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When her youngest child leaves for college, our writer learns about holding
on with ‘arms wide open’
By Jody Jaffe
I packed my last school lunch a few months back. After
15 years of smoothing peanut butter to the edge
of the bread to make sure there were no dry spots, peeling
carrots and cutting them into sticks that I’m sure
my sons tossed out, bagging cookies, oranges and potato
chips, packing lunches is one of those things I
could do without thinking. Muscle memory took over,
freeing my brain for more important things. Like forcing myself not to cry. Like forcing myself to smile
when Sam, my younger son, grabbed the lunch bag—the
last Mom-packed lunch of his life. Like
getting the tears out of my voice.
“Have a great day,” I called down to his back—when did his shoulders get
that wide?—as he rumbled down the front steps two at a time. It was his
last day of school; in just a few months, he’d be gone, off to college. I
could still feel his little fingers in my hand as we walked to school the day
he first met his kindergarten teacher.
I closed the door and heard his car back out of the driveway.
“Well, that’s it,” I said to my husband. I was blinking back tears. He rubbed
his hand on my shoulder.
“You did a great job,” he said.
I know he thought I was taking this too hard. He’d already shown me the car
ad in that week’s New Yorker. There’s a kid standing
by a college dorm, with all his stuff around him and
a car zooming off. “9:15, drop kid at college” the copy
reads. “9:17, what kid?”
When Ben, my first child, graduated from high school three years ago, I wasn’t
prepared for how I would feel watching him walk down the aisle
in his cap and gown. Of course I knew I’d cry. I’d been crying for the previous
year over the stupidest things. Tripping over one of his big red sneakers could
set me off; seeing his last school play was worth a few packs of Kleenex; and
the college room display at Target was a killer. But I was completely taken
by surprise when the tinny strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” announced
the arrival of the end of his childhood.
All the parents stood as the graduates marched in. And there he was. My
baby. My firstborn. The one who years before
had asked if there were “mommy rooms” in college dorms so I could go with
him. There he was in his blue cap and gown, tall and smiling,
with his goofy red Chuck Taylors, untied as usual. He saw me and smiled even
bigger.
That’s when the invisible linebacker of time slammed me so hard in the gut,
I fell back into my chair. It suddenly hit me—OK, I’m a little slow on the
uptake—that my child was no longer a child. I wasn’t ready for this; I still
had papier-mâché projects for us to do.
A few months later, my husband and I drove Ben to Chicago to start his freshman
year at the University of Chicago. So I might have had a little anxiety attack
around Indiana where I might have had a difficult
time breathing. But compared to my friend, the novelist Abby Bardi, I was
doing well. Here’s how she described dropping her daughter off at college:
“It felt like chopping my arm off and leaving it there.”
The ride back home was difficult. I was starting to understand what Abby
meant. Life with one less arm was going to be challenging. But thankfully,
I had another child at home: another three years of packing lunches, cheering
high school basketball teams, and negotiating curfews. I knew the years would
pass quickly; everything good always does. But this quickly?
I was no more ready for Sam’s graduation than I was for Ben’s.
A funny thing happened, though. The graduates walked down the aisle and I
saw Sam, so radiant in his happiness. That towheaded baby whose eyes were
so big, my parents used to call him “The Alien,” had grown into a handsome
and mature young man with a wry wit. When I’d once said to him, “I remember
when you were small,” he came back at me with, “I remember when you were big.”
Sam had worked hard these past four years, setting big goals for himself and
exceeding most of them. He was so clearly ready to move on to the next phase
in his life that when the invisible linebacker of time tried to tackle me
again, I held firm. I stood there, smiling—OK, yes
I had some tears in my eyes—as Sam walked to the podium with his fellow graduates.
Both my husband and son, Ben, were surprised that I handled it without an
ambulance. I only lost it once, when no one was looking. I’d gone to the front
of the gym to take a picture as Sam received his diploma. I was so rattled
I couldn’t get the camera to work.
In labor, they talk about “transition” being the hardest phase. In life,
it’s even harder. At least when you’re giving birth, they can shoot some numbing
medicine straight into your spine so you don’t feel a thing. But there’s no
drug in the world that can ease the pain of watching your children grow up
and go away.
Painful but ultimately, I’m told, joyful. Because after transition comes
a new life. For both of us. Sam’s already feeling
the joy. It’s going to take me a little longer.
I had dinner recently with my old college friend, Mary Challinor, a Washington
artist. When women of a certain age get together, the conversation quickly
turns to children and their impending exits. She’s still got a daughter at
home, but only for another year. After that, she said, she’s donning mourning
clothes. We both laughed, sort of. Then she said something that’s stuck with
me. “My grandmother always said, ‘You must hold on to your children with your
arms wide open.’”
Sam will be leaving for college in just a few days. I’m still working on
the armless hug.
Jody Jaffe is the mother of Ben Shepard, a senior at the University of
Chicago and Sam Shepard, a freshman at Yale University.
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