When I went away to college in 1977, my parents loaded up a car and hauled me to Flagstaff, hauled my junk into a dorm, took me to lunch with my sister and then amscrayed, all the better to get home to Phoenix and enjoy their new, blessedly empty, nest. I don’t recall anyone getting misty-eyed; in fact, my dad had let me know in no uncertain terms that I was getting sent to college so they wouldn’t have to deal with my mouthy seventeen-year-old self for a while.

I don’t blame them; I WAS really mouthy and the youngest of five really mouthy kids and I imagine they had seen the light at the end of the tunnel and just couldn’t hold their breath anymore, seeing as how they’d gone twenty-six years without going completely postal on us.

I went home a lot that first semester, and was a little puzzled when the response from the ‘rents was underwhelming, at best. One of the older sibs explained it to me: “If you want a big welcome, you have to not come home so much.”

I never went back, at least not to stay.

Times have changed, to say the least. I am reminded of the day I took my oldest to kindergarten sixteen years ago, and a bunch of us parents stood in the lanai waving through the windows before the teacher shooed us away.

I am appalled that some mother stayed in the dorm with her daughter for four days. I am even more appalled that it took four days for the roommate to complain. I wonder how these kids are going to live as adults on their own, or if an entire generation is condemned to not being able to cross the street to their Wall Street investment jobs without Mommy holding their hands.

My second daughter insisted on going away to her college orientation alone. It was in the spring, and required an overnight stay in a town about 90 miles away. If your parents came with you, you stayed the night in one dorm, and the parents stayed in another. Abby was the only kid who showed up alone. I was cringing a little inside, thinking that all the other parents must have thought no one loved her, or that she was an orphan or something, when she informed me that one mom had pitched a fit when told of the sleeping arrangements, because she didn’t want to be separated from her lambkins.

I quit cringing when Abby wondered what that woman was going to do when Lambkins has to come back here and stay by himself for a whole school year.

So far, we’ve gotten two kids into college (who, if I may boast, pay for almost the whole thing themselves with scholarships and jobs and some loans and with only a little help from their parents) and I’ve tried so hard to a) let them handle things as much as they feel able and b) let them know that if they need anything I’ll be there in a heartbeat. They pride themselves on their independence, and I am so proud of how well they manage their lives.

But I always figured it was my job to prepare them for being adults, on their own. If you (and I don’t mean you, of course, just the you who couldn’t leave the dorm room for four days) haven’t completed Job One, what have you been doing?

© E.S. Evans 2010