It’s not that different. Seeing the little room at the end of the hall. It’s still tidy, and tastefully decorated as always, bed made, pillows in place–enough whimsy and trappings of the girl to make you think she’s just stepped out, but then a stillness, a quiet, sleeping stillness that makes me know she is gone. Because it is Sophie’s, it is also freshly vacced, the waste can emptied, not a sock or a stray piece of clothing or hint of clutter. At 6:30 in the morning we left here for her UVA move-in, and she has the presence of mind to empty her waste basket! I could use her room for a house showing, right now. The other one, the new “Hoos” room, we outfitted a week ago–best we could in the two hours before her online morning class. It was the mom, dad and Sophie show while Will waited in the car, pulling out stuff for the carry up. Same at George Mason three weeks before–only two ticketed guests for that show as well, but Will is insistent on going to see his sisters off and enormously helpful. Thanks, Will.

I can’t lie. Can’t say it was a great time, bathed in peace of mind and a parents’ pride. Not for a moment did it feel normal, or good, or going in the direction the stream is flowing. Instead I mustered the can-do resolve of a much tested mom and I made my eyes (over our masks) tell my daughter what she needed to hear: that starting college is always stressful on some level, that move-ins come in many shapes and sizes, that this one is going fine, that there are no worries here–not a one do I see, do you? No I do not. That this day will come and go, no stopping it, and at at the end of it you will be moved in, waking in a new bed in a new room, moving about a strange new space made of new noises, doling out enough footprints and patterns to make it gradually your own. And all the while I was exuding this calm and willing the morning to bend our way, if only a tiny bit, I made the conscious effort not to air my inner musings and commentary —What, they couldn’t post a sign? Have a welcome station? Is this a school of zombies?? and then: Wow, this a pretty small room. This furniture is no way going to configure to fit all that stuff under the bed. I made a conscious effort to smile, make encouraging comments, ask to be put to work in the place of the fewest disruptions and decisions for her. And I made my eyes, my body, my hair say this to her: No matter what. No matter what happens, it will be okay. This is not just words. It is the all-encompassing embrace of the spirit.

There’s been so much grief. One minute she’s making grilled cheese standing at my kitchen stove. The next minute she’s melting down. Even now she is scared; I can tell she’s holding back, worried they will not make. It wasn’t until the beginning of August that she stockpiled a thing or began her “dorm gear” quest, and no one but me will be more surprised if they make it to Turkey Day. Maybe we are cut from the same piece, after all. Despair.

Her room has truly been a sanctuary during this long sabbatical from breathing and being, and I don’t wonder that she is trying to transport the same effect to school. She likes to decorate with the outdoors in–a living hospitality. Shown a while back that you can grow a new shoot of most any houseplant by cutting and inserting in water, she has breezed through my house, scissor in hand, helping herself and filling an assortment of vases and bottles placed around her room. Those, I see, have made the cut and are clustered near her college pile. Out of budgeted money for dorm décor, she gets her dad to construct a pair of lightweight wooden hanging shelves she saw on Amazon to hold her botanical array, which–interesting prospect–will have to hang on the dorm room walls without nails. It’s a little like I feel during these days–expected to hold stuff up without fasteners or anything supporting me at all.

The move-in itself is a little like unlocking secrets in an Escape Room or one of those video games where you are presented with the scene of a well-appointed room and have to find the right box that holds the right key to the right door. UVA has apparently cut down on (read, eliminated) signage, so the best instructions on where to go and what to do are on my phone. Slews of emails they’ve sent for the past two weeks re: “Return to Grounds 2020.” The dorm is labeled but the doors that are supposed to spring open (like a jail block??) at our appointment time (8 am) are shut tight. No movement or signs of life from inside the building or anywhere around it. So much for “we’ll leave the light on for ya.” The campus looks like it’s observing National Aloof Day or “Go about your business” Day. Construction sites are in full swing with noise and dust, and the sidewalks are punctuated by joggers and a few purposed pedestrians who may or may not be students. They must be students, but they walk alone, no backpacks, satchels or Starbucks in sight. Maybe they are Zombies disguised as students.

