It is enough to make you sentimental about tube socks. : Where Is Dr. Spock Now That I Need Him?

How odd to be teary-eyed over three-ring notebook paper in a Canoga Park drugstore.

It is not, of course, that the stationery department is intrinsically tragic. But at our house, as at thousands of others with Valley high school seniors in them, the letters from colleges have begun to arrive.

These early letters bring unseemly joy to their teen-age recipients, who have already learned that fat envelopes are harbingers of yes. Good news is typically plumped out with facts on housing and genial lies about the prelapsarian perfection of campus life. Rejection letters are so thin you can often read them through their mean-spirited envelopes.

Each letter of acceptance is a blessing, certainly. But, for parents, it is the kind of blessing that momentarily chills the groin. Your child seems to think that he is simply going to college in the fall. But you sense that something is changing between you forever. It is enough to make you maudlin over notebook paper, simply because you may never have to buy another pack.

It is enough to make you sentimental about tube socks.

I hadn’t realized before that you can catch empty-nest syndrome from college admissions committees. Child-care experts, so full of wisdom on dealing with colic and food-fussiness and all the other noisy, rashy milestones of early family life, utterly abandon us as soon as our children are old enough to buy their own record albums.

Where is Dr. Spock now that I need him?

Why 20 pages on toilet training and not so much as a footnote on the fact that we become addicted to parenting our children?

We may bitch and moan about untoward milk spillage and the remarkable tendency of litter, and who knows what else, to generate spontaneously under our offspring’s rumpled beds. But deep in our bones we know that the competent, cordial people they become are less ours than the sweet, half-formed creatures who once thought us wise enough to be trusted with their soccer gear and rewarded our utility with the occasional sloppy kiss.

Now that they are turning out the way we hoped, why does it feel so bad?

For a decade now, I’ve seen the stricken faces of older friends who said, through clenched teeth, that they were just thrilled that their Athena or Joshua was going to Stanford or some other first-rate school. Now I know why their smiles were so strangely bent. Remember how you felt when your supply of Richard Scarry books was suddenly cut off? Imagine swapping the soaring high of watching your children sleep for the mere methadone of affectionate phone calls on your birthday and bank holidays?

If we allow these children to go to college, they may choose to appear at Thanksgiving and, then again, they may not. We may never again have their cereal bowls in our sinks.

Friends who are veterans of this unanticipated trauma assure me that the worst is yet to come. You get used to being nouveau poor, the economic plight of those who have bright, studious children who get into Yale.

But I am told you never get over driving them to campus, which is what colleges call your child’s new life.

“He got out of the car, and he never looked back. He never looked back,” a friend recalled years later, her wound unsalved by the wall-to-wall white carpeting she had had installed faster than her new collegian could say “Freshman Orientation.”

The lonely rite of passage usually begins with the formal acknowledgment of your child’s maturity that is the real meaning of your asking: “Do you want to drive?” The talk inside the overstuffed Honda is typically silly stuff about eating right and calling home. The trees flash by along the freeway, and the snapshots flash by inside your head. He wants to get there. You want to know why Riverside would prefer a talented near-grown-up to the 7-year-old you used to have, the one with Chiclet teeth.

The problem is that he is happy and you are not. You can hardly stop the car and announce: “It will be lonely without you.” He doesn’t want to hear about your angst . He wants to be sure you packed the popcorn popper. He wants a roommate with pretty sisters, no vile habits and stereo speakers as big as the Ritz. It has just struck him that you will no longer know what time he goes to bed. He wants it to start now.

For Southern Californians, the pilgrimage takes place in ironic sunshine. For Easterners, the trek is made as the leaves begin to turn, in the most menopausal of seasons, which is really more than someone paying room, board and tuition should have to bear.

Nobody warns us when we have our children how soon we have to say goodby.

We have to wait until the letter comes. It says that he is in. Why does it feel as if he’s out?