I’ve been raising children for twenty-eight years and now my last boy is leaving.  He’s going off to college.

            Every morning, since he was little, he’d walk out to the mailbox by the road and bring in the newspaper.  As he’d come back through the kitchen door, he’d leave his newsprint fingerprints on the inside jamb.  I’ve never mentioned this to him. Every now and then, I’d just run a wet cloth over the wood, washing off the ink.

            Maybe two kids ago, I would have said something about it, but by this last boy, my priorities have shifted.  A benefit of raising children for over twenty-eight years is that you begin to realize what counts and what just plain doesn’t.  You lighten up and loosen up.

            For example, I’ve spent years begging my older children to clean their rooms.  In retrospect, they kept their rooms neat and clean compared to this last boy whose room resembles a toxic waste dump.  In fact, this boy’s room is so bad, one year when his siblings came home for Christmas, they spent days helping him sort through the debris.  I’m embarrassed to say they carried out six bags of stuff.

            I’ve realized the futility of fighting over a messy room.  “Did you clean your room?” was not the question I wanted to be asking my child most frequently.  So many other topics were much more pressing.  And, if I did insist on starting our conversation with that topic, we’d likely never get to any of the others.  So, the last boy’s room has stayed messy.  I just let it go. Consequently, he and I have had some stellar conversations.

When my first child left for college, at his insistence, he carried off his belongings in big, black garbage bags. As I loaded those bags into the back of our van, I counted the minutes until that first boy could come “home” again.  I didn’t understand that would never happen, not really.  I didn’t realize the subtle shift that would take place in his psyche, that eventually, in his mind, the place he left in order to visit me would become “home” to him. 

            That should have occurred to me.  Back when I was a college student, I remember telling my mother I needed to get back home with “home” meaning my dorm. To this day, I remember her crestfallen face.  I didn’t mean to hurt her, but I sure had.

So, in some senses, this going off to college is a going for good.  As well it should be.  We’ve raised our children to be independent. I am glad for this child, this last boy leaving.   He can fry an egg without breaking the yolk, get a blueberry stain out of his Sunday shirt, pay toward his car insurance, comfort a friend and ask for help when he needs it.

He’s mostly independent.  He’s succeeded.  We’ve succeeded.   So, why is this so awfully hard?

            Next week, the morning after he goes to college, I will walk down to the mailbox and pick up my own newspaper. Then, I’ll enter my house by the kitchen door, carefully checking for my last boy’s inky handprint on the jamb which I will leave there for at least a little while.