Now That You've Dropped Your Kid Off at College...

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about dropping your kid off at college--kind of a dos and don'ts sort of a thing. After rereading it, and after having done even more kid-dropping-off in the ensuing half decade, I think I can safely say it still pretty much stands up.

If you're so inclined, go ahead and read it now.

OK, so, now that your pookie is off to sleep-away school, the rules have changed a bit. This is when the Growing Up Portion of little Junior's life starts.

Please note: I'm not just making this stuff up. This is what I've learned from personal experience and hearing stories from my peeps on the front lines--people who actually work at these institutions of higher learning and have seen the horror wrought by this group of mammals to which we now belong: College Parents.

And I need to warn you at the outset that, while I love my children dearly, my life did not stop when they went away to college. I recently heard a fellow mom say, "It took me a year to adjust to the empty nest." I almost spit out my drink. Are you kidding me? The best sight I've ever seen is our son's back going down the security line at an airport. Not that I don't miss them and love having them around, but isn't this why we have kids? So they can grow up and live their own lives?

We start with the assumption that your child is old enough and mature enough to handle living on her own and dealing with the rigors of a college curriculum and has the social awareness to live peacefully in a communal setting. Because if she doesn't, well...

Let's not think about that right now. Let's focus on this new journey you're on and allow me to offer a few observations.

• It's COLLEGE. Back the eff off. And by that I mean, leave him alone. Let him figure out what he's supposed to do, when he's supposed to do it, and how he's supposed to do it. You can give him a little nudge now and again, but seriously, this is his journey and you need to let him be on it. Now this does not mean you shouldn't help him set things up--everything from his residence hall room (they'll tell you not to call it a dorm, just wait) to his student accounts. You should. And get the passwords while you're at it, because if your kid is anything like mine those passwords are out of the brain the second they're typed into the computer. But stuff like registering for classes and making his schedule and actually going to class? That's his deal. And, trust me, if you are one of those parents who keeps calling the desk receptionist to check on your kid's whereabouts on a Saturday night (FYI, the DR has no idea where your precious munchkin is playing his current game of beer pong) you will become the focus of much ridicule and abuse at the next hall staff meeting.
• Don't be what colleges refer to as a Velcro Parent. As in, you need to be peeled away from your child. Let's take a little test. When talking about your daughter heading off for college, what pronoun do you use? If it's "we" or "our" (like, if you ever uttered: "we decided on Princeton" or "our college choice was Harvard") then honey, you might have a problem with this whole letting-go thing. One mom I talked to last year said these actual words to me: "I am ready to stay in the room with her that first night in case she needs my help falling asleep." The scary thing? She wasn't kidding. I had this picture of this poor girl's roommate going to the RA that first night and saying, "Yeah, uh, so there's this woman in our room..." In a case like this, there's a really thin line between excessive parenting and felony loitering.
• Your kid is the one who should be getting--and heeding--the school's Public Safety alerts, not you. Marquette University has a phenomenal social media presence, which as a mom I'm grateful for, but when other parents start posting on the parent Facebook page things like "There's been a push-in robbery at 16th and Kilbourn" I'm not sure how to respond. I live more than 1,000 miles away from each of my kids' colleges, so am I supposed to hop on a plane with my pocket flaming torch and collapsible pitchfork so I can join the Parental Lynch Mob? I mean, there could be a major problem with TSA, for starters.
  
