KIDS AND COLLEGE

                       Eileen Cichello

It's been a long time since we did the college scene but certain events stand out in mind.

In my view, being the parent of a high school senior is a preview of purgatory, that place where you do penance for your sins.  What is it about that year that turns the most amenable child into a royal pain in the neck?

High school seniors know everything, they think you are dumber than concrete and, if at all possible, they would rather not be seen with you in public. They are fidgety, irritable, ready to argue and fight at the slightest provocation.  They believe that rules are made to be broken.  This uncomfortable state of affairs reaches its peak as the time for college acceptance or rejection notices approaches but it continues, with varying degrees of intensity, until the moment you deposit them in their dormitory room.

Perhaps this is life's way of preparing everyone for the upcoming parting.

     It was early September in 1978 and we were taking our oldest, Mary, to college.  Taking your firstborn to college is a traumatic event, a sort of a mini death.  You want the years back when she was an infant, a toddler, a child.  Maybe not so much the teen years, that great character building time for parents.

Mary had chosen Trinity College, a women's college in Washington, DC.  On the day she was due to report, we left Weedsport in the small hours of the morning, reached DC by midday, got her settled in her room, attended a reception for parents and headed home.  I cried much of the way.  At the time, we felt we probably couldn't afford to have her fly home for Thanksgiving and this was the first time any of the kids had been away from home for more than a week.

To my surprise, everyone survived.  We decided, afford it or not, she was coming home for Thanksgiving. We went to the airport to pick her up and I almost walked past her, not recognizing my daughter in the sophisticated young lady approaching me.  Fortunately, Mary grinned and said, "Hi, Mom."

So...lesson learned.  You do survive and life does go on.  By the time the long Christmas vacation was over, she was ready to return to college and we were ready for her to do just that.

Mary, as the oldest, was the trailblazer in our family, despite what her sister Claire says.  We were very strict with her and she had tight rules for when and where she could go and with whom.  In the spring of her senior year, I suddenly realized that, come September, she would very soon be deciding for herself when and where and with whom and that she had better get some practice at that while still at home.  Sam and I talked it over and we both agreed with trepidation to turn decision making over to her. 

We hated the results.  She stayed out later, much later, than we thought was good.  We bit our tongues and fumed.

There's another weird part of this letting go business.  When your child is away at college, you assume everything is going all right, unless you hear otherwise.  When they're home, you do not go into a sound sleep until that car pulls into the driveway.  At least for a time.  When we reached the point where all seven kids were finished with high school and home on breaks from college or work, at some point I decided to just go to sleep and trust that they would get home okay.  Otherwise, I'd have been sleep deprived for ten or more years.

In our family, there were some 14-15 years of FAFs, otherwise known as financial aid forms, documents designed to strike terror into the heart of any parent. If you want your child to receive any kind of financial assistance, you'd better be prepared to spill financial blood.  They (they being the ones who will decide to grant, or not to grant, financial assistance to your child) want to know all these things that YOU don't know.  You have to dig and figure and dig some more.  You also have to come up with all this information by early January, hardly the time when most people are figuring their taxes. Sam and I had some of our best fights over FAFs.   The only bright aspect of that bleak scene is it did away with Sam's traditional April 15th late evening ride into Syracuse to get his returns stamped before the clock struck midnight.

             

                           TO BE CONTINUED...                                   

 

 

                       KIDS AND COLLEGE   PART TWO

                             Eileen Cichello

I am a person who is sometimes late.  UNLESS I or a family member are catching a bus, plane or train.  Then I get into a lather about being there on time, envisioning the bus, plane or train departing without us.  I take very seriously t++he injunction to be at the airport an hour before departure. 

On one of Mary's visits home from college, she was still in the shower when we should have been at least halfway to Syracuse.  She finally emerged from the bathroom, cool and calm, unlike her frenzied mother.  I bundled her into the car and proceeded down the thruway at some 20 plus miles over the speed limit, yelling periodically, "I am NEVER going to do this again, Mary. Are you listening?  I am NEVER going to do this again.  You can miss your blankety blank plane the next time."  I dropped her off at the terminal. By the time I had parked the car and gotten inside the airport, Mary somehow was on board the plane.

There was another rushed trip down the thruway, though not as crazed as that other time.  Mary was getting ready to board by the time I had parked and gotten into the terminal.  I had given her an old sewing machine to take to school with her and I couldn't remember seeing her carry it on the plane.  I dithered around, then talked to the airline people.  They called the pilot.  He announced over the plane's loudspeaker something like, "Does Mary Cichello have her sewing machine with her?  Her mother wants to know."  She did have her sewing machine and she did contemplate matricide.   Oh, well, we all have things to forgive each other for.

For Mary's first two years in college, I made her plane reservations.  After one too many calls that went, "Mom, could you change that reservation for me?  I can't go until..." I made a rule.  In this family, you make your own reservations; you change your own reservations. Just let me know when to be at the airport, train station or bus terminal.

Teresa, our second, applied for early admission to MIT.  The deadline for filling out her application was November 1.  She still had an essay to complete on October 31st.  She had made a cone head costume for Halloween and wanted to wear it in the parade that night.  Heated words were exchanged when I wouldn't let her leave the house until the essay was finished.  This was the child of whom I wrote to MIT, but only AFTER she had been accepted and they were looking for parental input, "I admire Teresa more than almost anyone I know but there have been many times when I have wanted to knock her head against the wall."

