Other People’s Words
August 29th, 2008Like many parents across the country I recently dropped a child off at college for the first time. As a writer, I’ve composed some of the mixed emotions I’ve experienced into paragraphs that might have made an interesting essay, but that would’ve taken time away from some of the other work I’m trying to complete. But that didn’t prevent me from feeling the gratitude I experienced yesterday after reading not just one but two pieces by fathers who are missing their freshman kids as well. Indeed, reading the letter from a dad who recently deposited his son at the University of Illinois in Champagne was a tremendous relief. First, I realized, of course, that I am not alone in these strange and raw emotions. Oh, I’m sharing a lot of this with my husband, too, believe me. But reading about it from a distance has its comforts, too. What struck me most about what this particular parent wrote was his surprise by the sudden realization, once he returned to a differently-inhabited home, that life really was going to be different. In the same way, the other writer, an editor of our local weekly paper, exposed my naivete that this brown-out I’m undergoing (sometimes I don’t make sense presumably because I’m trying to imagine the life of my daughter in a new place far away) is rather commonplace. This is when I am particularly grateful for other people’s words, especially when the language of their lives seems to so easily intersect with my own.
One of the buildings at my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan University
