At Santa Barbara orientation for Bess's college, the family caboose big enough to step into the spacewalk that is a college life, and to have to hear about it for two days like it's a real thing that is going to happen
There was so much going on, just getting out of town, someone had to watch the horses, and then I had to leave B and Nathan to take care of my mom which I had never done because it requires wiping and hoisting on a lift and tending with water and food. And we'd just gotten back from Palm Springs which had already kicked our asses caring for her in that unhospitally environment.
But we got out, just me and the girls, drove at night getting to SB, a Motel 6 at 10 pm after visiting a Taco Bell and we open the door to our room where the door basically opens onto the bed there's no luxury of floor or any wasted space at all where you can maybe turn your body sideways while standing up. But at least there's three of us and some bags.
We do think it's funny and we try and settle in because we have to be up at 6:30 to be there at 7:30.
In the morning we're all kind of tossing and turning but Emma finally gets up and checks her phone and says OH SHIT MY ALARM IS ON SILENT. It's 7:37 NOW!!
We get up like rockets blasting off.
At the orientation area we don't have time to pick up bagels like we planned but we get in the long line for nametags and wristbands for free meals which I only paid for two of us. Because it was like $200 dollars each. Our shoebox motel room cost less than that.
Once I get the two wristbands and Bess gets her packet and we're waiting for the leaders to come tell us where to go next, I'm looking at the pile of wristbands over there in the side booth and I say wait we need to get one for Emma. She has to eat too. We wrestle with how to finesse this and finally I just say okay lemme do it. So I walk over to the area and there's the girl who gave me mine and the yellow wristbands are like all exploded all over the table and there's a young guy there next to the $200 dollar wristbands and he apparently knows nothing about their worth and he sees me looking and I say Hi can I -- and he says oh do you need another one? And I stare at him and just say YES
And he hands me another one and I say thank you and run out of there as fast as I can and then hide me and the girls behind other people in case they realize how stupid they are and look around for us. Now Emma has free meals.
We go off on a campus tour even though Emma gave us one a few months ago or last year when we looked through this her old campus, and there's a girl walking alone near us (I think she's a girl anyway), she looks like Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap and I say hey are you alone? And then I introduce us and she's a swimmer and I say where are you from and she says a place in California and I say where is that and she says I don't really know. Then she says I don't even know the 50 states. So then I'm feeling really good about Bess because I taught her WHOLE CLASS that song in 5th grade so she knows the 50 states alphabetically and if this is the caliber of people here then Bess is going to be on the very fucking top. I text Kurt about this 50 states girl and he writes me back wait there's 50 states?
I'm nervous about orientation because who gets good at orientation, if you've only ever been to your own, and now this one. Nathan went to his by himself and Emma didn't have one because of Covid. I want Bess to have friends so I'm talking to all the people that look like not weirdos walking near us. This is also a good way to see which kids are morons, which kids are self sufficient and which kids are heading to sororities. There seem to be alot of those kind of girls, which Bess comes to tell us at lunch her reaction which is I hate girls
Except she does find one kind of decent one.
By the end of the first day we walk on the beach at sunset with Emma trying to help Bess prepare for her class picking the next day, and Bess missing most of the sunset because she's looking at her phone figuring out which classes to put in her cart. It's all so jumbled. There's all this beauty but there's all this massive stress like getting an applesauce spoon jammed in your face by a mean gramma and you're just trying to look at the sunset man. You were walking ALL DAY LISTENING TO PEOPLE TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR FUTURE when you were already so happy just being a kid skipping along up to now. Why they gotta try and take your kids away. Even this incredible place, on this cliffs of this massive ocean, isn't as good as my little house with my family in it. It's a fucking tragedy.
I know they talk about helicopter parenting but I think mine was more Santa's sleigh flying over yelling ho ho ho and tossing down presents. I only got more hovery as Bess got meaner and quieter in the teenage years, from worry. Before I was downright jolly, man.
