COLLEGE MOVE-IN DAY
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 22.
Hello, my friends. This goes out to all of my mamas who were on the brink of sending their child to college. It doesn't matter if the college drop-off will happen in a few weeks or a few years.
It doesn't matter if it's your oldest or your youngest. There is something about thinking about college move-in day that can fill us as mothers with absolute dread. And don't get me wrong, it's not all bad.
I mean, you and your child, well, your child first, but also you have been working towards this moment, it seems, for their entire life up to this point. So think about this moment for you. Close your eyes and imagine you're on campus with your child.
Your child has worked so hard to get here. The college process was a lot, but they made it to the other side of it. Move-in day has arrived.
You've met the roommate. You've helped them move in their things and make their bed. Maybe you've had a meal with your child in the dining hall or taken them out for lunch.
I imagine it's a beautiful day, a crystal clear blue sky. The logistics of getting your child settled may have been complicated. Finding the dorm alone might have been the first challenge.
Your child may have shared at some point during the day that they're nervous, maybe even that they're not sure they can do this. Then before you know it, it's time for you to go. And suddenly, you're not sure you can do this.
You have to let go and you're not quite ready. You may have already experienced this moment before with an older child, or if you're taking your child back for year two or three. Whether you've been through it with a child yet or not, you can probably call up the imagery pretty easily.
After all, we've been thinking about this for a while. The college process has gotten more and more competitive. COVID upended the whole process.
The rules seem to change on an annual basis, and they're certainly much different than when we applied to college. The only thing that's certain in going through the process is that it will be uncertain. As a parent, you're told repeatedly by college counselors and admissions directors that it will all work out okay.
But frankly, you don't know this until you get there. Scratch that. You don't really feel like you'll know this until you can observe your child truly settled and happy.
Some of us might only have gotten started on this process with our children in 11th grade or even in a sprint in the beginning of senior year. But an increasing number of us are thinking about the college process from the moment our child enters high school. Some of us begin thinking about it in middle school, and frankly, even earlier.
Navigating the college process is a topic in and of itself for us as parents. So more to come on that. But for now, suffice it to say, by the time you arrive on campus for move-in day, you've been on a long, possibly stressful journey.
And it doesn't stop with your child's final decision in May. Almost immediately after that, you and your child are bombarded with a long list of tasks to complete before move-in. From filling out surveys about rooming preferences and connecting with roommates for the first time, to purchasing bedding, completing endless forms, many of which are accessible only to your child now that they are in charge of themselves.
And of course, we can't leave out the whole process of paying tuition. That is for sure the one email you will get without fail. So back to move-in day.
As you imagine standing on the green about to say goodbye, what comes up for you? I can imagine you might be feeling an incredible sense of pride. Your child made it to college, and you are deeply proud of them. You might be excited for them, embarking on a new adventure.
You might be feeling a little relief. You made it. They're moved in and settled.
There's nothing left for you to do. But on the other hand, balancing these incredibly positive emotions of pride, joy, excitement, and relief, you may also be experiencing a wide range of challenging emotions. Worry, anxiety, sadness, grief, dread, overwhelm, just to name a few.
In fact, you may have been feeling some of these emotions during the long journey to get to this moment. Think about it. The imagery of this moment is so easy to conjure up.
As I said, you may be months or even years away from this moment, and you can already anticipate the pain, worry, sadness, dread. Our minds are beautiful, powerful instruments, but in this way, they work against us. We can project the future with such clarity.
We can call up a story in our minds about what this moment will be like, and although you know the pride and joy will probably be there for the ride, the pain is what gets your attention in the story, like in a fairy tale, where you're focused much more intently on the villain of the story, the impending doom. So let's really look at each of these emotions and address them one by one to see if we can find a little bit of relief for ourselves as we project and eventually face this moment of the college move-in. I want to suggest that the first emotion to unravel is the emotion of overwhelm.
What do I mean by this? Well, often when we're presented with a situation where we have a number of conflicting emotions and quite a few powerful negative emotions, it's natural for us to feel emotionally overwhelmed. It's like we're being bowled over by a continuous series of waves that keep knocking us down. We feel like we're spiraling between worry, anxiety, sadness, and dread, and it feels like there's no relief in sight.
You might be thinking, I can't handle this, or I don't want to feel this way. I just want to feel better. And typically when we feel this way, we kind of shut down.
