Collegian

It’s official! Lauren will indeed be going to college in the fall, having sent in her acceptance and enrollment deposit last night. It’s all online these days so you can do that whenever you want.

This has been a long time coming, really. Preparing. Scouting. Applying. Deciding. Lauren has worked hard for this and to be honest she’s probably more prepared than I was when I was applying to colleges back in the Jurassic Period. Her grades are better than mine ever were, for one thing, and she’s got a much deeper wealth of experiences and activities to go with them.

This year has been a strange one for rising college students. The pandemic has put a halt to college visits so many of them are going in blind, and a lot of last year’s graduates chose to take the year off rather than start in the middle of a plague so the competition for admissions was intense. But she got into many of the schools she applied to and in the end it came down to a choice between three, all of them well suited for what she wanted – something large enough to give her a wide range of choices in majors, programs, and courses, and located in an urban setting so she could explore off campus easily.

Soon she will be off – we have a definite date for that now – and we will be empty nesters for real this time. We had a trial run with that when she went on her foreign exchange program and that took a long time for me to work out, but I will survive.

Because this is what you want for your child – your child who is not a child anymore, not really.

As a parent, you raise them to be strong independent adults and then they turn into strong independent adults and go off to their own lives. That’s how it should be. You remember all the times before, when they were younger, and you look forward to what they will become. And you hope that the world will welcome them with all the love and respect that they have earned.

Congratulations, Lauren. I’m proud of you.