Right Lane Must Exit

with epilogue as prologue, sixteen months later

The following is a repost from behind the paywall originally published last Spring (2023) when Archer and I were touring colleges in Boston. I am reposting it today to 1. give myself a few days to reacclimatize to back-to-school and all its trimmings (my twin daughters started 7th grade today and my oldest daughter starts her sophomore year in high school tomorrow) and 2. because I know a lot of kids are leaving for college in the coming week(s) including my son who will be flying back to Boston to attend his sophomore year of college. I wrote this before he committed to the school he now attends/while I was in the throes of an existential crisis. Ha!

ED: It is impossible to understand the anticipation of sending one’s child off to college unless one has experienced the anticipation of sending one’s child off to college (something I wrote about quite a bit in the months leading up to his departure) but what has taken me by surprise more than almost anything is how different I feel about his leaving now. How natural and RIGHT and not sad it all feels.

And while we will certainly miss Archer when he leaves to go back to school in a few weeks, I am overcome with gratitude for my son’s college experience and all the friends (chosen family!) he’s made there.

In the meantime, I am sending love and solidarity to the parents sending their kids off to college for the first time this month. I see you and I honor you and I AM SENDING YOU AND YOUR BABIES ALL MY LOVE!

RIGHT LANE MUST EXIT / originally published 4/11/23

We arrive at 4:30am on zero hours of sleep. They call this a red eye but I dunno about that, guys. 4:30am when you’re coming from PST means you’re landing during your typical bedtime and even though I am able to get us an early check-in, we are still only a few hours rested before we attempt a three college tour.

I have not yet learned a lesson I will soon learn which is that touring potential colleges is one of the more exhausting activities a parent can do with their child. That one should probably not dive into that kind of experience on two hours of sleep. (I will not make this mistake with the next kid.)

There’s a picture I have of Archer the morning we landed and he looks like he’s four years old on his first day of school. Which happens to be exactly how I felt as well. Like a little girl trying to get from point A to point B with a man who rumor has it is my child even though he towers over me and is far better than I am at direction.

“This is so exciting,” I say, nudging him against the window and he asks me how I have so much energy when we slept very little and, well, my son, one day you will understand that this is not energy, it is willpower.

Anyway, we’re on the T on our way to our first college tour — the school we both thought would be the one, mainly because they offered him a huge amount of money — the kind of money you don’t say no to… And in this picture, the one I mentioned earlier — his face is reflected in the window that faces inward. A blur of cement, a strobe of light and a boy on one side, a man on the other.

I totally misread our journey and after an hour, we are only in Cambridge, where the commuter train, we are told, will take an extra hour and we have to be where we need to be in 20 minutes. I thought I gave us plenty of time to get to our destination and I was wrong as fuck.

So I call a Lyft instead. Apologize for not knowing what I’m doing.

“I’ve never done this before.”

But I really want to know what I’m doing. I want to prove to myself — to him — to the Lyft driver who just pulled up in a White Toyota Camry — that I know what I’m doing.

That I’m the parent.

The shepherd.

At least… for a few more months.

We climb into the car and look out separate windows. He has ear buds in and I can feel the tears behind my eyeballs so I immediately make conversation with the driver as distraction from the emotional tidal wave I realize will eventually wreak havoc but at the moment, is still forming, fish flapping on shore, as he gives me a town-by-town breakdown of the Boston suburbs.

When we arrive at our destination, we are late, which I hate. Over the years I have gone from a person who is always late to a person who is always early and it has become something I am proud of. Like, guess what, guys, I am an old dog who learns new.

But right now, I feel not that. I feel late. I feel young.

We sign in at the front of the campus and sneak into the back of the auditorium where we take our seats as the dean is warm-welcome-wagoning the room. It feels instantly wrong, all of this. But I smile big and look over at him, overcompensating for my discomfort/exhaustion/panic with unnecessary enthusiasm.

It smells like a hospital in here. Except it’s warm, not cold, so I slowly remove layers. But as soon as the layers have been stripped, it’s time to go back outside so I get up and follow him towards the open doors while folding myself back inside my skins.

I don’t know how long the tour lasts. Hours, for sure. Feels like days. Like we are on a trek through some alternate reality. Now we are both performing but neither us knows it yet. This feels even more wrong to him than it does to me but he knows what kind of offer he got to go here and doesn’t want to disappoint me or anyone else with his feelings of NO.

I will learn on this trip, more than any other, that in so many ways we are alike — our fear of disappointing each other reflective of the years we spent walking on the same eggshells. I will also recognize in him the shift I feel in myself when I go from wanting to make everyone around me happy to quite suddenly needing to burn it all down.