  If your kid's college is in a city, he's going to be dealing with everything a city has to offer, like fantastic restaurants, excellent museums, great public transportation, and the occasional mugging. Even if Junior's headed off to a campus in the middle of nowhere, there's still a chance he might have things stolen out of his room or be accosted on the way home from the bars/late night chess club meeting. Make sure Buffy listens to and abides by all of the dos and don'ts of the Safety Talk she'll be given about 29 times during orientation week. Encourage her to keep her head up, lock her door when she's not in her room, and take care of her valuables. But this is her deal, not yours.
• Don't use social media to work out your kid's social or academic problems. Your precious little pumpkin's struggles with her roommate, her professors, or her class schedule really have no place on the school's public social media pages. Your child would be mortified (I hope) if she discovered she was the topic of conversation on Facebook--and god forbid the roommate's parents figure out you're talking about their little pumpkin. Unless that's what you intend, and that's just passive aggressive and mean and, not to put too fine a point on it, you're a bad person.
• Yes, college is expensive. Shut up about it. We all get the same friendly emails from the bursar's office twice a year, and while our bottom-line balance due amounts vary, none of us is really getting away for free. This isn't a police state, so this whole college choice thing is completely up to Junior and, to some extent of course, you, so when you start sentences with the words, "Given the amount of money we pay..." I, for one, want to punch you in the face. Go find a school where that amount of money you're paying is a good ROI for you and just shut the hell up. (This also applies to people who send their children to private elementary and high schools. Sort of a me-proclaimed universal law, if you will.)

This list is by no means comprehensive, but I've got to cut this short since happy hour's about to start and we have a lot to celebrate. Joe just texted that he's arrived in Spokane for his junior year at Gonzaga, and I think I finally found a type of Febreze that might actually get that horrific smell out of his room.

Good luck as you begin this new phase of your life. Trust me, it will all be fine! Or, at the very least, a couple of drinks will make it seem way better,

Parenting, Part I

I'm going to admit this right out of the gate: I'm not a great parent. In fact, I'm not even particularly fond of children. I mean, sure, I love my own kids, but I also blame them, to put it bluntly, for ruining my life. And not for the usual reasons (ruined body, no sleep, no money, no time to yourself). No, it's because when you have kids, you're forced to hang out with other people who have kids, and that's when things really start to suck.

It's all well and good when your brothers and sisters and your high school and college friends start reproducing, because these are people you  grew up with and drank with and you all kind of come from the same place. You know you don't know what you're doing, and that's cool, since you're in the same boat with a bunch of other people who don't know what they're doing, either, so you're learning together. And generally, there's beer.

But these cute little non-communicative infants don't stay infants. They grow up. They talk, they walk, and then you're forced--by law!--to send them to school.

That's when the fun starts.

I could not have been more excited to send my kids off to preschool. As a matter of fact, I almost wept with joy when our pediatrician told me at Catharine's 30-month check-up (after a long discussion where the two of them talked about little brothers, colors, and Congressman Dan Rostenkowski's recent defeat at the polls), "This is a child who needs school. Have you checked into preschools in the area?" And I did. And initially I was scared.  But that's a story for a whole other blog post. (I mean, have you ever visited a Waldorf school? Really? What's with the wood?)

Joy of joys, I discovered that our parish in Chicago had a Montessori preschool. Now, when I was in college and learning about all those different education philosophies, I have to admit I thought the whole Montessori thing was a little off. I came from a pretty rigid Catholic school background, and the idea of basically doing what interested you, at your own pace, made me more than a little skeptical. (This was reinforced when I student taught in an inner city high school in Milwaukee. If I had let those little darlings do what interested them, I would've witnessed more felonies in one semester than you see in an entire season of Law and Order--regular, Criminal Intent, and SVU. Combined.) But I figured, she's young! What can a little free choice education hurt? Especially when the education was taking place somewhere other than in my home.

And the actual school part of it was great. Catharine totally thrived, had great teachers, made a lot of friends, and I had the added bonus of a few kid-less hours to myself every day. But then I realized that once your kid ends up at school, you are, by default, a member of the worst group of mammals imaginable:

School Parents.

You can't get away from them. Because by the very virtue of you having a student, you're sort of forced to hang out with other students' parents. You want your kid to have a social life, right? But then these kids come to your house and you start to realize that not everyone has the same exacting standards of child raising that you do.

