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Leaving Home
Tips to Help You Say Goodbye to Your College Freshman
By Laurie Nadel, Ph.D.
Judy Grimner has spent the summer shopping, packing and getting ready to take David, the youngest of her three sons, to Villanova University where he is entering the freshman class. "As much as you're prepared for it, you go through a kind of grieving process," she says. "I'm absolutely fine and then I'm crying. David said, 'Mom, I feel this is it. There are so few days left.' I told him, 'You'll do fine.' Then I burst into tears when he left."
Judy's story could be yours or mine. Even though her two older sons, Brian and Michael, left home for college three years ago, the sense of loss is no less than it was the first time. "When Brian went to college in California, I went through the torture of getting him ready," says Grimner. "I flew to the West Coast with him and got him settled into his dorm. When I came home from L.A., I had to get Mike out the door. It felt like I was giving my family away."
It's an emotional roller coaster for most parents. "My husband had a much harder time letting go than me," says Marcelle Fischler, a mother of three. "He always hated when the kids went to sleep-away camp, and he didn't like our sons being away for an extended period. He also worried about the tuition payments."
And lest you think that process gets easier when the second child leaves home, Marcelle and Judy find that, in fact, it gets harder to say goodbye as the younger ones depart. "When my second son left last year it was actually a lot harder," says Fischler. "The nest was getting emptier. That meant only one child left in the house without a sibling. I didn't know the dynamics of a family with an only child. It also made me feel a lot older to have two sons in college. My husband also had a harder time with one child left. It was almost like we didn't know what our purpose was anymore so we coddled the youngest. While we had worried about him being an only child, he loved every minute and thrived on it."