Matthew Osborne
OK, so it won’t be like that. In two months, my son moves into his college dorm, and it’s not like I will kick him out the door and forget him until it’s time to baste the turkey.
We attended college orientation last week, which had lots of important activities for the incoming freshman, but regrettably also lots of boring stuff for the parents to sit through as well.
In a five-hour presentation, there were maybe one or two nuggets of importance. A lot of the time was spent “comforting” the parents of the students as they embarked on this adventure.
They started by saying two or three times that, “We are going to separate you from your students for a while, if you can handle that” or something to that effect.
If I can handle it? Madam, I am letting my kid leave my home and move here. You taking him to register for school for the next five hours is not going to faze me.
They talked a lot about striking the balance between wanting to fly into campus to solve all their problems for them and for the aforementioned “Call me in late November” methods of parental coping.
First, if I did not think my son could handle moving off to college, he wouldn’t be doing it. If he did not think he could handle it, same result.
I speak confidently that we have got this at both ends. Hunter will be fine, as will we. Circle of life, if you love someone, set them free … all that stuff.
I am good, no problems. No worries.
Well, maybe a few worries, but don’t tell anyone. OK, some worries.
MY GOD WHERE WILL HE GET TOILET PAPER??!!???
So I’m putting up a brave face, this is what you do. I stand by what I said about my son being ready to handle it. Whether my wife and I are ready remains questionable, but I feel optimistic that we will be OK.
Hunter certainly has some advantages that I never had going off to school.
First, he has free laundry facilities in his building. I cannot begin to stress how difficult laundry was in college, particularly my senior year. We lived in a building that had laundry, but the machines did not take coins. They took strangely shaped plastic tokens that you could not possibly replicate anywhere, and they were not distributed in equivalent amounts. It was something like $3 for 10 of them, which makes no sense in any system of math.
He also has a full kitchen that he will share with several others, but still, way better than what we had. My freshman year, we had a bed and a desk and godspeed from there. (I did have an extra small closet that I could have used, but we did not realize it was there until move-out day. I thought the door had been painted over because it led to the other part of the suite, but I was wrong.)
So, yes, there are always going to be things that kids going off to college encounter for the first time without Mom or Dad there to wipe their noses. And there are times where he will be need to be reassured that everything is fine, we are here for you and so forth.
But it’s also the only way we learn.
My parents dropped me off at school in Washington, D.C., and that first week, I was just happy to get to my classes, return to my dorm successfully and not run into any trouble. By that first Friday, though, I was on the MARC train to Baltimore to see Cal Ripken close in on Lou Gehrig’s Ironman record with 11 guys I hardly knew. Some of those guys are still my friends more than 25 years later.
So everyone’s experience is different, but I believe it’s necessary to get out there and take on the world by yourself when you’re young to find out what kind of person you want to be.
Besides, it’s fine. I’ll see him again at Thanksgiving.
Matthew Osborne is the editor of The Northeast Georgian. Reach him at 706-778-4215 or editor@TheNortheastGeorgian.com.