For years I thought our alikeness came from so many identical astrological placements — and the fact that we were both born on full moons. Now I understand that we were both beat down by the same exclamation points. Except it was my job to protect him from the sharp punctuation of his pre-adolescent childhood and I failed. Enabled instead. Spent the last five years trying to undo the damage of the first thirteen. For both of us.

And yet. Whenever we’re alone — a mirror sort of forms between us. And the smudges you can only see in a certain kind of light.

When the tour is over, I point to a bench where we can sit alone.

“Okay, let’s hear it. What do you think?”

“….”

“….”

“…”

His response is almost identical to the one I had when I attended the orientation of Loyola Marymount University and hated every minute of it. It was too late to opt out but I did so anyway. Deferred my admish as a way to soften the blow. And then just never went.

Not to LMU or any other college. Went straight to work instead.

And then, got pregnant. With him.

“Maybe I’m like you,” he says. “Maybe college isn’t for me either.”

And he is like me.

He is.

“You are…”

But also…

He’s not.

Not really.

But it takes everything in me not to say “Fuck it. Let’s go back to LA. You can live at home! Go to CC! Start a band… !”

But also…

We have two more colleges left to tour.

And you don’t have to go to any of them.

But… you should at least look.

See how you feel.

This is just the beginning!

We are supposed to attend a dinner but he doesn’t want to go. Doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (never wants to hurt anyone’s feelings) but…

Burn it downnnnnn…

I cancel last minute, call us a Lyft that takes an hour to arrive. We wait in the rain with wet hair, huddled under my umbrella.

The next morning, we hit Dunkin for breakfast sandwiches. Both of us are silent and sleep deprived on the train. We are newborn babies the first 24 hours of life. We are a fever dream on four legs. We are strangers seeking familiarity in the squeak of the breaks.

The next two college tours are at the same time but he’s right to choose the one he does and this time we’re there early. (We’ll watch the third school’s tour on a pre-recorded livestream later, during which he’ll fall asleep. And then we’ll break into that school the following day, and by break in I mean, slip in behind a student and then another student and then another until we’ve toured all of the different buildings ourselves.)

I love the second school we see but don’t want to project onto him so when he looks at me to read how I’m feeling, I don’t look back.

Later on he’ll tell me that he knew I loved it because I didn’t try to make it seem like I loved it.

They separate us minutes into the tour so he can meet the professors and some of the other students accepted in his major. We will reconvene after lunch and I try to make friends with the other parents who are all lovely and equally overwhelmed by all of this and seem to have all the right questions and take notes in a way that makes me feel like I should be doing the same so I pull out my phone and start taking pictures of the informative bullet points on the screen even though they are not very informative.

When my son and I reconvene he isn’t sure how he feels which is fine because you don’t have to make a decision right away. We have time. Take your time.

We are an hour walk from the hotel which is the perfect distance for weighing pros and cons. He likes it. He thinks he might be happy here but…

“…”

“…”

“…”

And the more we talk about it the more I start to panic that maybe college isn’t for him, actually. Maybe he is his just like me in that way. Maybe this was all a big mistake. Him applying to schools so far away. Me championing it.

“Just because I loved this school doesn’t mean you have to…”

“You can always change your mind.”

“Everything is temporary.”

“I support your decision either way.”

“No presh.”

But maybe he wants presh. Maybe he needs presh.

Rumor has it, some kids do.

He’s exhausted and wants to go take a nap back at the hotel but an hour walk isn’t enough for me and I couldn’t sleep right now if I tried, so while he goes back to the room to nap, I go for a walk and just… keep walking.

I buy a pack of cigarettes at a 7Eleven across from The Garden and smoke some of them. Wander into a bar by myself and order a beer. The Celtics game is on and everyone is cheering and happy and I am alone and not really a drinker at all. Like I think this might be the first time in my life I have ended up at a bar by myself at 5pm but here I am, with my frosted glass of whatever on-tap beer the bartender recommended and suddenly I am in tears. My dog died last week and my only son is going to college, maybe, probably or maybe not who fuckin knows and I miss having a partner to talk shop with about how to handle what I don’t know how to handle and I am suddenly fucking furious with Hal for dying when he was SO gung-ho on college and I am… not. Like, at all… (He would have preshed. He was all about the presh.)

I don’t know what is wrong with me, I think, but yes I do. I am uncomfortable with all of this because it is the first time I have had to navigate something of this magnitude with zero real-world experience. I can tell you about a broken heart. Hoo-boy. I am A GREAT BREAK-UP mom. I am a great ITS OKAY TO FAIL mom. I know how to navigate death and loss and girl drama and boy drama and Fs on math tests… I know how to drive a car and ride a bike and get period stains out on the go. I can do pretty decent haircuts and I’m really good in a crisis. I can make a mean mix tape for a birthday party.

