This weekend our daughter leaves home for the first time. She's headed off to University, and aside from a few school camps and sleepovers, it's the first time she's been away for us for a significant amount of time.
My wife's reaction has been to throw her strategic brain at the 'problem' of preparing for every eventuality my daughter might encounter, buying an entire kitchen's worth of equipment, making sure she has all the bedding she needs, and basically 'owning it' in terms of ensuring kiddo won't stress out over missing anything.
I'm sure we'll end up bringing most of the stuff back with us after her first term!
My part has been trying to prepare kiddo for University life by telling her what it's been like being around Universities my entire working life, and what it was like studying at one back in the 1990s. It'll be a whole different ball game for her. When I left home, we didn't have the luxury of instantaneous communication with home. A phone call was about as good as it got, but now with real-time video calls, whatsapp and whatever other social media channels are available to youngsters, it should be easy for her to keep in touch.
BUT in a way I'm hoping she doesn't feel homesick, and is kept busy enough (both at Uni and socially) that she just enjoys the heck out of her first year there (and subsequent years to come).
We're immensely proud of her. She is a bit of a worry-wort like me, so there are bound to be moments when things go awry, but we'll see. We're three hours away - probably not as far as Kiddo would have liked, but better than her being on the doorstep.
For my wife and I, it's an opportunity to get our own lives back. That might sound selfish, but we've spent 18 years looking after and nurturing our daughter, with all the joys and stresses that this entails. At times it's been exhausting, particularly this year where I've really felt my age and really felt the immense pressure of ensuring that she got through her A-Levels OK and could achieve her dream of going to University. It's been a collective effort between all three of us, and it's taken just about everything we have, mentally and physically, to get to this point. So if we don't at least get some kind of respite once she's comfortably settled in, I don't know what we'll do!
We need to rebuild our relationship too. It's OK, but merely OK. It could be great. But it always feels like some damned thing or another rears its ugly head and throws us for a loop (either work or home related). Will we ever actually get time to relax? We'll see.
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