Reality sinks in bit by bit. Come fall 2025, she’s outta here!

A few mantras are helping me through.

One: It’s not about me. We started our college visits last year, when she was a junior. I quickly realized I had to stop thinking over which college I’d pick. I am not going to college, just paying. I weigh in with things that were important to me, like living on campus. But for months after our initial visits I’d have dreams about starting school at some campus we’d visited. Will I like it? Will I find friends? Would I enjoy a snowy winter? Not about me, not about me…

Two: It’s a process. The first visits were terrifying. She’s not ready! she won’t be ready! The kinds of questions she was asking made it clear how many things she had no clue about. How was this going to be possible? But over time, with multiple trips to see campuses, I got to see her understanding develop about what college can be, about what she wants in a school and in life. Watching her work on her essays, put together her activities. It was a kind of “fake it ’til you make it” scenario, where the more essays she wrote, making up stuff about her interests, the more she figured out that some of the things might be true.

Recently we visited one of the last schools on the list, University of Redlands; they’ve got a required community service learning component, and had several panels of discussion with professors and administrators. At our first campus visits she was so uninterested in the speaking, I could see her eyes glaze over. But at Redlands she said the panel discussions and the service component were what she liked best about the school. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised; she’s been involved in internships and service activities, prepping food in a kitchen that feed the hungry, and learning about homelessness. I cynically thought a lot of this was for the resume, so to hear giving back and social justice have become important to her makes me so happy and proud. I guess we all pretended at the things we came to love, until we loved them. I used to pretend to like Sondheim, because it was cool (in certain circles), before I figured out what a genius he was.

Three: We can’t do it alone. Thank heavens for our amazing college application consultant Robin Levi! Having a loving third party helping our daughter with the whole college process has been, literally, a lifesaver. Robin’s wealth of information about the schools and the process, plus her status as not the parent, gave our daughter the motivation and confidence to get it done.

With the hard work handled, I’ve gotten to focus on the emotional rollercoaster. Grief about the coming empty nest, relief that she seems to really be going, fear that she won’t launch. Fear that she will.

Her senior photo shows a young woman with a very determined glint in her eye. I couldn’t believe how adult she looks in the picture; I’m not able to see it in person, I guess I have so many overlays from every stage of her life. Also, sometimes she’s still basically a toddler. But it seems like the glint is going to win. And I am, tearfully but wholeheartedly, glad about that.