Welcome to the Jungle

This is a particularly long post so I apologize in advance I have much to say.  I dropped my daughter at college 3 weeks ago.  My first born, my baby. I thought I was prepared for anything that would come my way. I went to college, I had been in her shoes.  Having read every Grown and Flown article on FB, probably twice and having gone to Bed Bath and Beyond, numerous times. I thought I was armed and ready, I was sooo not ready.

College drop off is alot like pregnancy. There are little things no one prepares you for and its almost a secret club that you get in only by actually experiencing it.

My colllege drop off was nothing like my daughters. I had been paired with a roommate from Laguna Beach (this was way before the MTV version). She had a boyfriend who was a real surfer, covered in tattoos (80’s style) drove a pick up truck and did not go to college. My other roomates were from Chicago and Beverly Hills. The Chicago roommate was from the town John Hughes based all his movies on and I think she thought she was starring in one, and my roommate from Beverly Hills was being raised by her spanish housekeeper whom she yelled at on a daily basis, in spanish. She had the biggest jar of dippity doo I had ever seen and her greeting to me was “Do you have an answering machine? Everyone in LA has an answering machine” I literally wanted to run screaming from my dorm room. Not only did I not have an answering machine, my fake ID was apparently really lame, My clothes were all wrong and basically any sense of coolness or confidence I thought I had I left behind with my Benetton rugby’s and OP shorts.
We loaded up the car the night before and felt good about our packing job and how she was being moved in. We rented a giant truck, one size short of a U-haul. I packed everything she owned, all her new purchases and everything from Bed and Bath. I was prepared. My plan was to avoid going to Bed and Bath once we got there. I figured if we had everyhting with us, I could unpack and get the room together in a few hours and avoid the crowds. We were assured that moving in would not be an issue. Move in carts were signed out for 20 minutes at a clip and they stuck to that schedule. I was feeling overly confident about how this was going to go down.  We arrived to mayhem.

One of the most important parts of move in day is securing “the cart”.  How else are you supposed to move in all your bottom shelf purchases from Bed,Bath and Beyond. People had hand dolley’s, empty palettes and their own freaking carts. We had nothing. We were such rookies. As we unloaded the car on the curb and I tried not to let her tampons and other feminine hygiene products fall over the place I started to realize this move in may not go as smoothly as I anticipated. I started to make one of my many treks across the parking lot, past the giant trash compactor and into the service elevator holding as many bags as I could until I could get into her apartment.  I thought to myself, “no big deal” that its 85 degrees with 90 percent humidity, and even though I was now doing serious manual labor I was still positive things were going to be  great. Lindsay was living in an apartment, all the rooms were supposed to be very big, much bigger than the dorms and the closets were suppposed to be even bigger, from what I was told almost all closets were walk in! I opened her bedroom door, got in and realized the room was smaller than any dorm room I remembered from 1985. walk in closet? Not here!  As a matter of fact the closet door had fallen off the hinges and was leaning against the yellow wall. I looked down and noticed a band aid stuck on the carpet from the previous tenant. As I was trying desperatley to rip that sucker up I looked around and tried  to figure out how I was going to spin this as “ALL GOOD!” This may be out of even my reach.

I went back downstairs and said “ALL GOOD” to my daughter standing on the curb looking like a deer in headlights. I whispered in Adams ear, ” The room is a fucking shoe box I dont know how we are going to do this”, naturally he responded back ” stop being so dramatic and negative”. Oh, ok Mr. happy. I handed him the key and said “go for it” and bring up those giant hefty bags filled with shoes while your at it. 25 minutes later he came down looked at me and said “whatever”. We have been married long enough for me to know that is code for “your right but I can’t deal with you right now”.  After standing on the curb and spending over an hour going back and forth carrying bags of crap up and down Adam managed to “borrow” a cart from some unsuspecting freshman and we were able to pile almost everything in “the cart”. I tried giving my two cents on how to pack the cart but at that point we were all sweating, we were tired and no one wanted to hear from me. Bad move. When I pack I am very aware of what is going where, for instance when piling things on perhaps a Kim Kardashian giant acrylic make up organizer is not the thing that one would put on the TOP OF THE PILE, especially since its not in a box. SEE where this going? As we were headed into the elevator Adam decided to drag the cart filled with almost everything my daughter owns over the lip of the doorway. The cart probably weighed something short of a ton so the only thing that moved was the giant acrylic make up organizer, and it moved across the top of the pile and like a projectile shot across all of us standing there and landed in front of the elevator.

