| by Peggy O’Mara, Editor and Publisher
Last fall, my oldest daughter went to college. And she came back. I didn’t know—I thought that maybe, at 18, they grew up and left home. No. It ain’t over yet. This has turned out to be one of my most profound mothering experiences. As with my daughter’s birth, her college experience turned me around 180 degrees, so that everything looked quite different and I felt, as I did after her birth, that no one had really told me what to expect.
When we prepared for college, we did all the right things. My daughter took the college entrance tests and pored over books listing numerous college choices. I went to college meetings at her high school, waded through financial-aid options, and made lists of college supplies. In effect, I got the boiling water and cord clamps ready, yet forgot to talk about the pain. We spoke a great deal about the practical details and little about the potential emotional realities. Fortunately, this time around, we’re a family that has learned how to talk about the pain and how to handle the unexpected.
My daughter chose a large college because she had attended a small, private high school. She chose a college town she liked that is less than 500 miles from home, and where we have old family friends. She chose a college that has a lot of different course offerings. And although none of her friends planned to go there, she visited the campus beforehand and liked it. She made a good choice.
The reality of life away from home turned out to be very different from the widely accepted fantasy of college as fun. The reality was a large institution with many of a large institution’s pitfalls. We place our vulnerable young adults in a new situation that carries heavy personal, societal, and financial expectations of success. To support them in this new and important venture, we pull the rug out from under their personal lives. They leave family and friends—their existing support network—to live with someone they’ve never met, in a room so small that furniture must be stacked. The room has one window that looks out onto a roof. The bathroom is down the hall. They eat in a cafeteria.
For young people who want to leave their present situations, who are highly motivated to learn or pursue a career, or who are of a different temperament, such experiences may not be sacrifices. At other schools, they may not be sacrifices. However, for those who value aesthetic and emotional experience, large-college personal life may be too impersonal. I am surprised that colleges and universities remain so unaware of how important the personal dimension is, and how impersonal campus life still can be.
At her first dorm meeting, my daughter was given a piece of candy, a condom, and a black whistle. The whistle was in case of threatened rape, and stiff penalties were attached to irresponsible whistle blowing. It was rumored that a student whose roommate commits suicide receives all A’s for that semester. Amid the innuendos suggesting serious emotional experiences, very little acknowledgment was given to the day-to-day coping with these new situations. Parents were cautioned to take a hard line when they received “the call” from their child, asking to come home.
The profundity of it all came in contemplating this hard line. Unlike the period following my daughter’s birth, this time I had the memory of my own college experience, and knew how much my own responses to her would echo the choices I had made as a young adult. While I encouraged her to give herself time to adjust, the line did not turn out to be mine to hold.
For one thing, I have the habit of trusting my daughter and her perception of her own experience. She knew when she wanted to walk, to talk, to wean, to read, to go to school. Her choices so far have been just fine. I have had no reason to distrust her experience—and neither has she. Once my daughter had decided she did not want to stay at this college at this moment, she had no ambivalence, no second thoughts, no looking back. She simply knew her own mind.
She had no guilt, either. Once she’d made sure that I would receive a tuition and housing refund, she was free of concerns. Having never been lonely, she could make no sense of unnecessary loneliness. Her large classes did not cause her to complain; what she could not endure was the abrupt loss of a family and social life that had been working well for her.
Due to her ability to know so clearly what she wanted and my ability to trust her feelings, even though they were not in my plans, my entire life fell into place in a different way. If it really is true that someone can be trusted to understand her own experiences, make her own choices, and take responsibility for her own decisions, then it must be possible to fashion very unique lives for ourselves—lives that are truly handmade, rather than imitations of society’s shifting standards of behavior.
My daughter made all of the times I had toughed it out the sadnesses they really were, rather than the necessities I had believed them to be. Her decision made my whole body relax, as I no longer had to be ever alert to the “right” way. Her clarity demonstrated that it is possible to raise children who know and trust their inner experience, who have not been lied to, who are not neurotic.
There is a name for what my daughter is doing. It’s called taking a year off. When I went to college, there was no adult education to speak of, and women who didn’t go right to college from high school usually didn’t go to college at all. That is no longer so. My daughter is seriously examining the college options right in her own backyard, with the knowledge that she can return to a larger school when she’s ready to specialize.
Surprisingly, many of her former classmates are choosing similar paths. Several boys went to a university nearby so that they could be together and close to home. Others have come home. Some would like to. A few are traveling. And many are adjusting to college just fine.
Like birth, college requires us to prepare as best we can, knowing that we must also be able to respond to the unexpected. Curious that it should be unexpected. In our family we value personal timetables, connection, cooperation, and support for one another. We share difficult emotions and hard times. In our family, how someone feels is very important. Our quality of life is very important to all of us. And so it is with my daughter and her classmates. They have broken the mold of “ivy league” expectations and recognized, at a young age, that life is not only about going after something, it is also about the getting there. These students are insisting on getting there in a style to which they have become accustomed.
Thank you for this article. I am getting close to sending two children off to college, one of them being my only daughter. Even though I still have a couple of years, I feel so lonely about it already. Your article helps.