It feels like too much, so we go out of our way to avoid all of it. But before we dive further into this emotional experience, if this is something you've experienced, this overwhelm, I want to invite you to hold space for yourself. We all get to the point of emotional overwhelm sometimes.
But the next time this shows up for you, rather than telling yourself you can't handle it and that you just want to feel better, I want to suggest that you say to yourself, of course I feel this way. Of course I feel overwhelmed. I'm experiencing such a mix of challenging emotions, and it's okay.
Look, you're on the brink of letting go of something very precious to you. And right now, it's so much easier to see all of the things you are losing rather than the things you or your child might be gaining. And sometimes it's not useful to force yourself to look on the bright side.
Sometimes it's just not honest. You can't wish away the painful feelings all of the time. A friend on Facebook posted an image similar to that on the cover of this podcast.
The image is of a toddler holding a teddy bear and a beat up suitcase by the train tracks. The caption said, college bound through a mother's eyes. I couldn't actually capture a more perfect image and sentiment than that for what we're talking about here.
This is your baby. And I wonder if you, like me, sometimes look at your child who may now be at least eye to eye with you, if not considerably taller. And as you look at them, your mind literally flashes to images of them as a toddler, of them giggling uncontrollably as a three-year-old, of them not wanting to be put down or always looking to hold your hand.
Those days are long gone. But as long as I've had my babies at home, somehow the memory of all of that has stayed intact. And now they'll be away for a long period of time.
Is it any wonder that you're experiencing a wide range of emotions that bring you pain? So first have grace with yourself. If you find yourself overwhelmed with these emotions, tell yourself it's okay. Nothing has gone wrong.
In fact, maybe this is just the part when letting go feels really hard and you can do this. You can get through to the other side of this. One big benefit of just giving yourself the space to feel a bit overwhelmed sometimes is that you stop fighting with or stop arguing with the reality of these negative feelings.
It's like you've been pushing against the closet door to keep all of the demons in and you're exhausted from the effort. But once you stop pushing and you let the demons out, you let the pain free, you actually start to notice, oh, that sadness. There's anxiety.
It's no longer a big ball of emotions that are bowling you over, but simply a few powerful emotions that you can name and understand. So what can we learn about these emotions? Let's talk about worry and anxiety. These types of emotions tend to be incredibly challenging for us because they feel so out of our control.
And here's why. When we worry, we're typically imagining that something terrible will happen in the near or distant future, either to us or to our child. Our minds project this image of a possible future that we don't want.
And in the same way I earlier painted a vivid image of you dropping your child off at college, we could also project images of our child sitting alone in his dorm room, feeling lonely and without friends. We can project an image of our daughter getting into a dangerous situation at a party without anyone watching out for her. We can also project an image of us back home, feeling empty and alone, not sure what comes next for us.
It seems like there are so many unknowns and the possibilities for the future that our brains offer us are the painful ones. And I don't know about you, but sometimes when my brain gets stuck on one particular version of what might happen, a version that I find particularly worrisome, it's like my brain obsesses over it. I can't stop thinking about it.
And it almost feels like we're proving ourselves right. Like the more I think about this awful scenario, the more weight it has, the more my brain thinks that it's probably going to happen. And what our brains really want us to do is to make that possibility go away.
For most of our children's lives, we've had a number of ways we could try to mitigate risks for them. We'd give them curfews or get to know the parents of their friends. We would check up on them with Life360 or Find My iPhone.
We try to help them keep on top of their schoolwork or extracurricular activities. We would be there if they needed us and we would see them every day. So we would be able to have a check-in or to gauge how they were feeling.
Now the window we've had into our children's lives is closing. They may still share many details when they call or when we see them for breaks, but we're not as intimately involved in their lives once they go to college. And they certainly don't want us keeping track of their whereabouts or micromanaging their schedule and choices in the same way we did when they were home.
We're left to trust that the tools and the judgment we've tried to instill in them over many years will serve them well and help them navigate this new world at college. But we can't help but wonder. After all, we still see them as our kids.
They've grown up in so many ways, but are they really ready to be entirely out on their own? This lack of visibility and control that frankly we've been losing for a number of years by now, we're embarking on a period of time where we're losing visibility and control. And frankly, we've been losing this control for a number of years by now. But I think when our kids are still at home, we have this illusion of control.
