Always is what you miss.1 Note »

September 2nd, 2010

Yesterday was move in day for the Williams first-years.

I looked on from the comfort of my office and observed a new generation beginning their college career.

Kids shuffled nervously around campus.

Eager upperclassmen bedecked in abrasive purple and gold t-shirts greeted arriving families with explosions of energy and enthusiasm.

Hesitant hellos! and how are yous? and where are you froms? were exchanged.

Parents sweat under the last burst of the summer’s heat, always timed to conflict with the labor involved in lugging boxes of a child’s life into a compact dormitory. If not heat, then rain. But this year brought the heat.

Uplifting words that looked toward the future were spoken.

It was a day of much anticipation. Uncertainty. And promise.

Four years seems like an eternity for an 18 year old. With age comes perspective, and I now know how quickly those years pass. What a blip on the radar screen they are in the grand scheme of a lifetime. And yet, they are those seminal years in a person’s life that chart the course for the years to come. If not for those four years, I would not be seated in this chair, watching those families, with photos of my baby girl tucked beneath my gaze.

Next to a photo of Sunny lies a photo of me. Age 6. Wearing a purple and gold striped t-shirt, cradling a felted purple Williams football, on the porch of my childhood home, sporting thick, unruly bangs.

It’s amazing how things come full circle.

On the back of that photograph is my mother’s swirling, full-bodied cursive, a script I could recognize anywhere as the work of her hand. She’s written, “Ashley, age 6. Williams, 2005?!”

It gives me the chills every time I read it.

In 2005, I did indeed graduate from Williams. But it was a long and tenuous road from the moment in that photograph to that day when I walked across the commencement stage.

My baby brother began his college career a week ago. My parents, after a four year break from the move-in and move-out demands of a college’s 9 month calendar, once again engaged in the act of helping one of their children start a new stage of life, a stage free from their ever watchful and supportive presence. I hadn’t fully processed the weight of that moment for my parents. The last child fleeing the nest.

I thought they’d be high fiving each other all the way home from Ohio. FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST!

Instead my mother sent me this article and said, “This is how it can feel.” She had read it years ago in the wake of my graduation and my sister’s move to the equator for her junior year abroad. She revisited those words with Wesley’s leaving.

I don’t know whether they hit me so hard because I’m now a mother. Or because my parents just left my home after a summer of constant companionship (albeit at times claustrophobic companionship), but without them the house feels empty. And quiet. Or if it’s just because I’m a total emotional sap, but I couldn’t stop the tears.

I was the sun and they were the planets.

In the day-to-day life of parenting a toddler, it’s easy to become bored. Distracted. Anticipating the next nap time, or opportunity to steal 5 minutes to yourself. But how many times will I look back a year, 5 years, 20 years from now and crave those moments of idle play? How often will I wish that I hadn’t sat reading email on my iPhone, but watched every second of that little girl splashing in her bathtub?

It’s unrealistic to think that I (or any parent) can ever be 100% present 100% of the time, but it’s important to keep in the back of my mind. Important to remember that this time will come and go so quickly, and before I know it, it’ll be me holding back tears and smiling on proudly as my daughter exchanges her first awkward hello with her college roommate.

My hairdresser said something to me while I sat in the chair getting my hair cut to resemble a simpler time in my own life. The words have stuck with me ever since:

“The years raising your children are the best years of your life.”

And ain’t it the truth?