Off to College

Caroline left for college on Wednesday.  There was lots of last minute stuff left to do, those last couple of days, but Tom and Sarah drove her to Athens on Wednesday and got her moved into the dorm.  A big step for her, and for us.

During the last few days before she left, I was thinking about when I went off to college.  The first roommate who only lasted a few days before she decided she wanted to go back home (I don't think it was anything I did).  The freedom from attending class, all day long every day, yet the classes were so much better and covered so much more, compared with my high school classes.  New friends, almost all from the honors dorm or my honors classes, some of whom I've kept in touch with and I still consider myself close to, even if we aren't as good about keeping in touch as we intend to be.  Some classes I still remember (admittedly, not that many) and a professor and his wife who are still friends.

In those days - in a different era - you had to pay for out-of-town phone calls and my raised-during-the-Depression-era parents didn't make long distance calls unless there was some news to convey that wouldn't wait for a letter.  So we didn't talk much on the phone, but they wrote me letters, and I wrote them back.  Presumably I exercised some sort of judgment and didn't tell them the stuff they really didn't need to know.  But that was it - that's how we kept in touch.

Since Caroline left, we haven't heard much from her, but Sarah gets text messages (they are sisters, and that's how sisters now talk, apparently) and I see the updates to her Facebook friends.  The only communication I've gotten that was more than a brief answer to a question by Facebook message was when she wanted me to order a couple of items from Amazon.

And that's okay.  She's gone away to college and her parents are no longer supposed to be deeply entangled in the everyday minutiae of her life.  We could be in touch almost all the time, but we shouldn't; still, I can see totally how new technology has totally enabled helicopter parenting at a whole new level.

I'm trying hard to not be that parent.