Raising children involves a lot of picking up and dropping off. It doesn’t matter the mode of travel – walking, public transit, cycling, driving – parents can feel as if they spend their entire lives doing one or the other. What all these trips have in common is that after the drop-off there is the inevitable pick-up. It’s a cycle.
One day, however, if all goes well and you are very, very fortunate, there comes a different kind of drop-off, one often made by automobile. There will be no pick-up, at least for a while. By this time, the children are no longer little. To their parents and everyone over 30, they’re still babies, but they feel old and wise beyond their years (a symptom of being in your late teens and 20s). Yes, this is a different sort of drop-off all together.
Remember how they cried when you dropped them off at preschool? Now it’s your turn. No need to look up “bittersweet” in the dictionary. You’ll get three scoops in a waffle cone.
I was fortunate enough to experience such a drop-off recently, when we drove our youngest to Montreal to start university. I say fortunate because seeing your kids grow and begin their lives as adults is a blessing no one should take for granted.
This was not my first such drop-off and, having gone through the process three times, here are some observations, from the parent’s perspective, on the nature of such journeys.
You can’t win with the weather. If the date of the drop-off is a picture-perfect sunny day, you will be reminded of other picture-perfect sunny days when your kid was younger and recall them with great nostalgia, forgetting the exhaustion, bickering and frustrations. If it is gloomy and rainy, as it was on our most recent drop-off, it will remind you of the relentless never-ending march of time.
When you make most car trips, you want to reach your destination as soon as possible. Not so with this kind of drop-off. You will be amazed how small your bladder has become and to what depths you will sink to find any excuse to prolong the journey. For instance, having grown up in the Mississauga suburbs, my wife has a nostalgic soft spot for Burger King, specifically the veal parmesan sandwich (which contained no veal) and was sold between 1981 and 1988. It is her version of Marcel Proust’s madeleine from Remembrance of Things Past. Burger King sporadically brings back versions of it and throughout the many years I have known her, she has pursued this sandwich obsessively, like Captain Ahab hunting Moby Dick.
So, during our drive when I say, “Oh look, there’s a Burger King at the ONroute coming up. I wonder if they have the parmesan sandwich?” it is the height of shameless spousal manipulation, of hitting the weak point, the equivalent of putting a plate of sushi-quality tuna in front of a starving cat. We stop and – of course – there is no sign of the ever-elusive parmesan sandwich, but that doesn’t prevent me from suggesting we not only buy lunch at Burger King but eat it there.
You won’t get lost, but if you do, you won’t mind. When you arrive at your destination, you will see other parents who look like you feel and you will wonder why somebody doesn’t hire a crop-dusting plane to spray Visine over the entire campus.
The trip home will be worse. You may instinctively check the now-empty back seat.
Once you finally return, you will park the car and find yourself staring blankly through the windshield wondering where all the time went. The cycle of picking up and dropping off has a way of making you feel it will last forever, even when you realize that it can’t, that it shouldn’t. Then it will hit you, as perhaps it does all parents. You knew this drop-off day was coming but you never truly believed it would arrive.