MIT was also where we were introduced to co-ed dorms.   In my college years, you signed out and you signed in.  There were strict curfews.  If a boy was found in the girls' dorm, it was automatic expulsion for him and her.  Come in late and the roof fell in.  Stay out all night and you could start packing for home.  Now here we were, depositing our daughter in a coed dorm.

Our kids were quite nonchalant about it.  On Teresa's floor, there were coed showers and bathrooms.  "Take it easy, Mom," Teresa explained.  "See that sign on the door?  You just turn it around and people know that you're in there."

Sure. "When I'm in there," I announced, "one of you is to stay outside the door. You are not to leave your post until I come out." 

When we took our third daughter, Claire, to St. Lawrence, there was a meeting for parents.  By this time, we were seasoned at the game.  When a counselor spoke to us parents about the trauma of the empty nest syndrome and how to cope with it, some of us looked at each other and tittered.  WHAT empty nest syndrome?  This was a high school senior we were dropping off!  We old timers knew it was time and knew we would survive and so would they.

That said, there was also ALWAYS, at the moment of parting, that thought, "Oh, God, they look so young, so vulnerable.  Are they really ready for this?  Will they be okay?  Have I done a good enough job raising them?  I could have been more patient, more loving."  It was the usual mixed bag of gain and loss that seems to make up living.

          To be continued...

                      KIDS AND COLLEGE   PART THREE

                      Eileen Cichello

Our daughter Claire decided in her freshman year at St. Lawrence that she wanted to spend her sophomore year in Spain.  Now, I would have found it hard to say "yes" to her going to Spain in her junior year, the usual year for study abroad.  But Claire was, and is, a determined young woman.  She did research.  She had students who'd been to Spain and students who were currently in Spain write to us to tell us what a great experience it would be for Claire and how she was mature enough to handle it.  She had her Spanish professor call us with the same message.  You get the picture.  She wore us down, rebutting every argument we put forth.  We finally gave a reluctant okay.

So here we are in one of New York's airports, hurrying to get Claire and her luggage to the right part of the terminal.  They call for people to board.  I'm fighting back tears.  Claire turns to me and says, "Do you think I'm doing the right thing?"

"Get on the plane, " I hiss.  Mothers do hiss, given extreme provocation.  Even so, I cried most of the way home, thinking we would not see her for almost a year. 

(When I told Claire, who now teaches Spanish at St. Rose College in Albany, that I was writing about this episode, she said, "You had tears in your eyes while you were hissing. I tell all my students about that.  By the way, be sure you say that I was the trailblazer in the family.") 

Claire showed up at the back door on Christmas Eve yelling, "Surprise!" but that's another story.

Then there was the magical time when the whole family went to Mary's graduation.  At that time, our kids ranged in age from 21 year old Mary to 11 year old Paul.  There was a dinner dance for the graduates and their families the night before graduation. That night, watching our children all dressed up and laughing and dancing with each other, was one of those moments when you stand back, looking at your children and thinking, "Oh, my God, isn't it incredible?  Look at these wonderful human beings we have produced!"    It really hit me how precious these kinds of times together were.

Do you remember the saying rampant on TV for several years, "Do you know where your children are right now?"  There was one year when I would respond to the TV with snide comments like "Oh, somewhere between Ireland, Rome and Spain.  Is that exact enough for you?"      That was the year that Paul was studying in Ireland for his junior year at college.  Michael had graduated from college and was spending six months working in Ireland on a student visa.  Claire was back in Spain for graduate work and John, working for the Boy Scouts, could only take ten days off from work to join them.  Anyway, Michael and Paul traveled to Rome for Christmas, surviving on bread and water ("Paul was such a cheapskate," Michael recalls).  Then the four of them got together somewhere in Spain.  Our daughter Teresa and her husband also went to Ireland that year and visited Paul.

My husband Sam hit sixty that June and the kids planned a big party for him.  Paul was to be back from Ireland by then and would join us.  During the party, the bell rang at the side door and this blondish-bearded man walked in, looking like a tall leprechaun.  I hesitated.  You don't want to mistake someone else for your own son, not in this family!  I'd never live it down.  It turns out to be part of an ugly conspiracy.  All the siblings knew of Paul's beard and the word was out, "Don't let Mom know!"

So there it is or parts of it.  There were many trips to many colleges, both for finding the right one and for taking and bringing home all their paraphernalia.  We all attended everyone's graduation and those occasions were great family times.  The last few graduations had babies and toddlers involved and things got sort of complicated but still were fun.

On those trips we had our share of car breakdowns, out of gas fiascoes, getting lost and never EVER stopping to ask for directions scenarios.  This IS about the Cichellos, after all.

  Postscript: It is a thrilling moment to see your child, no longer a child, walk across the stage and be handed the college diploma he or she has worked hard to earn.  No matter that they often don't have a clue as to what they want to do with the rest of their lives.  I learned that it's okay for them to rest on their laurels and catch their breath for a while.  Soon enough they will be locked into the nine-to-five-or-six-or-ten routine.  Soon enough they will be juggling work, spouse, and kids. Let them relax, enjoy.  Life is long and there is no hurry.