We have the perception that somehow we're still keeping them safe, even though, let's face it, once our kids start to drive, even before, once they start getting a little bit of freedom in high school, we don't really know everything about the choices they make unless we catch them doing something we don't approve of. Our kids are now adults and they're calling the shots. They're taking control.
And just like those first days after your child got their driver's license and you were petrified that they would get in an accident right away, now they're taking on this huge responsibility on their own. I'm imagining a baby deer weakly trying to stand, not yet strong enough to be on his own, but determined to try. This is all new and our brains don't like new.
Let's face it, none of us crave change, especially when it involves changing something about our lives that we have loved for so many years. Our children and us, we're walking into unknown territory. And of course, it's scary.
Of course, our brains are going to be looking for danger. It's actually a habit. It's what we've practiced.
We have been protecting and guiding our children for years. And so, of course, our brains are continuing to try to do this, even though so much of our children's lives is no longer in our control. If you feel anxious about your child going to college, of course you do.
Hold space for your anxiety, but also remind yourself that the stories your brain is concocting about all of the things that could go wrong just because your brain has thought it doesn't make it true, doesn't make it any more likely to happen. If the worst happens, if something awful happens, then we will experience pain and we'll figure out what to do next, if something happens. Until then, become the watcher of your mind and notice how your brain wants to offer you phantom possibilities that are actually bringing the unnecessary pain into your present moment.
Nothing has gone wrong in this moment, and yet you already feel the pain you so desperately want to avoid. So the next emotion, sadness. Oh, this is a heavy one.
Our child is going to college. It feels like a huge loss. Honestly, like grief.
This is a process of letting go of our child, and it feels like we are letting go of this precious life we've built. Our child has been home with us for 18 years. It sounds like an eternity, but when you're looking back on it, it can feel like a blink of the eye.
The last four or five years have gone by with lightning speed. It's just incredible how quickly we get to the place where they no longer need us. Even though they've been operating pretty independently for the past few years, we still have enjoyed their quiet presence in the house.
They would be home for dinner, or at least home to go to bed. We would plan our schedules around them, just in case they were free. If they had an event, a concert, or a game, we would for sure be there to cheer them on.
Over the years, our children stopped spending as much time at home. They prefer to be with their friends, or their boyfriend, or their girlfriend. And let's face it, sometimes they find us annoying, and you feel a sense that they're pulling away, that they actually don't want to spend as much time with us.
And sometimes we can't help it. When we're with them, we remind them to do the things we think are important, and it just adds to their feelings of wanting independence. So we start to develop this sadness over time of what we're losing, the closeness, and the relationship.
And so this sadness has been building for years. Those days of having total control of your child's schedule, or of simply being able to plan vacations where your child was fully, 100% in, excited, loving every moment of your attention, time, and love. Those days feel like they're long gone, or at least your relationship with your child has shifted, and guaranteed it will continue to shift throughout your child's life.
But back to college move-in day, this moment feels monumental. The moment when everything shifts. They will no longer be at home.
When they come home, they'll be coming home to visit, not to stay. We always knew this moment would come, but for right now, it feels huge. We always knew this moment would come, but when you're standing there on the college campus, it feels like you're standing on a cliff.
I want to acknowledge and spend a moment with this feeling of sadness because unlike worry and overwhelm, sadness is an emotion that is worthy of our time. I say this because worry and overwhelm don't move us forward. In fact, they keep us stuck, entrench us even more deeply into our negative experience.
We can indulge in them, obsess over these feelings. Sadness, on the other hand, sadness, grief, it is actually a gift. Think of it this way.
If we had never loved, if we had never experienced the immense joy of having children and raising them to have the absolute honor of then launching them to this point, to saluting them as they make their way into their adult life, if we had never had this experience of love, we wouldn't be having this experience of sadness and grief. These feelings are the flip side of the love and when you can think of it this way, it doesn't necessarily make the pain go away, but it does allow you to have compassion for the experience. Of course you're sad.
Of all of the painful emotions we've discussed so far, sadness is the one that's most important to allow. Overwhelm isn't useful because it causes us to shut down and resist our feelings. We don't want to feel overwhelmed and so we just don't do anything and therefore don't address any of the thoughts or circumstances that might be creating this feeling for us.
And with worry, it seems like it's useful, but ultimately it's counterproductive. It keeps us stuck and churning in a negative reality that isn't even true, that will likely never come to pass in any way, shape or form. But sadness is an emotion that's more difficult to reason your way out of.