But I don’t know of a college experience. How to prepare for one. What it’s going to feel like… look like… be like.

For the first time, one of my kids is going in a direction that I am completely unfamiliar with.

And I cannot advise.

Which is good for both of us! It’s time for him to figure shit out on his own. And it’s time for me to step back.

And yet…

I think about the moment I found out I was pregnant and how I counted the years until my pregnancy would turn eighteen which felt like a hundred years from then and now it’s here. That people talk about empty nesting but not about this weird transitional in-between existential crisis of WAIT IT’S OVER. HOLD ON… WAIT, WHAT!?

Like… no one really talks about the funeral procession that is college tours.

I decide that I have never felt so alone in my whole life. If this weekend was a romcom, this moment would be the dark night of the soul. I am sobbing in a bar with my beer surrounded by cheering sports fans. I am a cliche on top of a cliche, framed by cliches.

What would Nancy Meyers do in this situation?

I decide she would have me order a plate of fish and chips.

So that is what I do. And then I eat all of it. Finish my beer. Go back out into the night.

I cry some more. Smoke another cigarette. Wait for Archer to text me to tell me he’s awake and ready to go get dinner somewhere and where are you when will you be back.

Which is my question, too.

In the morning, I will feel better. Maybe it’s because I finally slept and he finally slept and we have decided to spend our next day and a half here really seeing the sights.

The Red Sox are playing and I found last minute seats behind home plate for fifty bucks a pop. Game’s in two hours, away we go…

… to have one of the best fucking times we’ve ever had together. Core memory shit. We are freezing but in a way we can handle and the guys behind us keep yelling at the refs in strong Bostonian accents and we order all the food and sing all the songs and become rabid baseball fans out of absolutely nowhere and I don’t know what it is, but I feel myself let go. Not entirely obviously but it’s like… I stand back and watch him and realize he isn’t mine anymore.

He’s his.

And suddenly it becomes so wildly obvious that this is where he should absolutely be. Not at Fenway, lol but, here. In this moment. Wherever it leads. It doesn’t even matter. Because this is it.

Whatever happened before now is exactly what brought us to these VERY GOOD and surprisingly affordable seats. Even if its been messy and fucked up and confusing and I shouldn’t have smoked all those cigarettes the night before. Even if it’s extremely cold where we’re seated and we can’t feel our feet.

On the way home, he shares the same sentiment. Tells me this is where he wants to be. This feels good he just needs thicker socks.

I agree. Co-sign every one of his feelings. Not because I am projecting but because he is absolutely right.

We decide to walk back to the hotel again. Stop to watch a choir sing outside a church. Talk about God being THIS: Music that stops you in your tracks as a reminder to slow down, breathe, then keep walking.

Eat your heart out, Nancy Meyers.

In the morning we’ll head over to the college. Buy matching sweatshirts in the merch shop and carry them through the city in the giant canvas bag I have had with me for the last four days. Full of umbrellas and college tour name tags and pamphlets and maps and so many fucking water bottles.

We will finish our trip eating Italian deserts and placing pennies on the graves of strangers. We will eat oysters for dinner (his favorite) and find our way back to the hotel without mapping it. (HE will find our way back to the hotel without mapping it.)

On our way back to the airport we will discuss his return in August — all of the things he will need before then and whether or not he will come home for Thanksgiving…. and I will imagine myself taking the trip back to LA without him in late August but I won’t tell him that. And I won’t cry either. Instead, I will pass him a sleeve of sour candy straws and he will take two and hand them back and then we will cheers them together, like, we did it, Joe, and eat them quietly while waiting for the plane to take off.

On our way the airport, before we left San Diego (where I dropped the girls at my parents’ house) a rainbow appeared just as we were getting off the freeway. I took a video of it and posted it on Instagram but it wasn’t until I watched it back that I noticed the sign in the corner of the frame just as the video began.

RIGHT LANE MUST EXIT.

And I, thought, fuck. There it is.

There it motherfucking is.

I will think of those four words our entire flight home. I will think of them in the days after. As I appeal for more financial aid for the college he has gone from luke warm to FUCKING PUMPED to attend. I will think of them as I prepare for his 18th birthday and high school graduation next month. I will think of those four words in the evening when I come home to him playing piano and in the mornings when he makes his coffee in the exact place where I’m trying to make his sisters’ lunches. I will think of them while I write this post, which has taken me an entire week to finish because I keep absolutely losing it, like right now, for example. My glasses are so fogged up I can barely see.

And while I hate to end this with the most overused metaphor of all time, I will also think about that rainbow.

Just off the exit ramp and to the right.