Years ago, when our daughter went to sleep-away camp for the first time, I was wildly overwhelmed by the packing list. Ordering the regulation t-shirts, following the luggage requirements, tracking down the requisite water bottles and shin guards, counting out precise numbers of socks and underwear, suffering the torment of what three sets of “casual clothes” even meant. That Spring was a flurry of checking and rewriting lists and making trips to Target and staying up into the wee hours of several nights to label every last sock and shampoo bottle.
And then, “bus day” came. We drove to the Upper West Side of Manhattan as a family, watched her climb up the steps into the luxury liner with tinted windows that obscured her fate, prayed that she sat next to someone nice, and waved goodbye. It wasn’t until we got home that the sadness swept over me. Her room was empty and quiet, and our apartment felt like the abyss.
I wasn’t prepared for my daughter’s absence when she left for camp
In all the list-making and box-checking, I hadn’t prepared for the sting of her actual absence, and it knocked me out. My husband, son, and I collapsed on the couch that hot summer afternoon and watched about eleven episodes of Bob’s Burgers to numb the ache. I realized that in all the planning, I had lost the plot.
Our little girl was leaving us for the first time. And I had spent her last few weeks at home counting underpants instead of hugging every last drop out of her before she left on her first-ever adventure without us.
I knew the sting would come after this drop-off
As far as parenting tasks go, packing for camp is child’s play compared to the college admissions process. The test prep, the essays, the tours, the extra curricular activity juggling, the summer internship search, the instagram accounts detailing exactly who got in where– it was a grueling marathon that lasted three years.
All the excitement and tears and pageantry of high school graduation was a shot in the arm toward the end, but by the time we got to mid-August, I was in the 24th mile and running on fumes. But at least this time, I knew that at the end of it, when everything was crossed off the list, and the car was packed, the sting would come.
This must be why, when our daughter discovered that one of the country’s top roller coaster parks sat at almost exactly the halfway point between our home in Brooklyn and her midwestern university, and begged us to make it our one overnight stop, we agreed. Growing up in Brooklyn, she loved holding her birthday parties at Coney Island, leading her friends on breathless rides on the Cyclone.
She looked forward to our annual trip to the Jersey Shore boardwalk with her cousins, wolfing down custards and water-ices between bouts on the Scrambler. I’ll never forget her ride on the Slingshot. I almost passed out watching her being flung into the air in a giant plastic sphere by what looked like two pieces of dental floss, but she emerged grinning and begging to go again. She never met a thrill ride she didn’t love, and I knew that this time it would take more than a Bob’s Burgers binge session to dull the pain.
We found ourselves at an amusement park right before freshman year drop-off
This is how we found ourselves, on our drive halfway across the country, in advance of her freshman year, spending the night on the grounds of Cedar Point, one of the country’s oldest and most famous amusement parks. The park is beloved among roller coaster enthusiasts, and, situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is known by some as “America’s Roller Coast.”
Everything about the place made me want to throw up. But I was damned if I was going to miss the opportunity to spend a day by her side doing something she loved. So I took a week off work and we made a family road trip out of it. I was not just “list mom,” purveyor of twin XL sheets, specialty headboards and teacher of basic laundry skills. I was also not “entrepreneur mom,” who spent her days on Zoom. I was “road-trip mom,” who blasted music and told stories about college shenanigans.
I was “FUN mom,” dammit, and I was going to embrace the giddiness of viewing Lake Erie from 200 feet in the air, upside down. And for roughly ninety minutes on that hot August morning, I did. But after three rides, I had to find an empty bench, lie down with a sweatshirt over my eyes, and meditate myself back to equilibrium. For the rest of the day, I was merely “water-and-phone-holding mom.”
I found out little interlude liberating, poignant and sweet
Did I spend moments that afternoon questioning my parenting choices and mourning our imminent separation? Yes. But I also glimpsed the glee in my kids’ (and husband’s) eyes and soaked in the family giddiness as they raced from Millennium Force to the Raptor to Steel Vengeance, and my heart broke wide open. We were surrounded by strangers in a place we knew nothing about, with nowhere to be and nothing to prove for one more day, and I found it liberating and poignant and sweet.
That night we ate at the hibachi restaurant in the hotel and sat next to a lovely Spanish family who had discovered the park on TikTok and had been there for a week. And then we headed through the hotel out to Lake Erie and walked along the shore. The sand was flatter than an ocean beach, the air was chilly, and there was something about being out there in the dark, on the coast of a lake that looked like the sea, with the three people I love the most in the world, that suspended us in time and space.
I cherish the blurry selfies we took
We were nowhere near anything familiar, about to embark on a mysterious new chapter, but for the moment the universe held us, like a stop-motion video of a swimmer jumping into the ocean, in that silent, hyper-still moment before the film speeds, the splash kicks up and the movie returns to the regular-paced familiar turn of events. We have a few blurry selfies we took of ourselves that night, and I cherish the moment they captured. We didn’t have any idea what lay in store for us all the next day, but for the moment, that night, we were a family of four for what felt like might be the last time, and I held on tight.
The next morning we drove straight to Madison, Wisconsin, and, the closer we got, the more the ratio of anticipation to dread tilted in the wrong direction. As if it just then dawned on us what the goal of our journey was. We had managed to avoid it by pretending it was all about the roller coasters. In that way, we had succeeded. But we hadn’t anticipated day two of our road trip. It’s true that another exciting chapter unfolded…mostly hers, but also partly ours, in meeting her delightful roommate and her family, walking around campus, discovering the stunning student center on another lake.
Then it was time to go
We made her bed, hung her posters, constructed a bedside table, and sent her brother on Target runs. She was excited and proud and a little apprehensive, but mostly charged with adrenaline. We went out to dinner, spent the night, and visited the bookstore in the morning, buying way too many university sweatshirts. Then it was time to go.
We hugged her fiercely, said goodbye a hundred times, climbed back into the now empty car, and drove across the cornfields of Indiana, feeling only a little less sad than that Bob’s Burgers afternoon. Now that she’s completed her freshman year, and we are on our way back across the country for our second drop-off, I can happily say that it turns out that the goodbye wasn’t as final as it felt on that trip.
We’re even going to stop at Cedar Point again, and I might try to make it on four roller coasters instead of three. It will be fun, but it won’t be the same. We will never again be that family suspended in time and space, steeped in anticipation, on the precipice of that new chapter, and, so, as much as I hate roller coasters, I’ll be forever grateful for the pit stop.
More Great Reading:
Six Reasons Why Moms Cry When They Leave Their Teens at College
