of them. That year has a specific kind of quiet to it. The waiting. The deciding. The understanding that whatever you choose, you are choosing to leave.
The smile I saw at that statue was the one on the other side of all of it. It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t I think I’ll be okay. It was certainty, the kind that doesn’t ask any more questions. I made the right call. I am where I am supposed to be. You know it when you see it, especially in someone you’ve watched work toward something they couldn’t quite name for years.
Having him go to our alma mater would have been so wrong.
On the drive home, the Kleenex stayed in the box
We drove home on Sunday. Eight and a half hours, four states, the long way back to a house that had one fewer person in it. The Kleenex stayed in the box.
I don’t know exactly what I thought it was going to feel like in that car. I had been so sure it was coming. But there wasn’t space for it, because there wasn’t ambiguity. He wasn’t lost. He wasn’t making a mistake. He wasn’t too far away or too alone or too young.
He was happy. The real kind. I had spent enough years watching him work toward something he couldn’t quite name—watching him reach, and push, and figure it out—to know what it looked like when he finally arrived.
You can’t grieve someone who is exactly where they belong. I brought the Kleenex inside when we got home. Put it under the bathroom sink. Used it later for something I’ve long since forgotten.
The wine my friends had waiting tasted like relief, not condolence. There’s a difference.
The author wishes to remain anonymous.
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