My Little College Girl

Tomorrow Lulu leaves for college. That day that I first brought her back from the hospital seems like two or three lifetimes ago, and yet it also seems like last week.

Oh, wait: I never brought her back from any hospital. I must have mixed her up with someone else. She was born at home.

I’m happy she got into a good school, and I’m really happy that she’s happy to be going. As I write, she’s in the next room packing. I hear crackles of boxes being taped, thumps of boxes being dropped, a tinny sibilance from her iPod speakers as they broadcast her eclectic selections: It Was a Very Good Year (Kingston Trio), Shiny Happy People (R.E.M.), I Did It My Way (Frank Sinatra), Tea for the Tillerman (Cat Stevens), Trees Get Wheeled Away (Bright Eyes), Mi Ranchito (Los Super Seven) and some reel by the Chieftains.

As more and more things go into boxes, I’m able — for the first time in five years — to walk through her room without being aggressed upon by a stray pant leg.

Over the past weeks I’ve assembled goodies for the top of Lulu (Chapstick and shampoo) to the bottom of her (slippers and star-covered kneesocks). I got her Spiderman BandAids, a subscription to Mother Jones Magazine and sheets. I bought phosphate-free laundry detergent, organic teas, and an environmentally friendly, wind-up radio/flashlight.

Tonight we went to a departure-eve dinner at her favorite restaurant across the estuary. It serves New Zealand cuisine; sheep products, mostly. On the way there, there was a Stones song on the radio but … she didn’t know who it was! I panicked. “Here she is going to college and she doesn’t even recognize Mick Jagger! I’m a failure. It would be one thing if she couldn’t tell the difference between Freddy and the Dreamers and Herman’s Hermits … but the Rolling STONES! My work here is not done. And she can’t go until it is.”

It’s that same feeling I get as the Times Square ball starts falling on New Year’s Eve: That OCD thing of “Wait! There’s something I have to do first! I don’t remember what it is, but … WAIT!”

During dinner I kept my ear out for evidence of other parental duties I might have neglected and might be able to remedy by morn. In the meantime, I tried to give her one last sex talk, just in case. But she would have none of it.

The first thing I did when we got home from dinner was to make an iTunes playlist of musical essentials: Traffic, Cream, The Byrds, The Dead, The Band, The Doors, Mississippi John Hurt, Fairport Convention, Randy Newman, Otis Redding, Jerry Jeff Walker, Leadbelly, Buffalo Springfield, Clifton Chenier, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Doc Watson, Bonnie Raitt, Blind Faith and the like. Oh, and the Rolling Stones.

[Editor’s note: In the end she was too busy. I am ashamed to admit that I sent her off to college anyway, ill-prepared and vulnerable.]

Now, as she finishes getting ready I keep singing my own version of Lucinda Williams’ gently ironic song:

“Once you get to college, I don’t think I’ll miss you much… “

My brain understands that there are great opportunities awaiting me now that I’m “childless,” but the rest of me mourns. It’s been wonderful to have the orbit of this (mostly) delightful creature interweave with mine. It’s strange — unimaginable, really — to realize that’s all behind me. Not only that raising M is behind me, but that raising children in general is past. Now, when strangers see me with a young person, they ask if it’s my grandchild. So, not only must I learn to live without M, I must get accustomed to the idea that the world no longer sees me as the radiant, voluptuous, nubile and achingly beautiful sex goddess I once was.

Here’s a work of art by Mark Bulwinkle, which he just sent on account of its relevance to my situation.