As I watch friends and family heading out to drop off their first child at college, I am reminded of our experience doing the same, almost exactly one year ago.  I have no advice for any of you.  In my experience, it sucks.  Or, as a rather taciturn friend of ours put it, after we asked how it had gone for him (knowing we would soon be doing the same):  “It’s horrible.  It was one of the worst days of my life.  No one prepares you for this.”

It’s true, no one does.  I think that’s partly because neither party wants to have the conversation (who wants to relive the pain of that separation and who wants to anticipate it?) It’s also because each family experiences that separation in their own way.  Together with our children, we form a unique chemistry that is all our own.  No one else will experience the feelings, carry out the behaviors, or interpret the events that attend a college drop off in exactly the same way.  You just have to do it your way, and travel the path that you were meant to travel.

For us (me, my husband and our two daughters), the actual drop off wasn’t traumatic or hysterical or anything like that.  It was clear throughout our ride to Ohio (where my oldest daughter was heading to attend Kenyon College) that we were all trying very hard not to focus on what was about to happen.  Everything was happy and busy and exciting (if you know what I mean).  But the raw sorrow was there, just beneath the surface, ready to erupt with the slightest prompt (Exhibit A:  I am tearing up now just thinking about it).

It hit me hardest when all of the parents were gathered together in the auditorium to receive information and sage advice from the school’s administrators.  There was nothing to do but look around and know you were sitting in a room full of traumatized adults trying to pretend otherwise.  A single horrible thought just kept knocking at my brain’s door trying to come in:  Our family will never be the same again.  This is permanent.  Our precious little unit is forever changed.

(Don’t worry . . . this has a happy ending).

We were lucky.  Our daughter led the way in helping us get through the immediate ripping off of the Band-Aid.  She was all happy and together, joyfully hugged us, said goodbye, and headed off on her way with seeming confidence and glory (what she actually felt I’m not sure I’ll ever know). As a result, we didn’t feel the need to drive around the corner and park on a local street so we could ball our eyes out (as the college personnel had suggested we were free to do).  We spent the rest of the car ride, as I recall, doing what we could to distract ourselves from what just happened.

It hit me again in the hotel room where we stayed on our way home.  Waking in the morning, and witnessing so clearly, so concretely, that our younger daughter didn’t have her lifelong companion to pal around with as she normally would, somehow set me off more than my own sadness did. The missing piece was just too obvious and it ripped at my heart.

Okay, fast forward to one year later.  Our daughter is off to school again, eager to reconnect with friends and return to what seems to me to be, her new home.  Does this idea make me sad?  No, not really.  This idea makes me feel exceptionally gratified and proud, much the way I felt after I got over dropping her off for her first day of Kindergarten, or High School, or summer camp.  Each of these rites of passage are both deeply painful, and deeply satisfying.  But the pain part is acute, while the satisfaction is sweet and lasting, because with each of these transitions our children reveal to us a new version of themselves that we could not really have imagined prior to then. The college transition is perhaps more profound, but it’s of the same ilk, and produces many of the same kinds of feelings.

I look at my daughter now and I say — she is launched.  There is simply nothing more rewarding than that.  Now I get the joy of watching her rocket ship take off and carry her wherever it is she is going to go.

So I have no advice for all of you who are perhaps suffering through the college drop off as we speak.  Just know that you will be rewarded with quite a jar of goodies waiting for you once you get to the other side.