This article really hit home for me. I graduated from the biggest high school in Missouri in 1991 and went to a large state university right away, just as many of my classmates did. My family expected me to go there because I had a scholarship to the school. I was very excited to be away from home, living by my own rules and having new experiences. But that’s not how it worked out. Right away I felt totally isolated and forgotten. I had a few friends at the university that I tried to call for help, but they didn’t seem to want to offer much support. I had no car and didn’t know many people with cars so I was stuck on campus most of the time until the end of each semester. Everything on the huge campus seemed to be paved and everyone was in a hurry to walk a mile or more to their classes.
I lived in a dorm that more closely resembled a prison, and my new roommate bizarrely slept in our room for days and then disappeared for weeks on end at times. My family, not being particularly nurturing anyway, wouldn’t come to visit me at all. At one point I slipped into a deep depression and could barely get out of bed in the morning. I developed an eating disorder, started drinking and smoking, and hanging out with people who weren’t focused on getting a decent education. Needless to say I began to skip and fail classes. I tried joining various social groups on campus to get back on track, but I never felt I fit in anywhere.
At that point, I told myself I was done. While my family attempted to guilt me into staying at the university, I announced to them that I would be transferring to a school of my choice. I spent a year researching colleges all across the U.S., applied to three, and just one accepted me because of my low university GPA. That was OK — it turned out to be the best choice for me. It was a small liberal arts college, Notre Dame de Namur University, on the West Coast. While I knew no one there, it was as if I was coming home. The dorms were more like apartments with living rooms, large bathrooms, and bedrooms. Everyone knew everyone else, and even recent graduates came to visit current students on campus. Professors worked one-on-one with students in a way I’d never witnessed, and there were no teaching assistants to intimidate or demoralize me.
There were no fraternities or sororities so there were no huge, loud, alcohol-fueled parties on campus. The university was previously a historic, beautiful old estate and it was wonderful simply to stroll around and enjoy the gardens. It was a dream come true, and I made it happen by myself. I took on a lot of student loan debt to go there, but I have never regretted my choice. I’m pleased to say I met my wonderful husband there, too.
Strangely enough, almost 20 years later I still have dreams at night where I’m stuck at that big university. I wish I could have those 2-1/2 years of my life back, but I realize I needed to go through that unhappy experience to take control and make decisions that were best for me.
Thank you for this lovely piece. I was fortunate to go straight to a small, private women’s college out of high school and had a good experience after the initial adjustment. However, as an adult I have returned to college at a large university, and what a difference! I have no idea how many young people cope in that environment. It is impersonal and not at all nurturing. I recently had a difficult time dealing with the financial aid office, and reflected on the fact that people 15 years younger than me, who often may not have the skills to advocate strongly for themselves, are forced to deal with this bureaucracy on their own. I join you in the hope that colleges begin to look to the emotional health of their young students as they make this transition.
Dear Peggy O’Mara,
As you say, many students can adjust to the distance and new surroundings, but it would help students and their families if all of us, particularly parents, teachers and counselors, explicitly acknowledged the issues you explore in this article.
When I went to college less than an hour from home, I liked campus life, roommates, and my beloved all-night library (the HUT). I probably had no idea how important it was that I could come home anytime, join in family trips over the weekend, attend my sister’s dance recitals, and have my parents bring me home-cooked food. I took it for granted. I don’t remember ever hearing in high school to take such things into account when choosing where to go for college.
When my sister went to an Institute 8 hours away, she had none of this support and eventually transferred back to an in-state school. In high school there is so much hype about leaving home and getting away from parents. Few people consider living at home, though for many families, it can be a win-win. As a student in the 1990s, my roommates and I paid under $200/month each for our own room in the house we rented. I earned $5/hour working as a library monitor. With today’s wages and rents, I might consider living at home too.
Really interesting article. Will try to remember it in 13 years when my oldest is facing college decisions! My own experience at a small liberal arts college was completely different. It was far from home, but the college really “took care” of their students, and in many ways, my college friends became what I thought of as family, more than my actual family, who weren’t very close-knit. Still, apparently my parents had the wisdom to push me to a small college, and I am grateful for that.
Dear Peggy,
I have been reading “Mothering” for quite some time – our oldest is almost sixteen, our middle guy will be thirteen, and our youngest turns five in August. Your articles have helped me – THE quintessential researcher – through breastfeeding woes, vaccination decisions, cloth diapering choices, co-sleeping dilemmas, and myriad other “alternative” parenting questions. Now, the article “It Ain’t Over Yet” on your child going away to college has made it into my archive of files for the future. Yes, yes, my sixteen year-old still has three years of high school to go…but I am well aware of how quickly those years slip by. It was only yesterday she was potty-training and tandem nursing with her younger brother…sigh…
Thank you so much for this insightful piece that will help this parent – along with her daughter – make an informed and intelligent transition into yet another, ever-changing phase of family life.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Polishook
Dearest Peggy – How do you do it? You are always on the leading edge of important emotional social issues involving family, children, choice! I loved this article! There is much research to support that many young people,disenchanted with the drug use, the heavy drinking, the lack of privacy, the sexual mores, find college dorm life to be intolerable and too expensive for their family to justify. So, they come home, take time, off, work, do something that makes them feel like the responsible young adults. thanks, Peggy! Kathy Morelli, LPC