When Life's Pageant is Maybe a Little Too Rich

Experiencing & processing, always & forever

Aug 23, 2024

Summer, we hardly knew ye! Your Dames are taking next week off for the Labor Day Weekend in the U.S., so our next regularly scheduled issue will arrive on September 6.

For the first time in at least a decade, I’m buying luggage. My husband & I are preparing to take our darling Seb (they/them) to college soon, and the heavy-duty suitcases we’d bought for our first big family trip way back in 2006 have given up the ghost. It’s nice to be working on this discrete little aspect of our ongoing group project of being a family. I like to learn new things, and wow, luggage technology has improved dramatically in the last 18 years! Some of our new suitcases have four wheels, and all of them are compact yet roomy, and so much lighter weight than our old luggage. I sound like an absolute rube, I know, but this is new territory for me, and I like novelty!

I also like to be very lightly irritated by silly little things, and the mild outrage of learning that the standard height limit for U.S. domestic carry-on luggage is 22”, while the standard height limit for international carry-on luggage is 21” is the silly little thing of the moment. Why are we like this, as a culture? It’s goofier than our failure to adopt the metric system. It’s making me take a page from Tim Walz, gently shaking my head at small factors that can all easily fit within one of two columns under the heading The Darndest Thing (one column for marveling, the other for eye-rolling).

Assessing a need and—the girl is out of the library, but the library remains within me forever—developing an iterative, fruitful line of inquiry about it is both meaningful and a way to channel my feelings about being on the cusp of something significant. The great quest for upgraded luggage is just one part of preparing for this moment in our lives; the only experience we’ve had comparable to it was when I was pregnant with Seb while Marcus & I were busily evaluating cribs and car seats, attending birthing classes and practicing our breathing. So many items to consider and acquire, so much paperwork to complete, a go bag to pack for the hospital and to keep by the door to grab on our way out.

Seb was very busy gestating at the time, so their role in that project was clear-cut and straightforward, while ours was both task-oriented and shot through with fuzzy unknowables and what-ifs, some thrilling, some daunting. The roles are somewhat reversed now, with Seb being the one taking the lead on completing paperwork, packing their bags, and attending freshman orientation events. For me & Marcus, the planning of this trip has been the last, smiling-through-tears hurrah of this first long (and short) season of parenting. I was talking about it with Dame Karen the other day and she summed it up perfectly as a moment when we’re going to step into a totally new phase of parenting in one fell swoop. So efficient! So devastating!

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So anyway, this luggage acquisition. As I do for any big purchase, I’m back to considering options, back to consulting others for guidance, and reacquainting myself with the joys of haggling. (I’d forgotten how much fun it is to filter my Ebay search results to listings marked Or Best Offer and then negotiate a better price. Driving a decent bargain is A Thing on my mom’s side of the family, she & my late grandmother can be proud.)

There are definitely things about sending Seb off to college that I dread, and I’ve cried a lot of anticipatory tears, but I’ve also been very pleasantly surprised by how much I’m enjoying the little steps that are mine to take on. It’s a big group project, and having such great group members to work with makes it a nice and rewarding one to work on. Running errands together, listening to Seb thinking through the specs they’ll need for their school laptop — it’s nice to be able to help and not to be in charge of everything.

I’m also making more of an effort to notice when I’m feeling good and happy about any aspect of this moment. Seb is so happy and excited, and it’s so good to see that. I love for them to be happy, and they’re brimming over with it, reveling in having found new degrees of confidence and competence. It’s plenty bittersweet that the very things Marcus & I have been trying to set up conditions for them to experience and accomplish all along — feeling at home in the world and both capable of and supported in pursuing a life that’s meaningful and joyful for them — are the things that are taking them so far away from us. But it’s also far more sweet than bitter to see it unfolding in front of our eyes. I’m crying right now, obviously. Equally obviously, I’m going to miss them so much it will be literally physically painful. I’m giddy with the anticipation of seeing Seb flourish, too, and it’s so much to be feeling all of that, all at once. An overabundance of feelings, which for me is saying something.

So: everything is changing, and nothing is changing. Marcus & I went into the hospital all those years ago as our fundamental selves, and when we left with Seb clipped very carefully & snugly into their carseat, we were still our fundamental selves, only now we had a baby. Now, we’ll move our big kid (in whom we also, always, see what they can’t: the baby and toddler and elementary, middle, and high schooler that they’ve been at each step of the way) into their student housing as the family unit we’ve been since we brought them home from the hospital. And then Marcus and I will leave, still Seb’s parents, still ourselves, while Seb settles in as the bureau chief of a new family satellite office.

I told Seb yesterday, as they sprawled their now fully grown self across me and tucked their head neatly into my neck, just like they used to all those very both long ago and spookily recent years of toddlerhood, they’re the light of our lives, and always will be. We’re just going to need a somewhat higher-powered telescope to check on all that brightness every day.

Some thematically linked things I’ve been reading & rereading lately:

The latest issue of Evil Witches, which features an interview with Fred Bryant on how we can savor special, fleeting times with our kids all we want, and it’s still not going to stave off melancholy. In fact, that melancholic nostalgia is good, an adaptive strategy for managing our feelings about the passing of time. It’s reassuring to know something that feels hard is that way because it’s also how we’re meant to feel.
Laurie Lindeen’s 2017 essay for the New York Times, “Johnny Goes To College”, is, I now realize, a weapons-grade version of this week’s issue (complimentary). I’m going to take notes on this trip to remind myself the next time we navigate a significant milestone that we all survived and learned.
John Dickerson’s 2013 Slate piece, “My Daughter Went Away To Camp And Changed”, has been a standby ever since the first summer Seb attended sleepaway camp. Those couple of weeks, 30 minutes away each year aren’t the same as being thousands of miles from home for months at a crack, but we all have to start somewhere, and recalling how rich and formative those experiences were for Seb is both bracing and a balm.