How do you tell your daughter you love her beyond the moon and stars, and leave her alone in her dorm room 2,000 miles from home?
Next week, I will be faced with this moment when Anna starts her freshman year at Rhode Island School of Design.
In the meantime, every day brings another encounter. “Are you ready?” friends ask Anna. “Are you ready?” they ask me. If it’s ready as in, “We have acquired extra-long twin sheets for the dorm beds,” we’ve got it covered. The other kind of ready? This year has been so full of highs and lows that it is difficult to know.
There were the so-far-away flights and longer stop-overs on the spring break college tour. There were those minutes of getting lost in the dark alleys and underbellies of the biggest cities. My imagination going wild, my heart pounding, I assured my daughter that the college campus could not possibly be nearby.
There was the excitement of each new campus. The students marching up marble steps into sunlit studios filled with easels, paints and charcoal drawings. The dorms designed by architecture majors and the stores filled with the wares of hopefully not-starving artists.
During the application process, there were the repeat trips to the store for more manila envelopes and to the processor for more slides of Anna’s artwork. There were the essay questions she pondered and the pouring out of her heart. There were the discussions over what was bragging and what was listing one’s accomplishments. The young are too modest, the old too proud.
There was the ecstasy of Anna being accepted, something she had wanted so much that when the envelope arrived she was in cultivated denial. “It says congratulations on the cover, but that doesn’t mean anything,” she said, hedging her bets as she tugged at the seal.
There was the agony of learning the cost of the prestigious private school, wishing the scholarships from other schools could be redeemed there. (Wouldn’t it be nice if colleges “matched our competitors’ prices”?)
There was the day Anna broke down, doubting whether she really belonged at that school. Was her talent just a sham? Had they really looked at her portfolio?
There was the worrying about how she and her boyfriend would go their separate ways come fall, replaced by the dismay that he broke up with her the day after senior prom instead, a day dubbed “senior ditch day.”
There was the graduation party when Anna and her friends offered ice cream sundaes and cotton candy to their grandparents and neighbors, and played volleyball in their sundresses. Party over, they huddled in a hug and cried.
There was that day in June when, shopping for dorm supplies, I had the overwhelming urge to lift Anna into the shopping cart and guide her around the store, my once Saturday- morning shopping companion scooped from her crib in her pink terry sleeper.
The cart half-loaded with shampoo and lotions to last to winter break, my big Anna proposed we stop for the day. She wasn’t ready to pack and ship, either.
Days later, though, at the dining room table she confidently stitched around fiery poppies on the fabric that would be her bedcover. One learns that art majors do not settle for striped multipatterns at the Linens-N-Things fire sale. Next came a mirrored silver and ivory lampshade. Nothing too “matchy-matchy like a grownup’s house,” she said.
There is the wondering how I’ll be able to pass by her room with a bed perfectly made, wishing instead to see piles of jeans and wet towels, sketchbooks and textbooks and notecards strewn around.
How do you tell your daughter you love her beyond the moon and stars, and leave her alone in her dorm room 2,000 miles from home?
Because you do, and in that there is no doubt.
Lucy Ewing (lucyewing@ ) is an elementary school teacher in the Boulder Valley School District.