Last March, the college provosts and presidents and powers that be all seemed to be meeting around the same conference table in the sky, handing down the “here on out.” They were similar. You could look at one and know what the other was going to do. One child’s dire news preceded the next one’s phone call that he or she was coming home. A survey of college cousins yielded similar reports: they’re extending spring break by another week and they’re not going back. Then, with one synchronized pen stroke the “not” went to “never.” Now, in start-up mode, each college and university seems like a separate planet. Maybe they all went to that summer summit on “NO-Life Learning” and made their departure then and there and now each, in its own way, is making a play for Fall 2020. Some are all virtual, all the time. (What dorms? Those aren’t dorms. It’s a movie set for our blockbuster, Zombies U…) Some, like GMU, are opening their campus and residence halls while broadly proclaiming the “all virtual all the time.” Indeed, stomping out every last in-person class may be what is helping Mason boast 37,000 registered students and only 20 cases. Then you have the wide openers, masks optional, classes in person and partying like it’s 2019. Many have made a play for it and made it five days, maybe a week before reverting (careful the verb you use here) to online only. UVA, against the wishes of some and votes of many in the community, is opening campus for in-person and virtual learning after a two-week delay on moving in. It’s a bold move and the days preceding it are filled with news reports of other universities and colleges going down. I know my girl follows and reads every email and internet post on the subject. She is learning a whole new meaning of her major: undecided. Every pillow, push pin and poster Sophie picked out for her new room was procured in the light of all that up in the air-ness. Sorry about all the Ps. Goes with another one: pointless.

Not a soul approaches us or even notices our little family endeavor to get carload A into dorm room B. Shannon 309. A newer high rise on an outer edge of campus, backed up to by woods, maybe 6 or 8 floors, the glass and some mod steel architectural beams glinting in the morning sun. Used to be a room was keen by the square footage and the style of furniture, now it’s central air I look for instead of box units, the width of the stairwell for distancing and the size of the window for good ventilation. No one to greet or welcome us, no one but Google maps confirming that yes, this is Shannon. I decide we will sit on the benches out front of the building, trusting that the door will magically fly open when they said it would. Antsy, I pace, thinking I can pre-empt the magic opening if I step on the right paving stone. Where’s the giant Egyptian statue whose eye we can poke to find the hidden latch? Mom, says Sophie in rare disclosure, I feel embarrassed. Really? Like, as in, “we’re trespassing” embarrassed? Because it does feel a little like that. We’ve walked into the wrong room at a party or shown up on the wrong planet and I am not really looking for a way in, but a way out. Anybody else trying to get off the Covid train a little early? I would like to get off here: Children at College. A sleepy little town on the outskirts of All Three Back at School. I’m so worried that it’s not the end of the line.

What they have saved in signage and guidance, never mind balloons and streamers, they have spent on indifference. Once we are able to access the residence hall (via the back door, silly!), they’ve slashed the welcome budget there as well. Three RA’s are seated at a folding table in a darkened “commons” area (Hah! misnomer of the year, with police or painters’ tape to prove it). They look like they’re all set up for a weekend phone-a-thon, backdrop of commons area sofas and end tables stacked two and three deep behind them. Only the phones ain’t ringing. One of them makes eye contact with Sophie over the masks, hands her her college ID, waves obliquely at the boxes of pocket hand sanitizer and mini bottles of disinfectant spray, and we’re off. Doesn’t everyone love a ticking clock when you’re doing something important, and stressful, and momentous–and only slightly illegal. We’ve smuggled an unregistered sibling onto campus. No worries — without even lying we could say we didn’t see him, we found him in the back when we unpacked all this stuff.

I should think this “insert yourself while no one’s looking” move-in would have suited her–8:00 am on the stairwell with domestic goods and two hours later in Biology class, seated with a Zoom screen and attendant smile like she’s always been there and always will.  Certainly the fuss-less, efficiency model. But it doesn’t suit me. Ten minutes into the building, dutifully unpacking clothes and hanging them in a wardrobe, my heart has made its invisible survey and assessment of the space, the situation, and has found the leave-taking, which is still an hour and 46 minutes away, lacking. To this day I’ve never been a drop-off mommy. Annoys my children to no end. Will, this very morning as I dropped him at a boy scout hike: “No, you can just stay in the car mom, no…no, Mom! It’s okay mom just stay in the–” (sound of car door closing as I step out to greet the adult). Birthday parties, play date pick ups, after school stuff…I don’t care if you label me an AH-1W Super Cobra (it’s a helicopter. A big one), I want to lay eyes on the adult in charge of my child’s world. Often it’s just to thank them, and to insert a vestige of reason, sanity, calm, and responsibility into the picture. It also gives your kid a certain flavor before their conduct and behavior gives off the full taste. Oh that’s Will B, he has a mom…I met her, she’s nice. Today, I am in college world and this “no one in charge” aura is unsettling. I know the big wigs are off hooking up ventilators and pounding out highly educated and eloquent emails about how fine it is here. But still. We are unpacking so quickly it will soon be done and time to go and there is no one, no one who knows I left a child on the third floor, most likely weeping. Her roommate is not due in until after dinner. I guess it doesn’t matter she doesn’t know where the dining hall is because she would never go alone. Her little eyes peeking out from that mask, looking at me with only questions and apprehension. Can’t help feeling like we are launching our daughter on life raft, adrift in a stormy sea. Do you know the prayer of the Breton fisherman? O Lord, be good to me, the sea is so large…and my boat is so small…

