College Is Learning Experience for Parents Too

Reporting on a recent parents’ information night at Moorpark College, I sat among the hundreds of moms and dads who had filled the college auditorium to learn about student orientation, financial aid and transferring.

The evening made me remember my own anticipation of finishing high school and the anxiety of starting college.

But talking to those Ventura County parents made me think about what my own mom and dad went through while I was busy setting out on the rest of my life.

During my final days of high school, I counted down the days until graduation, dreaming about living without any parental rules.

In fact, I was so ready to leave home, I started to act like I already had. I was so consumed with my own yearning to be on my own, I never stopped to think that my mom’s heart was breaking.

“I just knew I was going to miss you so much,” she said recently. “I was also very happy for you. That’s always the dilemma of parents. We raise our children to be independent, and then when they leave we say, ‘I can’t believe they’re all grown up.’ It’s melancholy but it’s also a celebration of going on.”

In Moorpark, Vickie Chien of Westlake Village spent the two-hour information session jotting down notes on a small yellow legal pad. She wanted to make sure her son, Justin, a Westlake High School senior, knows when to register and where to take the college’s assessment test.

However, Chien had one important question college officials couldn’t answer. How do you get yourself ready for your kids’ going to college?

“There are so many mixed emotions. You’re not ready to cut the ties but you have to,” said the mother of three. “It seems like he was just born. Now he’s going off to college.”

As many high school seniors count down the days to graduation and send off their deposit checks to colleges, parents head the other direction emotionally. And while students have ceremonies like graduation and the prom to celebrate the achievement and complete the chapter that is ending, parents often cope with the change alone.

“When people have babies, they say you have baby blues,” said Priscilla Partridge de Garcia, a Camarillo-based clinical psychologist who specializes in blended families, teenagers and stress. “Nobody really put a name to this.”

Tom Nussbaum, state chancellor of the community college system, has talked of his own turmoil as his daughter Joselyn prepares for college. After waiting to hear from a number of UC schools, Joselyn recently picked San Diego.

“It’s starting to hit me hard. I realize the days at the dinner table as a full family are numbered,” Nussbaum wrote recently in his weekly e-mail dispatch that usually addresses state budget matters. “A few weeks ago I was cleaning out the garage and had to deal with the boxes of her childhood toys. Despair is the only way I could describe the feeling. Where did all the time go?”

Parents often feel anything from loneliness to relief to grief when their children trot off to college, said Partridge de Garcia. She recommends they talk to other parents, get involved in an activity that is not child-related and think about what is next.

“Whatever the nervousness is, you should really take a look at who you are. What do you want to do in the second part of your life? What’s going to get you energized for the last part of your life?”

Although my dad and stepmother had enough of their own activities in place before my brother went to school last fall, they still struggled when they took him there.

The trio left Los Angeles early in the morning after spending the night packing the van. Dad jammed it with everything Bobby had been collecting for life in a UC Santa Barbara dorm. Clothes, sheets, a bonsai tree. You know, the necessities for freshman living.

They spent all day driving, unloading, organizing and buying more needed dorm items, like a refrigerator.

“You hang around as long as you can and you start to wonder if you are intruding because at some point, all the other college boys and girls are hanging around. You want them to get to know each other but you don’t want to leave,” said my stepmother, Marga Bakker. “You come up with excuses. Shall we get some more supplies?”

Maybe they stayed as long as they could to make sure he had everything he would need. Maybe it was to give them a little more of what they wanted--the feeling that although this young man was living somewhere else, he still really needed them. And maybe it was to avoid the inevitable.

After hours of doting care, they climbed back into the minivan and started home. Together and alone, they cried, reminisced and wondered about what lay ahead.

“I cried for the sense of loss, flying-the-nest syndrome, which you know has to happen, which you know is the right thing in life,” said Marga. “Somehow, you still hold on.”

Bobby still comes home more than two weekends a month. And he is probably on the phone with dad daily asking for money.

But it’s the day-to-day personal connection I think our parents miss.

When Bobby was in high school, each morning dad would put out a bowl, cereal and milk for his son. Then he would pull out the sports section and lay it on his son’s seat at the kitchen table. As the two ate breakfast, dad would ask Bobby about the Lakers or if he was ready for his history test.

“Parents are funny that way, myself included,” dad said. “They always want to find a way to connect with their children, even if it’s a strange connection.”

Now, dad spends his mornings in the kitchen alone, but he still searches for those connections.

“I never used to look at the sports page. Now, I glance at it to see if there’s anything there even though he’s not,” dad said. “There might be something there I can discuss on the phone with him the next time we talk.”

Jennifer Hamm is a Times Community News correspondent. Her e-mail address is jennifer.hamm@latimes.com.