Bess is tired and kind of wants to be done with the day and go back to the hotel with us but we tell her to stay for the 9pm games because this is where you might have fun and meet people. Her eyes are bleary and I want her to come with us too but I want her to not just have the business but the fun of the school too. She has a bunk and a roommate in the dorm, to spend one night and see what it's like, what her future could be like in her dorm. So we leave her at the beach. And pretend it's okay.
That night Emma and I go back to crawl into the rabbit hole and we're on our phones and reading and wondering how she's doing and she tells us it was very fun and she's going to sleep there.
And we spend our first night away from Bess.
The next day she has to pick her classes by the end of the day and this is the nightmare part, getting a laptop to do the job since she didn't have one to bring. What if she doesn't get the classes. She doesn't want to eat much at 7 am. How are we going to get through another day of walking and listening. We don't wanna talk to anyone anymore. She eats with her friends she made but they are girlier than her and the swimmer who doesn't know the 50 states walks by me looking the other way. I try to make friends with an english muffin with peanut butter and jelly because all the desserts taste like old paint here. Emma has work meetings in the morning and I go to different meetings and Bess goes to different ones too.
Then suddenly it's lunch again.
Behind the barrier in the dining hall courtyard I saw my daughter leaving me. It's a glass barrier because it's UCSB so you want to see through every wall cause every wall shows you the wild ocean. The ocean just right over there, inches from you at all times, throwing you remember me bursts of fresh air and seagulls. We gulped all the air lobbed at us because well we had no choice. It was offered.
I was trapped in the dining hall courtyard by cheapness. This free food we got for this last baby at this watery dream school. If I left the courtyard I couldn't get back in and there was a buffet behind me. The all you can eat and stuff in your bag, kind.
Emma was on her way to meet us and Bess had to run out early to her group. If I left to help Bess then Emma'd be inside the barrier and I would be outside. It's that "mom of many" problem, where to meet one kid's need you break the other kid's heart. Except the youngest kid is 18 with a pretty full heart. She's a solid 10/10 on the scale of Almost Finished.
My problem wasn't that I was trapped, it was that there was this glass wall and me looking at my baby, the one I left at preschool for the first time, and the one I left at elementary school trusting those teachers and the one who flailed emotionally through high school after spending middle school in her room on a computer. There's my baby, right there. In her baggy jean shorts, and her nice camisole top and her casual shirt on top for color and to catch the wind. She put those perfect clothes together herself. She doesn't have any friends here yet. She needs a laptop to get her classes, we've been worrying, she's about to sign up for her classes and they're supposed to give her a laptop what if she doesn't have a laptop. That's why she had to run out early. She turns to look at me once and gives me the thumbs up. She's got the laptop secured. That means.
So now I can only watch because they're gathering there only the students as they call them, but that is my baby, and she was just on my lap while I typed up articles, nursing or sleeping as I wrote. On my body. Connected to me.
Her leader holding the blue sign is yelling something and then starts walking away with her crowd including my baby, with her long blond hair and my eyes are filling up because she is relaxed and laughing with someone in the group and she doesn't look back at me because she is ok. That is when you know you did your job right. When there's tears in your whole torso because she's walking away like a normal person and you are still the head cheerleader and wanting everything for her and not quite done ever.
I go back to Emma at the table now who has shown up from her meeting and is eating the sandwich I got for her and she's hearing about how everything went since I saw her at breakfast. This orientation has made us WALKING BITCHES, we've done Disneyland walking, mybrother. Bess can barely move one of her legs and my feet are shot like someone actually shot them off with a shotgun and then hotglued the shattered parts back on all wrong. Emma went to this school already and is already off to her next school, but home for the summer so she came along to help and has been like the alternately magic amazing genie and impatient motherfucker with us as Bess and I stumble around listening to her but stupid like we're in a bad glitching 80's videogame. I feel nothing but compassion for her at our bumbling.
Emma says it feels like so long since I did all this but I want to do it all again, she says and I say I feel the same way, and imagine it's been even LONGER for me. But I want to do it all again too. It makes you take inventory of your life.