Not that I ever had any standards, exactly. Mainly my child rearing revolves around trying to get the least annoying kid possible. You know, use the inside voice, put your stuff away, don't touch my stuff, here's how you open the refrigerator and get Mommy a beer. Basic community living, don't-be-an irritant skills. But these other people? Ohdeargod, it's awful.

I realize that not everyone parents according to the Darwinian School of Child Rearing like I do (kids either figure it out or don't survive). That's fine. But then there are the mothers who, early on, basically give it all up and let the kid take over. "Johnny doesn't like to sit in his car seat." "Johnny won't eat at the table." "Johnny doesn't want me to wash his hair." "Johnny only drinks juice."

So let me get this straight. Johnny is a smelly little bugger with bad teeth who's going to trash my house when he comes for dinner but I won't have to worry about any of it because he's going to end up in the ICU with a head injury after you get into a fender bender on the way over. Oh, okay.

My eyes were permanently opened to this phenomenon after Catharine started school and I started trying to be a Good Mom by volunteering in the classroom and offering to have kids over to play. I could go on and on about the wacky moms I was forced to hang with, but all the craziness I encountered during those first years can be summed up into one person: The man hating, obviously frustrated fundamental Christian repressed lesbian teacher who was more than happy to lecture me about how my husband was neglecting his family (the fact he traveled on business meant he didn't care about us), how I needed to raise my son to be a feminist (I should encourage him to try on Catharine's dresses now and again), and how raising my children Catholic was going to cause them to kill me in my sleep one day (which they may still do, but it's going to be for bigger reasons than me simply taking them to church).

Oh, and her kids? She had three daughters who were all budding sociopaths. The oldest was one of those kids who smiles sweetly at the grownups while stealing and hiding another child's favorite toy. Or, better yet, taking away another kid's floaty thingy in the pool and watching passively while the kid slowly sinks to the bottom. ("I wanted the green one and she had it," she squeaked matter-of-factly after the other child was fished out of the pool and eventually revived.) The middle one was just a brute--I watched her toss a boy down a flight of stairs at preschool because he got in front of her in line. (The poor boy's sprained wrist and black eye were shrugged off by the MHOFFCRLT: "Buffy gets aggressive when she's hungry.")

The littlest one seemed fine, until it came time to toilet train her. One morning the mom brought her over to my house, stripped her naked, and explained to me that she thought the only way for a child to learn about her bodily functions was to let things happen "organically." That right there was the last straw. I told her to bundle her kid up before anything organic ended up on my newly cleaned carpet, then I started talking about how I thought the only way to heaven was through the Catholic Church, women shouldn't be allowed to drive, and Republicans were generally awesome. She left shortly thereafter and didn't come back.

And don't even get me started on the whole competition thing. "Oh, Catharine's reading?" the MHOFFCRLT said to me one day when Catharine was struggling through Hop On Pop. "My kids showed signs of early reading comprehension at 18 months." Pause in the conversation while I pried her daughter's teeth off my dining room table leg. "Of course, it's been proven if they read too early it affects their reading appreciation and spatial skills as they grow. And they tend to be less social. But, you know, good for her!"

And this has continued through the grade school, high school, and even college years. Different people, but the same basic conversation, now dealing with test scores, athletic ability, grade point average, shoe size--everything is some sort of competition. It's exhausting.

Trying to raise children while being a School Parent is the hardest thing I've ever done. But it's also made me more realistic. After listening to these nimrods, I came to the realization that being a student is my kids' experience, not mine. We aren't in high school--Joe is. And I'm probably doing the worst job of parenting in the history of the world, but we've had our share of laughs and I think we've raised these kids not to be complete jerks. I guess that's just going to have to be good enough.

I did feel a small flicker of hope recently. The other night, at a Mother-Son Dance, I got a little bottle that contained a questionnaire Joe filled out about our relationship. Question 3: "What is the one piece of advice your mom has given you that will always stay with you?"

Joe's response: "Don't be an idiot."

Phew. My work here is done.