A moving day at the dorm
The woman in line ahead of me at the Trader Joe’s in San Francisco was chatty and upbeat, loading up on healthful snacks for the long ride back to San Diego.
She’d had a “wonderful day” picking up her son, a freshman, from the dorm at San Francisco State.
I was buying a bottle of wine, which I considered opening in the parking lot before I headed back to the same dorm to join my own freshman child.
A wonderful day?
Maybe she had managed to snag a dolly or find a convenient parking space. Maybe she had plenty of room for her son’s gear in her SUV. Maybe her kid, like my daughter’s roommate, had his stuff packed, closet emptied and floor vacuumed when his mother arrived.
For us, moving out of the dorm was an arduous two-day process — infinitely less “wonderful” than moving in.
It wasn’t just the multiplying gear tugging at my arms — the boots and coats accumulated during a cold, rainy winter, the photos and posters and stuffed animals my daughter took back after each family visit, the suitcase full of hundred-dollar textbooks she “forgot” to sell back to the campus bookstore.
It was because of the emotional baggage — the inevitable pulling away of a child so reluctant to leave home nine months ago, she wouldn’t get out of the car when I tried to drop her off at college.
Back then, she cried for 45 minutes in the parking lot before heading alone into the dorm, a tattoo on her hip and a teddy bear in her purse.
This time, she cried when she got home. And I’m the one reluctant to move on.
------------
The odds were against “wonderful” from the start. The last day to move out of the dorms was the last day of spring-semester finals, so students had been cramming when they should have been packing.
That made for a combustible mix: exhausted teenagers and anxious parents jostling for space on elevators crammed with boxes, bins and dollies; cars circling the campus loop for hours, searching for nonexistent parking spaces, stalked by cops with ticket books.
I’d been through this drill with two older daughters; that didn’t make it easier. But at least San Francisco State eased the guilt by making it easier to dump the year’s detritus.
A giant Goodwill bin stood outside the dorm, and barrels in the lobby collected donations for food banks and homeless shelters.
By day’s end, the overflowing piles outside the bins were a college-life collage: a flower-patterned duvet, no longer needed by a student who would not sleep in a extra-long twin bed next year. The heaps of rubber shower shoes, cheap coffee makers, grimy mattress pads.
And our contribution: a barely used mini-fridge that might have fetched enough on Craigslist to fill my gas tank, if I could have squeezed it in with the suitcases and storage containers filling my midsize sedan.
I passed the same parents trekking back and forth from dorm to car so often, we shared pleasures and miseries like old friends. Packing up a freshman’s room, we agreed, unearths all sorts of mysteries.
There were signs that college hadn’t changed my kid. The pencil holder on her desk was empty; pencils were strewn all over the room instead. Sunflower seeds carpeted the floor and empty candy wrappers were stuffed behind the bed. Post-its, scribbled with random thoughts, blanketed the wall.
And there was evidence of my prodigious mothering: unopened packs of hair scrunchies, contact lens cases, bottles of hand sanitizer. Cans of soup still in grocery bags. Thermal shirts with price tags attached.
My feeble attempts to keep my baby safe, healthy, warm — attached to her mother by an umbilical cord of necessities that she had ignored.
I held my tongue as I helped her pack, determined to celebrate her independence rather than lament my loss. The process tested my resolve, and her emerging boundaries.
“Don’t touch that drawer,” she called out as I rummaged through her desk. She unloaded the drawer, back to me, facing the wall.
I tried not to be alarmed. “There’s an explanation for everything,” she said whenever I found something that unsettled me. That became our mantra.
That six-pack of condoms, dressed in colorful foil wrappers? A gift from the health center for new students.
The unopened second set of sheets? Didn’t need it; just washed the same set over and over.
What looks like a elaborate giant water pipe on the kitchen counter of the apartment she’ll be moving into?
Hookah, anyone?
-------------
She’ll be living off-campus next fall, sharing a tiny one-bathroom flat with three roommates. It’s four miles, on two buses, from school.
A kid who can’t scramble an egg will be cooking for herself. A freshman who dragged herself out of bed 10 minutes before class every morning will be a sophomore with a 30-minute commute.
But I’m not worried this time around. She had never been on a public bus when she left for school last year. Now she rides the bus, the Muni, the BART to visit the Castro district, party in the Haight, hike through Golden Gate Park.
My suburban girl has learned to appreciate the in-your-face diversity of a campus with a plaza named after Malcolm X and a student center named for Cesar Chavez, and has fallen in love with a city as different from Los Angeles as Venus is from Mars.
She’ll find her niche just fine, I thought, as I carried her last load to our car: a teddy bear, a Jimi Hendrix poster and a duffel bag full of philosophy books.
