A Very Weird Mother

I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be normal, you know, as in "mainstream," part of the general current, floating in the middle with everyone else. I don't think of myself as a contrarian and I'm certainly not much of an original thinker and I really rather like feeling like I belong.  And yet it so rarely works out that way. Maybe it's the consequence of being the first daughter after five sons; maybe that experience of being the outlier just got woven into the fabric of my being. More likely it's just happenstance, the random throw of the dice. But somehow I ended up a political and theological liberal and an impractical humanities grad in a family of fundamentalist Republican moneymakers, a Midwesterner in the Deep South, a city lover submerged in strip malls and subdivisions, a sports agnostic in a universe of football fanatics, a European with an American accent.

And, evidently, a Very Weird Mother.

I have just begun a new position as the sort of academic head honcho of a residential college at my university ("head honcho," that is, in the sense of "the person in charge of making lots of phone calls and begging people to do stuff," not, mind you, "the person with power or prestige"). Now, if you're my age, and you attended an American college or university, you probably lived in a dorm. You are old. Dorms are no more. Now we have residential communities, or if you're really cutting-edge in the student services industry (and yes, oh yes, what an industry it is), residential colleges. Which is all well and good, and if you're really interested, go Google it, but the point is, I now have more exposure to the parents of university freshmen than I've ever had before. And I've come to realize that I am not a normal mother.

Normal Mothers--or perhaps, given the range of my data, I should say "Normal Mothers of Freshmen Attending Public Universities in the Deep South" but then again it's an Election Year when we're all used to general conclusions based on the flimsiest bits of anecdotal evidence so hell, let's just go with "Normal Mothers"--Normal Mothers accompany their children on Move-In Day.  They come in with enormous refrigerators and microwaves and flatscreen tvs and they demand to know when Brittni's WiFi will be available. They storm down from the room with long lists of Things That Must Be Repaired Immediately. They stand in the various dining hall/mailbox/rec center lines in loco offspring-is so that their children can be free to do whatever it is such children do. Normal Mothers know their children's course schedules by heart--they know course titles, times, classroom assignments, professors, the required book lists, the tentative dates of the midterm and final, and the various ways these courses fulfill the General Education requirements. They say things like "We're thinking about Engineering. Or maybe Interior Design. We're not sure yet."

Weird moms like me? We stick the kid on the plane with a suitcase, $50, and a big hug. And then we wait for him to call. And when he doesn't, we figure he's doing ok or he'd call. And we avoid looking at his baby picture or that beautiful painting he did when he was ten and we let him be.

I guess I'd thought that was the whole point. Raising him, releasing him, letting him be. Except it's so damned hard. And now I find out it's just weird.

Well, shit. Can we rewind?