After lunch I sit in more lecture halls and learn about more stuff to help Bess and at the same time I clean all the hay and receipts and old frozen yogurt spoons out of my wallet because I finally am sitting down and having the time to properly attend to my wallet. But listening to these people talk about navigating school and how we can help our students I'm thinking damn.
Now I have to think about real life?
School at 18 was one of the most unsafe places for me. I was 18 and mentally 16 and emotionally 9 in New York City, stepping over bums on Broadway and 10th Street to get to class and here is Bess in this oasis by the sea with TWO members of her family orbiting around her. Helping her feel safe. I felt alone in everything, not scared, but out of my element. Being in a new place and in a school you've never been to, to live, is a strange sudden environment. I'm not sure anyone feels like they are in the right place because it hasn't spoken to you yet or invited you in. You just kinda landed there, fresh from your mom's alcoholism. Ok that was just me. But we all come from some specific shit man.
And then when I finished school I majored in auditioning in a variety of beds over the years but never really giving myself to any of the parts, totally. Even the one I ended up in. It's been a long running show but I always had one foot wedged in the door because I don't like a place without a door open a crack. What if I smothered. I'm only now, as in about 15 minutes ago, getting the feeling that I might be in my actual life. It's just - there's been so much going on I forgot it might matter
The weird part about being a mom for so long is your life doesn't matter anymore. It melted away to make room because you had beautiful people to raise. But then here it is, your life still surges back up, like here it is. Like Emma said when we were at the beach listening to the noise of it and the ocean got quiet for a second. She said the ocean forgets to speak sometimes. It forgets its words.
I did that. I just put all my talking into these creatures, and now here is this last one, walking and talking and laughing and signing up for classes and forgetting a laptop and not knowing what she's doing and having adventures like rolling down a grassy hill last night with a girl she met for fun.
I go to the meetings until she gets her classes and she texts me that she got all the classes she wanted and this was the reason we came here, she miraculously got off the waiting list to get into this college, this one by the sea that is only an hour and a half from home, now she will belong in two places, now she is forming herself into herself and her shoes are walking away.
And I'm still behind that barrier with the free food still grabbing all I can to feed everyone but I don't have to now what do I do with these hard wired skills from years of mom I'm hungry what is there
It would be weird if I wasn't here still doing the scrounging I've always been doing at book fairs and teacher appreciation and science projects and dioramas and basketball games and gymnastics meets birthday parties beach trips and I'm actually so tired and my back doesn't hold me up very well anymore but what do I have to do next why do I have to do something else now when I was perfectly happy doing
these three kids
I just sit down in this weird courtyard with a tuna sandwich wrapped in napkins on top of a bag of bagels I bought when I passed that place and the bread smells so good. I smell the bread everywhere I go the rest of the day because indeed I will be carrying it all the way home. I remember when things are on overload like on days you are following your daughter at orientation and there are heavy schedules in foreign buildings with everyone new and groups of faces talking to you that this is being immersed in life, and you are too busy to do anything but hold all the bags and keep following the girls' feet as they're scampering to the next thing and seeing their faces for tiredness or hunger or disappointment to try and soothe their needs that's what I am made to do
this has been a big job. Way bigger than college. College is nothing. The love I grew from these kids could wrap all around this college and tie it all up in a sack and it would only use a teaspoon of what they gave me, and what I have. With them, I am infinite.
When I get home and Bess collapses into bed like herself again but now a bigger self made for the outside world, we actually just PLANNED HER LIFE with people concerned with SCHEDULES and FUTURES. And I put my mom to bed and swam and then took the young horses over to Double D's to run and the sun is going down and I let the horses loose and Double D is digging a hole for her tree she is planting and she never had kids and she says to me how did it go and I look at her, a few years older than me and no kids ever not even one birthday party and I look at her and what did Columbus say when he saw a whole new land a whole huge continent and he looked back at the Queen of Spain wide eyed what could he say shrugging, the whole thing, raising these people (heart fed by 3 kids, the size of what's the biggest planet, Jupiter? 36,000 Jupiters exploding) what was it like?
it was unprecedented