One of the things I learned from Ellie’s freshman year is that having a mom is no credence at all. It means nothing in college world (well, I take that back, it means something for the week proceeding a tuition bill-paying deadline, but for the rest of the time, nothing). I am now in that phase of life where I am supposed to step back and let the world kick, hurt, disappoint, rob, and harden my children, and I am supposed to like it. In a rather counter-intuitive move, you pack up your beloveds with all their gear and you drive them away to a place far less safe or stable than your own home and then you actually, intentionally, help them set up shop there (so, what–they’ll feel at home?? Hell-O!) and then you make a few half-hearted jokes in the doorway, a few last desperate pleas — “Pleeeeze don’t go jogging alone, make sure you eat well, wear your mask,” and then you get back in your now empty car and drive back to your now emptier house, and then you pay someone thousands of dollars to keep up this bizarre arrangement. And when they call with a bombed exam or job they didn’t get or hiking club that was full by the time they got to it, you think of that helicopter parked in the garage and it takes everything in you not to start ‘er up. Seriously, who lets a perfectly good helicopter go begging in a pandemic?

But no, I have to walk a new walk, take a page from the “you’ve got this” aura the university is projecting. I have to talk a new talk, say things like “That stinks, I am so sorry for you” when what I really mean is Give me a name and number so I can fix it. And “That sounds so unfair, I’m sorry that happened” when I really mean Hold my coffee please while I go hurt that person. I know the code has always been this way, even from the first days of skinned knees and playground bullies, but the ride in that Apache attack copter was so fine. And anyway, the people that made those ridiculous labels and made up the parenting rules were blissfully able to raise theirs before mass school shootings, an opioid crisis and now for goodness sake, raging racial discontent, political upheaval, wildfires lowering our statehood and upping our lung issues for generations, a planet that is so warm in places it’ll never be habitable again, ever, and an insidious and unrelenting deadly global pandemic. For real? Helicopter parent? How ’bout I push over and give you a seat on the last ride out before the Armageddon. Get over yourself already. You can thank me later.

I’ve always thought that “Just lemme make a phone call” is the caring parent’s extension to “have you brushed your teeth?” But it’s not. Somewhere along the line the child comes to want the unmitigated cruelty of the world undiluted. Unbuffered. To herself. For herself. Because that is what constitutes (young) adulthood: I can go it alone. Three and a half decades her senior, I know the disasters and disappointments are necessary to humble her into true adulthood:  I could go it alone but I don’t want to.

I wonder if she will miss us. Will she get homesick? Did I make our home welcoming enough, her world cushy enough? I don’t know. Before she left she informed that she was ‘cutting me loose’ on my locator app. She already dissed Life 360 the beginning of summer–we never gave our blessing but instead offered our silence on the matter as a sort of coming of age graduation gift. Except for the times I clocked a Young Life bus loaded with camp bound teens (including mine) doing 82 up the highway, or took note of the speed at which her friends travel with my girl in the front seat, I loved life 360. Loved it. The picture Sophie added to hers was a curly-headed toddler, dimpled cheeks and impish smile, so every time I looked her up and saw her moving along the little lined roads on the app, her travelling bubble was this cherubic image of her at two. Children don’t realize the comfort those stupid apps provide. I don’t even need to know where you are, really. All I need to know is that you are well in the world. That you are still attached somewhere and that disaster has not shook you free. Now, after teaching me it she wants to remove “find my friend,” too.

