Illustration by Karly Andersen
The time went by so fast, just like people told me it would.
It seems like it was just the day before yesterday that I was driving my little girl to ballet classes at Pine Camp, picking her up from Fan-area sleepovers and taking long walks with her through the wooded paths of Three Lakes Park, looking for turtles and frogs. I could swear that it was only last week that I was accompanying her in lace and gloves to father-daughter dances, serving as a put-upon butler for birthday tea parties, and reading “Anne of Green Gables” to her at bedtime as she clutched Fluffy, her beloved stuffed lamb.
“Enjoy it,” I remember a lot of wise people telling me. “She’ll be grown before you know it.”
She’ll always be my little girl, I’d think, offering a smirk.
Olivia now has her own bank account, as well as ankle tattoos; this vibrant and independent young woman is a committed vegetarian, a daring visual artist and a quick thinker — quicker than me, anyway — and she reads Isabel Allende and Pablo Neruda for fun. She’s also in her freshman year at a college 300 miles away from me and her mother.
Those last words are hard for me to type. Kind people who know me well ask me how I’m handling all of this, and I say, “Fine.” But I say it in a glassy, unconvincing monotone. In truth, I’m a little angry because I wasn’t done being “Dad.”
Yeah, OK, I know I’m still Olivia’s dad, but I’ve been downsized and lower-cased. I’m now a background character in her evolving life story, reduced to the b-roll, largely disappeared from the novel, with only a few of my dad jokes thrown into Act 2 of the play. You get the drift. I was once a leading man, and now I’m a has-been.
In the three months she’s been away at school — time just went by so slowly — my wife, Tina, and I struggled with our new roles as satellites in our only child’s life. We have figured out the hard way the rules outlined by higher-ed life coach Lori Smith in her much-downloaded online essay, “6 Things You Should Absolutely NEVER Do as the Parent of a College Student.”
Smith writes that parents shouldn’t try to choose their kid’s major for them, or “guilt them” into joining their old Greek organization. Good advice. And definitely don’t micromanage from afar — don’t call to wake them up for class, for example, or remind them about tests and the due date of papers. “Don’t be afraid to let them struggle and (yes) fail,” she writes.
Smith’s column is a helpful life hack found on Grown & Flown, a website and popular Facebook page. It’s one of several online destinations, like the resource hub College Parent Central or Collegiate Parent, home of the parental advice columnist, “Dear Adina,” that cater to parents who don’t know how to stop being parents. Turns out that there is a plethora of places to commiserate with other parents who don’t know how to stop parenting.
Before my child went away to college, I might’ve thought this kind of familial hug therapy was a bit silly. But now I’m all in as the target demographic for clickbait like, “How to Parent at a Distance” and “Five Signs Your College Student May be Struggling.”
The Grown & Flown site was started by authors Lisa Heffernan and Mary Dell Harrington (they also wrote a book with the same name). Here, you get the answers to the important questions parents ask about their outgoing children, such as “Why do they never call?” (Answer: they prefer texting and video chatting); “Should I call the professor?” (No. Absolutely not); and “Is homesickness common?” (Yes, and disengaging a bit can help them overcome it.)
That last one hits home. College life was tough for Olivia at first. It was a courageous choice to travel so far from home to attend a school where she knew no one, and the second thoughts set in early. After the first month, she seemed miserable and expressed a desire to leave the school, come back to Richmond and get a 9-to-5 job while taking herbalist classes on the side (this plan just thrilled her mom).
Lori Smith and Dear Adina would’ve been proud of us. Tina and I didn’t overreact. We waited it out, listened more than talked, encouraged her to find new friends and to take cultural and recreational advantage of her proximity to nearby cities. We resisted the strong urge to check in every day with nervous queries while she worked the issues out (or not) herself.
Three months later, dancing and bouncing around the house with her headphones on, doing return-to-campus laundry and FaceTiming with her roommates and other college friends, she seems excited by the trip back to school, Fluffy (naturally) in tow.
The peaceful nesting over the holidays was good for all of us. Olivia’s monthlong winter break saw us settle back into the familiar family routine — Tina and I were Mom and Dad again — of vegetarian family dinners, impromptu yoga demonstrations, trips to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, pampering the cat and late-night movie viewing. As you can imagine, I had a lot of dad jokes stored up after three months. Good thing she’d been exercising her eye-rolling muscles.
Still, a month is not a long time at all. You’d think I’d be used to this stuff by now. The time just went by so fast.
Don Harrison is a writer based in Richmond and the co-host of the “Open Source RVA” news-talk radio show on WRIR 97.3 FM. Until she left for college, his daughter, Olivia, was a production assistant and sound engineer for the show.
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