My Son Goes to College

A full day af­ter leav­ing my son at col­lege in New York City, I am clean­ing his room out. If you think that’s too ear­ly, wait for your own teen to leave. I find: 5 Vi­sine bot­tles, an emp­ty box of Tro­jans, one lone con­dom pack­age and a slew of Pol­ish Play­boys. I am not sure I ex­pect­ed any­thing dif­fer­ent. He has been at NYU for four days and al­ready has a girl­friend. And a hick­ey. My hus­band had to tell me this be­cause Cole won’t text me. I can’t tell if it’s an in­de­pen­dent thing or he’s as glad to be away from me as I am. I guess I don’t re­al­ly care.

I love my son, yet I have to ad­mit I’m a lit­tle bit gid­dy he’s gone. I find that I keep brac­ing my­self to deal with him. In the morn­ing, I keep ex­pect­ing to run in­to him at the kitchen ta­ble: IPAD, ce­re­al and scowl. Some whiny rude re­mark, some sort of de­mand and my whole day is shot. If he were my boyfriend, I would break up with him.

But he’s not there. He’s not any­where. I find him on Face­book, pho­tos oth­er stu­dents have tak­en of him at par­ties, eyes rolling high. But he has a smile and I have not seen it for a while. This makes me hap­py.

I al­so find him on his blog. He has been asked to write about wel­come
week; what he has done, seen, feels. The prob­lem with this is I’m learn­ing things most par­ents don’t want to know. $60,000 to par­ty all night. Ev­ery night. I know he’s tak­ing shots in an apart­ment on Broad­way over Amer­i­can Ap­par­el. I know he is not sleep­ing, that he’s late for meet­ings and he’s smoked cig­a­rettes.

I prob­a­bly should stop read­ing what he writes. It’s stress­ing me out. But not in the way you’d think. I am scared he will be kicked out for un­der­age drink­ing and end up back here at the kitchen ta­ble, mak­ing my days sour and sad. He be­longs in New York City. He’s be­longed there since con­cep­tion.

It takes him five days to fi­nal­ly text me. I ad­mit I am thrilled he’s fi­nal­ly shar­ing with me. I want de­tails. Then I hit the view but­ton. “I’m stop­ping the an­tibi­otics.”