Another secret no one tells you is that if you don’t have a good marriage, college move in is the nail in the coffin. Sign the divorce papers. This one will send you over the edge faster than a reality tv show. Needless to say in front of all the innocent freshman I looked at Adam and said, “Are you a fucking moron” it was rhetorical so I am not sure why he felt the need to respond. I should preface this and say I never speak like that to my husband, I swear I don’t. We had been up since 5:30 in the am, driven 3 1/2 hours and was nowhere near move in. I was sweaty, smelly and stressed out beyond even what my neurotic brain could process. There may have been a call to my own mother snuck in at this point. I admit to having crossed that invisible line that all couples have. And after it came out I immediately knew I had crossed it. Or it may have been when he said “Are you kidding me” in his really scary crossed the line voice and I knew I had to apologize. We had not even gotten on the elevator yet.

Once we got everything in the room it was a giant shitshow. There is no ther way to explain it. I don’t know why it took us so long to pull it together, but I think we were in her room for like 6 or 7 hours moving her in. This is not normal. The room was so small I could not make the bed, although I kept saying “I need to make the bed” and I repeated it like it was my mantra. Every 20 minutes or so I woud just randomly blurt out “I think I should make the bed” even if no one was in the room. After being in the room for about an hour Adam decided he needed food. I just could not understand how he thought eating was going to take priority over getting this done. As I re-arranged the room, and rearranged the room I realized I was just moving things in circles. After about 2 hours I saw I was alone in the room. Lindsay was in the bathroom doing who knows what, but where was Adam. I went into the hallway and there he was, computer on the lap, searching websites looking for a new car. “What the fuck are you doing?” He looked at me with a straight face and said, “there is no room for me in there, no sense both of us being in there, you have this.” I gave up. I went back to the room, continued to move things around until I was able to clear enough crap of the bed to actually make it.

At this point I have to talk about decor, which clearly is just as important as tailgate clothes (another phenomenon we did not have in 1985). To move into your room you need this new stick on wallpaper that your husband or yourself need to have a degree in interior design to know how to hang. Being the newbie that I was I only bought one roll, this covered a spot behind her bed which equated to nothing. So on top of needing the perfect set of plastic drawers, we need to search for more stick on wallpaper. I would start on the string lights that go around the room but as luck would have it, my daughter is as neurotic as me and the fear of a potential fire loomed in the back of her mind so we escaped the string lights.  As we left to go look for a Super-Target, (not to be confused with a Target Express) because we needed MORE stick on wallpaper, my mind was churning -wtf was happening here. This is NOT at all what this experience is supposed to be like. Granted, move in in 1985 consisited of securing the rental refrigerator and hanging a few photos. This is somewhat of a fucking nightmare.  We had already seen many FB posts of rooms looking finished with relaxed parents and students.  People were out to dinner already! We looked like we had just experienced some kind of natural disaster. After another 2 hours at Target I said to Adam, “I have a game plan”. The look of defeat on his face. “Just tell me where to go and what to do.”

At 7:00 am the next morning I woke everyone and was determined to make this day work . There was no way I could have another day like the previous. My daughter already was in the throws of a serious anxiety attack. She was like a PTSD victim. We spent the second day in a much better head space. We got done what we needed and of course the picture on FB looked perfect. No one knew what had actually transpired to get us to that finished product (until now. But I guess that’s the beauty of the internet, smoke and mirrors.  Which of course leads into an entirely different blog post about the fallacy of FB. But thats another time.

Adam and I survived the move in. As we said goodbye to Lindsay I of course was sobbing. I was sick to my stomache with the thought of leaving her but I also knew I had to do it. Rip the band aid off and walk away. Adam was yelling at both Lindsay and myself to pull it together and wrap it up. As we drove away I sighed and Adam reassured me all would be ok. He was eerily normal. Iceman. We stopped for gas and as I watched him pumping the gas I noticed a few tears falling. Are you freaking kidding me? He got back in the car and I said to him, “Are you crying?” He didn’t answer he just kept sniffling. His nose was actually running. This literally continued to Delaware where I finally said, “you need to pull your shit together, I am the one we are supposed to be worried about, not you.” It was like he was having some kind of emotional breakdown. I am not equipped to handle this. Children crying and being total emotional wrecks I can handle, my husband, no I am not ready for this. He finally stopped crying at the Starbucks rest stop in Delaware.

The pressure of the move in was tremendous. If I had to see one more photo of the perfect room I was literally going to shoot myself. When I moved in to college we hung magazine ads on the wall and had posters of Rob Lowe, we rented a refrigerator and called it a day. I have no recollection of buying bedding or “getting ready for college”. College move in in 2017 is a long ways away from 1985. Today you need a headboard, wallpaper (bring a level with you btw),  string lights, a collage, a monogram…the list is endless. I know with Morgan I will be so much more prepared. For instance, I am already investing in my own hand truck. My advice to future parents “getting ready” for college is this: Bring your own cart, do not put anything breakable on the top of it, leave your emotional baggage at the door and don’t forget the level. The wallpaper will forever hang crooked without it and of course lots and lots of tissues, you never know who will surprise you and need them.