Today, in the hurried and stealth move in, nothing is working. The furniture is too plentiful, or too big, or too small, or too angular (or, somehow, too unreceptive to the few pieces we’ve brought. What, is stand-offish-ness in the drinking water here?) so the perfect arrangement eludes us, even an hour in. The “Command” strips we brought just giggle as they pop from the walls. She wants to hang the little wooden shelves Bill made over her bed with the 5 lb hooks. She’s researched them online and has wisely armed herself with several types and sizes. But like a lame sitcom that is decidedly not funny, every time we turn around one of the hooks slides down the wall or pops off and the shelves dangle wildly from the remaining hook like a miniature swing for an elf on the shelf. All this does not bode well for the upcycled planter/sconces she fashioned out of (trendy) soda cans: Drink the $2.69 soda. Cut the top cleanly off the can, wash, dry, affix one half a velcro Command strip vertically and the other to a wall over your bed. Fill with water and plantings. Over your bed. Bill and I look at each other, then at Sophie dubiously. As if on cue, one of the hooks holding a shelf pops free and the shelf does its sick-silly nose dive. Mocking us. The “What the heck?” hangs in the stuffy air and her frustration comes to a boiling point when we go to hang up the perfect poster, fresh from its wrapping making a much-awaited debut, and the blue painter’s tape meant not to leave a mark comes away from the walls as if they’re coated in Vaseline. Maybe they are. It springs shut like a window shade and flips down on the bed. The clock ticks, the panic rises, and we may as well be nailing jelly to the wall. If there were floor space my girl would collapse in a heap of grief and despair, I know it. But even that doesn’t go well for the floor is covered with open suitcases and discarded boxes, no space even for a proper melt down.

So we three keep standing, keep circling, keep trying; the clock ticking, the appointment ending, the online class going to start like a hard stop: Two hours ago, you woke up for the last time in your childhood bed. Here, for the first time, you are going to need all the life skills you got to discern between a nightmare and a dream, and the strength of character to settle for something in between. We are all just hanging on. We’ve been hanging on for two weeks while UVA made its decision for go/no go. In the fine print was the date August 28th to decide whether campus would open or not. Before that we were hanging on to the prospect of college going back at all. And before that, rewind, we were hanging on to the hope of an in-person graduation, and before that a family mission trip, a Prom, a senior year as the beautiful garden she had tended for four years. Hanging on…to nothing. No wonder the girl doesn’t go in for hugging anymore, and when she does it’s still held back, like more for your benefit than hers. Sure, we been working on it all summer. All that construction out there? Cheaper than installing central air and a state of the art purification system is putting in a revolving door.

What will it take to be here? Really be here? What will it take for her to stay? Today I feel a little like our whole world is held up by those Command strips, telling lies about their staying power and coming away without leaving a mark. After we pull away, Bill and I circle the campus a couple times, not really knowing where to go or what to do. Will in the back seat, car now utterly voided of the Sophieworld that had stuffed the car and put him practically riding in his sister’s lap. We decide on lunch and a hike, a short one in the area, nothing too strenuous. We’ve climbed enough mountains for one day. From the car I text Sophie, to see if she wants us to wait out the class, take her for a little lunch, take another stab at those hooks, maybe a Target run? Better still, come away on this hike with us. Easier to go into nature than to tame it and force it into dorm room size. I try to picture her nestled in her new little world, tending, fretting, trying to put things to right… “no,” comes the response, “but thank you. my class goes another 40 minutes and i’m pretty tired. i’ll be okay.” Yes, my girl, you will be okay. I’ve hiked with them long legs before, and it’s a good thing your stride is so long. There’s a lot to take in.

So what does the newest resident of “we don’t know you” dorm do when her Zoom class gets done and the afternoon looms long? Does she curl up in her trendy bedding and wait for her wall art to hit her in the head on its next detachment from the wall? NO! She does what any survivor does, what we’ve all been doing for the past 30 weeks — she straps on them walking shoes, pockets her brand new college ID that makes her one of the club, though she feels like an impostor or like she got wait listed for that life as well, and she walks. She pounds the campus pavement–I’m sorry, “Grounds”–but really? Get over yourself, UVA, it’s a campus. We call “ground” that which is lasting, permanent, solid beneath her feet. So. I’ll give you grounds. I am her ground. And I always will be.

She walks to a nearby CVS where she procures new supplies, stronger for hanging her loot and then she goes back and hangs it up for good. Even the little tin soda cans with their hopeful sprigs, which will strive to take root in nothing but water and air and new sunlight. You go, my girl, you hang on to plan A: Bloom where you are planted. We are just getting on 64 for home when Sophie texts me pictures of the successful redone décor. Her caption: “ingenuity at work.” And there she is: selfie-seated as a queen atop the prettiest comforter on campus, throw pillows casually tossed, colorful throw draped as if in cozy and regular use. On the walls, two little plank shelves, whipped into command and valiantly holding her planned and whimsical artifacts–little glass bottles, postcards, a geode. It is the image of whimsy and the end result of (I know) strength of will. Pure steel, really. She is holding on as tightly as ever. Take that you %$#@! disease. My girl will outlast your time on that campus. She will. She has set up shop in the room of hope and she will not fall. She will not fall.