Kids, families, college and moving on
I’m not a helicopter parent, hovering over my children — I swear. It’s just that the spider webs that blossom in our garden this time of year always make me a bit weepy.
We did the soggy-Kleenex college drop-off years ago, and since then, our now-adult children have ping-ponged between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. They’ve each graduated or started jobs up there, or headed off to faraway adventures.
Yes, the house felt achingly empty after my husband and I deposited first our son, and then our daughter, for their freshman years. Sometimes it still does. But in those early months, we certainly didn’t call them every day or, heavens to Betsy, attend class with them, as some parents have reportedly done.
College administrators say they’re getting tougher this year on parents who hang around campus, all but ordering Mom and Dad to leave after the orientation, forcing Junior to navigate the shoals of roommate living and class registration solo.
Bravo, I say. Time to cut that cord!
But the problem is, after those tearful partings at the dorm, the kids return — for Christmas vacation, summers and sometimes, for a good while after graduation — only to leave again.
Which brings me to the spiders in our yard.
The August our daughter started college, we came home to find that a stout brown spider had strung one of those perfect Halloween webs outside our bedroom window. Lonely and stunned that we suddenly had all the free time we’d longed for, that spider, bizarrely, became our focus for the better part of two weeks. We took our morning coffee outside, riveted as it feasted on trapped bugs or repaired the tears rent by mortal combat and heavy morning dew.
And when the web became so seriously ragged that its occupant moved on, I’m embarrassed to admit I felt kind of abandoned all over again.
Last month, our son started law school across the country, and our daughter is settling into a job up north. This week, I found a web shimmering between our circuit box and the power lines overhead; at its heart, a fat, mottled-tan spider gobbled an insect bounty. Smaller, wispy webs clung like cotton candy to the big jade plant and the leaves of my potted geraniums.
But come the Santa Anas or the prospect of better hunting elsewhere, they too will soon vanish.
The kids’ departures this summer weren’t near as wrenching as those freshman drop-offs. But the sight of my son’s tousled bedsheets the day he left for New York, my daughter’s long brown hairs wound through my hairbrush, half-empty jars of their favorite pasta sauce in the fridge, their scents on the towels — they still make me melancholy. Probably always will.
Years ago, before all the leavings and re-leavings began, it was sometimes hard to appreciate the family we were amid the vuvuzela-din of two kids, two jobs and a million chores.
Those years are over, for better or worse (and to be honest, it’s both). But if we’re lucky, the kids will return, over and over again.
The silk that spiders weave is a remarkably strong material, its tensile strength comparable to steel. Although we left our kids to steer through college largely on their own, I’d like to think our ties will remain just as strong, if ineffable, as that silk.
As with spiders, I’ve learned that the trick is to try to stay quiet, watch and just wait.
Molly Selvin teaches at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.
