We began this handbook speaking as parents and went on to speak mostly as college deans. We conclude by speaking from our personal standpoints, one as someone who can vividly remember her own experience of leaving her parents to go off to college, and the other as the parent of children who are now past college.
A Personal Conclusion from Maria Davidis
I knew, when I was in my junior year of high school, that I would just die if I had to stay in the Philadelphia suburbs. I wanted to get out of my provincial hometown and see another part of the world, to meet people who had completely different backgrounds from my own, to do the unexpected. My parents, like all other Greek immigrant parents we knew, had only allowed their first child to apply to universities and colleges in the area. My sister attended the University of Pennsylvania, which was an excellent choice, but not far enough away for me. So I applied to a school just outside Boston and made a very complicated deal with my mother, the upshot of which was that if I managed to get into that school, I could go.
I realized some time later just how painful my eagerness to go away for college was for her and my father. Unbeknownst to me, they had decided to allow me to apply out of state because they felt they had been overly restrictive with my sister. In their hearts, they wanted me to remain at home, as she had, but they also wanted me to be able to develop intellectually and personally as fully as I could. Like all parents, they wanted me to have all they had not had growing up; in their cases, war, the death of each of their fathers, and political tumult had robbed them of opportunities they might have had had they grown up in the United States.
That spring, I received my acceptance from my first choice, and that fall, my mother helped me pack. For my part, I was looking forward to this great new adventure, but I was also a scared eighteen-year-old, petrified to leave the warmth and nurturance of home for something completely alien. What was this first-generation kid from a poor background doing at an Ivy League school so far away from home, surrounded by students who all seemed wealthier and more entitled to be at the university than she was? During my freshman year, I would call home with my insecurities and tales of woe, and my mom would try to reassure me by saying that I was in a transition and that things would get better. Indulging in the melodrama that only an 18-year-old can, I would insist that things would never improve, and she would then ask me very gently, “Are you sure you don’t want to come home and go to Penn?” At this, I would assert my determination to stick it out, and I soon realized that lots of other students, many of whom became my friends, felt the same kinds of insecurities (but were just as determined to succeed as I was).
By the end of my freshman year, my phone calls to my mother, made every night, became increasingly positive on my end, and our relationship became even closer than it had been. Even after I made decisions with which they didn’t agree, such as being an English major rather than a pre-med student, my parents kept believing in me and offering their support.
On the day of commencement, there they were, beaming as I received my diploma, happy that I had succeeded in doing what I had set out to do, and happy to share in it with me. I am profoundly grateful to my parents for allowing me to go away to college, even when what they desired in their hearts was for me to remain near them as my sister had done. They gave me the room to grow intellectually, to test my mettle, to become an adult. It was their most precious gift to me. Thanks, mom and dad.
A Personal Conclusion from Lynne Abel
When pregnant with my first child, I worried that resentment about the necessary sacrifices of time and volition involved in raising a child would contaminate my parental love. I was surprised and delighted to find that natural chemistry overcame any thought of "sacrifice." Parental love is so deep and powerful that we give our children more attention than they perhaps need – and certainly more than they sometimes want.
Despite this early lesson in love's potency, I was again surprised at my sense of personal irrelevance when my children left for college. Having worked outside the home for many years, I was taken aback at how much being a mother contributed to my sense of myself. My husband advised me not to despair, to wait three months before finally deciding life no longer had meaning; he suggested I might come to enjoy the empty nest. He was right -- within weeks, not months.
Not being daily responsible for a child – even a grown one – is wonderfully liberating. Cooking, keeping the house, going to the movies on the spur of the moment, reading the paper every day or a whole book in a short time, engaging in community projects, going away for a weekend – all these things (assuming one has prudently avoided the encumbrance of demanding pets) become much simpler.
And once children graduate, most of us find ourselves with at least a bit more ready cash. My husband and I celebrated our freedom with season tickets to the opera in New York City (and eight weekends a year in The City around opera performances). Those weekends are magical. My husband and I have to sit next to each other in the car on the trip down and back; we spend two whole days doing whatever we decide we will enjoy most. If you will permit me to mix a metaphor, the empty nest has no shackles.
In addition to the personal pleasures I have described, cheer-leading and comforting one's children as they metamorphose into adults are as wonderful as and much more multifaceted than cheer-leading and comforting their first steps and tumbles. You never stop being a parent. It is what you do as a parent that changes. There's lots to look forward to once the children leave for college. And even more when they graduate.
Many people advised Lynne Abel about the first edition of this handbook. She thanks them all most heartily: her constant helpmate, John Abel; the generous advising deans in the college’s Academic Advising Center and Philip Lewis, the supportive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; dear friends -- all parents of college graduates, mostly of Cornell -- Marion Gold, Carolyn Landis, and Patricia Rider; Jill Fasciana, coordinator of the Committee on Special Education in the Jamestown, NY public schools and the mother-of-the-bride she shamelessly enlisted at her daughter’s engagement reception; a former advisee, Jeffrey Diener, who, having worked for a few years, is now going on to graduate school; and Samuel Wheelis, now deceased, consultant and owner, Marketing and Public Relations, Ithaca, NY.
Also, many thanks from both Lynne Abel and Maria Davidis to Paige Kennedy for all of her hard work typing and formatting this edition, and to Deb Morey for her updates and technical expertise.