ET Phone Home

When my daughter left for college three years ago I hardly noticed she was gone. We saw each other a lot in the first few months and she called me everyday sometimes three times a day.

I use to joke with one of my colleagues who had a son entering his freshman year that I would forward one of my daughter's daily calls so she could hear about college life as she was limited to once a week at best from her son.

Once a week did not sound unreasonable at the time. After all I did not talk to my mother more than once a week, but that was long before the advent of cell phones, text messaging, email, facebook and skpe, all of those cheap to free means of communication which also offer the anonymity of not really having to "talk" at all.

What is so hard about sending an email? After all there is a lot of news. Classes have started I barely know what he is taking much less who is teachers are, how many kids in his classes (is it really an 11:1 student to faculty ratio for which I am paying dearly), who his new friends are, how the food is, what his roommate is like, how he likes his new baseball teammates?

Just a few short months ago I knew everything, or almost everything. Now I know nothing not what he is doing and not even who he is doing it with.

I find some comfort in bemoaning this condition with his sister. She too is left in the dark and missing the daily connections with her best friend and mine. But I find I am enjoying the regularity of her calls all the more so maybe his absence is to bring me closer to my daughter and that is certainly not a bad thing.

But ET, you can still phone home!

It really is empty

It is the end of August and for many that means returning to school, the beginning of fall, the end of summer.

I have always welcomed that. By Labor Day I was tired of the lack of routine the summer months bring, the plaintive sighs that "there's nothing to do, I am bored", nagging to get summer reading done, the sleepy mornings because I stayed up too late with my kids who did not have to get up. School starting was good.

But that was before school starting meant dropping your children off at some distant location to sleep in a strange room with strange new faces -- that was long before my youngest child left for college.

Confessions of an empty nester -- I am not so sure I like this school year.

But I am finding quiet comfort in talking to the many other Moms who are feeling the exact same way. Walking in their son or daughter's room and feeling the emptiness in the pit of your stomach. Knowing that even though they will come home it will be on a temporary pass, a visitor if not a guest and they will never again occupy the house in the same way. Childhood as we knew it and loved it, is over.

So because I am having so many feelings about this unique, bittersweet time of life what better way to move through it than to reflect on it in all of its many facets -- both the melancholy times and the fun ones.

Our sons and daughters will be growing up and isn't that what we always wanted for them? They will make new friends, share new experiences, learn new life lessons and value some of the old and through it all we can watch, listen, and maybe grow a little ourselves.

But come on Matt, is it really so hard to call home?