Sep
23
My youngest child has left for college! Somehow I now have two adult children, both living on their own.
This milestone felt pretty different than it did with Riley. It is no less momentous, I am no less proud or bittersweet about it all, but of course everything else has changed. I did not move him into his dorm with my longtime husband, driving home together and talking about what it all meant. I didn’t say any kind of official goodbye to him, there was not a great sense of Before He Left and Afterwards.
He left the nest, but I myself was not sharing that nest. The torn-asunder feelings largely happened for me last year, not that they have truly ever abated entirely. While it’s not the way I imagined seeing him off to college, I’ve learned that things can stray pretty damn far from the path I had in mind and still be okay. We visited Corvallis together a couple times right before he moved, checking out his various halls and his dorm building, and that was really nice. Maybe even nicer in some ways than the hectic business of move-in day, I don’t know.
And he’s not too far away. Corvallis is about a 45 min drive and quite a lovely journey if you take the country route rather than I-5. I grew up there, my grandparents and mom lived there, it’s a town I’ll always enjoy visiting.
Meanwhile, my other kid is here in town. He’s a private guy so I won’t gush with updates, but he’s doing so great. They both seem to be.
What more could I ask for, you know? Sometimes I still get mired in all my woulda-coulda-shouldas, this past year should have looked like this instead of that, everything would have been better if only, but man, there’s no point in it. It’s all in the no-takebacks rearview and the kids, excuse me young men, are doing so well, so let. It. Go.
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