You have to learn to allow it, to let it be there without judgment. And this can feel really uncomfortable. The sadness can come in waves.
You can forget about it for a while, but then it can knock you over again with a subtle reminder, walking by an empty room or driving by your child's old school. You love and you let go and that's a cycle of life that's inevitable, that's beautiful. It may also be that there are many layers to the sadness for you.
It's not just letting go of your child, it's letting go of being a mother with children at home. It can seem like an entire identity shift. We can feel like we've lost the purpose that we've felt for so many years as a mother.
Having a child or children establishes a framework for your life. Think of a solar system where your children are literally the sun and our lives to a very large extent can revolve around the central unifying purpose that our children offer us. It might influence where we choose to live, whether or not we work, the type of job we take, how we arrange our schedules, the friends that we make, what we do on the weekends.
Then your child gets their driver's license and the solar system begins to feel like it goes off kilter just a bit. You can feel some relief in not having to do as much driving around, but luckily your child is still at home so there's still plenty we can do to keep the rotation of our lives revolving around our children. But once they go to college, it's like the sun of our lives has uprooted itself to another solar system.
Some of us try to keep the rotational force going. We plan our weekend visits to see our kids. We may try to talk to them every day, look forward to parents weekends, but it's still a shift.
When a star collapses in on itself, it creates a black hole. And in the same way, this empty space that our child leaves in our lives can feel like it's pulling us in, pulling us under. In the face of all of these uncomfortable, painful emotions, it can be tempting to try to fill up our schedule with busyness so that we can escape.
Our days feel empty without the purpose we've had, and so we can rush to fill the void because the void itself is a reminder of the loss. And yes, we do have an opportunity to choose what comes next, but for so many of us who are feeling stuck in the weight of these emotions, it can feel hard to move forward. In fact, because many of us are experiencing these motions well in advance of move-in day, it can feel like there's no relief in sight, that you're destined to feel this pain until you get to the other side of bringing your last child to school.
And then, then maybe you can start to move forward. But until then, when you have one foot in the empty nest, but the other still firmly planted at home, still taking care of your younger children, it can feel like this pain is going to go on and on. Here's the good news.
It doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to gain mastery over your emotional life. Now, this doesn't mean that you'll be happy all of the time, unfortunately, but it does mean that you can learn how to discern which emotions need to be processed and allowed, and which are simply habitual thought errors that keep you stuck.
Our minds create our emotional reality. Our minds, and not our circumstances. This is why some women can drop their children off at college and feel only a sense of relief and pride, and others of us feel devastated, worried, and sad.
And this is not at all to suggest that some of us are doing it wrong, not at all. Each of us have developed our own lens through which we view the world, and that lens has been forged unconsciously over all of the decades of our life. Half a century of ingrained perspective.
So this lens may mean some of us tend to have less of a tendency to think the thoughts that create worry, or more of a tendency to think on the bright side. But no matter your lens, there is nothing right or wrong about how any of us feel. It is what is for us right now.
But what we can all do, what we can all learn, is to become the watchers of our minds. To begin to learn how our perceptions about the reality of our lives, our view of our circumstances, how this is what creates our feelings and then drives how we show up in the world, and the results we create in our lives. When we think we can't handle this, when we think it's too hard, we feel overwhelmed, and we can't handle it.
It is literally too hard. When we think about all of the danger waiting for our children, for us, we feel worried and anxious, and we literally bring the pain of those imagined outcomes into our present reality, the very thing we so desperately want to avoid. And when we think about what we're losing when our children go to college, we feel sad and all we can think about is the loss.
Nothing has gone wrong here. We think and we feel. But here's your invitation.
If you can learn how to watch and become aware of your thinking and how it is influencing your emotional life and the results you are creating for yourself, you have the opportunity to decide on purpose if you want to create something different. This is the gift self-coaching has given me, and it is a process I teach my clients. It has opened up a whole new world to me and the experience I have of my life.
We feel sad, we feel worried, we feel overwhelmed. Nothing has gone wrong. And yet, we also have the power to not stay stuck, but to use this self-awareness to discover a whole new potential for our lives.
At the very moment our children are embarking on an exciting new chapter, we get to embark on our own from a place of power, self-discovery, and love. Thank you for being on this journey with me. Until next time, friends.
Thanks for listening to The Small Jar Podcast. Please visit us at www.thesmalljar.com, follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Small Jar Coach, and subscribe to this podcast. Remember, you are the author of your story.
