I'm old. Old enough to have left for college nearly 60 years ago.
I didn't go far: 50 miles down the Mass Pike from Worcester to Boston.
My parents dropped me - me and my two suitcases (Atlantic-brand, wine and black tartan, soft-side) full of clothing, my Royal portable typewriter, my AM-FM radio (Motorola, off-white), and my books (some of them, anyway). Soap, shampoo, deodorant, and sanitary napkins (purchased at Spags). A comb and brush. Two sets of twin sheets, two sets of towels, a blanket, a pillow, and a granny afghan my mother had crocheted for me.I met my roommate, Joyce and her mother, and as soon as the parents departed, we walked over to George's Folly in Brookline and bought some cute India-print bedspreads - cream, orange, and brown with an elephant pattern - and settled in.
I don't recall either of us bringing any family pictures with us, and I don't think we had anything on the walls until winter, when I found a black & white poster of Paul Newman in a tee shirt (from The Hustler) poster, still wrapped in plastic, in a snowbank.
I didn't call home for a couple of weeks, and my mother got a bit worried, so she called the payphone in the dorm corridor, where some freshman on "phone duty" answered and came and fetched me.
A month in, I think I went home on Columbus Day weekend. After that, for Thanksgiving.
Maybe I wrote home once or twice. I did call (collect) occasionally. I don't remember my parents doing much visiting, other than when they drove me back to school.
My younger sister did, however. Every once in a while throughout my college years, Trish (starting at the age of 8) took the bus from Worcester to Boston to spend the weekend.
It's not that I didn't love (and miss) my family. I did. It's not as if we weren't close. We were.
It's just that, once you went away, you went away.
My mother did send along little freebies that she collected labels and boxtops to get for free. There was a Campbell's Soup Mug, a stuff Jolly Green Giant doll, a few other thing. She knew I'd want to get mail.
The dining hall food was awful, but apples and cartons of milk stayed cold outside your window. Or you could keep some supplies in the fridge in the communal kitchen. (Fridge and stovetop.) We beat a path to the nearest grocery store and bought coldcuts and bread when the meals were especially inedible. (Charles River Scum [fish], Puck [beef], Abortion [lasagna].) Or we could go the campus shop for a bagel or BLT. We knew how to fend for ourselves, that's for sure.
We didn't cook until we lived off campus our senior year, but Joyce and I both knew how to cook and bake, as both of us had learned how from our mothers. (Admittedly, I wasn't much of a cook, but I knew the basics and loved to bake.)
I don't remember cleaning our room, but Joyce and I were both very neat, so there was never an apple core on someone's desk, a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. I'm sure we cleaned, as both of us had learned how from our mothers.
There were washers and dryers in the dorm basement, which I happily used, as I always loved doing laundry. And god knows I did enough of it growing up Chez Rogers. Doing my own laundry, and paying quarters to do it, I quickly learned that you do not have to use a couple of clean towels every time you took a shower. Washing your sets of towels once a week was plenty.
In college, we quickly made friends who we could sit around our dorm rooms and commiserate with, bitch with, gossip with, tell stories with, get advice from, share tales of woe with, etc. We all talked about home, and so pretty soon we all knew the demographics of our classmates. Not that there was much differentation: almost entirely white, middle-class, Catholic, and majority Irish-ethnic. But we got to know the names of everyone's siblings. Where they'd gone to high school. Where they'd had summer jobs.
We all felt sorry for the one fellow freshman on our floor who called home at least once a day, crying into the phone while talking to her mother, whom she called Mama. Which, of course, we cruelly nicknamed her, but only when speaking of her in the privacy of our dorm room, never where she could hear us.
Amazingly, despite her attachment to her mother, Mama made it through the year. And I just checked the yearbook, and she graduated, too. (At first I couldn't find her, but then I realized that her very Irish-y last name had an O' in front of it.)
College, back in the day, was about becoming independent. Getting by on your own. Growing up.
(All this said, over my college years, I probably went back to Worcester for the weekend more than the norm. My father was ill throughout my years in college, and died in the middle of my senior year. My parents weren't exactly forthcoming on the weekly phone calls, and sometimes I went home just to find out what was going on. On one occasion, I arrived in Worcester to find that my father was in the hospital. I had spoken with my mother a few days before and she hadn't said a word. Just some vaguery about his being under the weather.)
Anyway, an article I saw in The Times a while back got me thinking about my college experience, and how things have changed over the decades.
One of the changes is the emergence of the business of being a surrogate mother.
Concierge companies offering student support have existed for decades. But in recent years, a new crop ofupstarts — such as Horwitz’s company, MindyKnows; the Bama Mama in Alabama; the GA Mom in Georgia; and Campus Mom in Texas — have met additional demand from a new generation of worried parents....Historically, college has been a time for young adults to gain a sense of independence. They run their own errands, do their own laundry, organize their own lives. That’s changing, according to Monteigne Long, a co-founder of Campus Mom, who said the parents of this generation of college students are much more involved in their children’s day-to-day lives. (Source: NY Times)
These surrogate moms see to a lot of different things. Some of which - like clean the dorm room, do the laundry, and get their laptop repaired - the kids should be doing for themselves. At least in my non-parent, old lady opinion.
One professional mom-er:
....brings students balloons on their birthdays and chicken soup when they’re sick, sits with them in the emergency room and picks up their prescriptions if they’re busy. She bakes homemade challah, coordinates with the bedbug exterminator, texts photos and updates to faraway parents and doles out recommendations on the best local doctors and landlords.
Some of these tasks didn't exist when I was in college. C.f., texting photos and updates. But most of the items on this "extras" list were things that our friends would have done for us. And/or things that a today's concerned parent could just have delivered. Like the balloons or the chicken soup.
And can't someone figure out who the best landlords are through Googling or talking with their friends? There's no one of my era who lived off-campus who didn't know the name of the biggest slumlord in Boston, even if we didn't have the Internet to search. (Thanks to the Internet, I now know that he died a couple of years after I graduated from college, and that he had an obit in the NY Times. Through which I learned that he once withdrew a major donation to a local university because its students protested taking money from a slumlord.)
Despite knowing he was a slumlord, Boston's finest slumlord was pretty much the only game in town. So Joyce and I rented an apartment from his company. Until we raised an incredible ruckus, our slumlord didn't replace the ancient (1920's vintage) fridge and stove as they'd promised. But after they grudgingly replaced them - we threatened small claims court - the fridge didn't work. We finally took the train to GE's local appliance headquarters, somewhere in the Boston ex-urbs, and staged a mini-sit in until they agreed to make the fix.
The slumlord did paint all the rooms for us, but did zero cleaning. When we moved in, we found old liquor bottles amidst the dust bunnies under the claw foot tub.
And Joyce's then boyfriend, now husband, installed snappy new linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom. Was Tom a linoleum installer? Nah. Just a fellow college kid who knew how to do stuff.
No surrogate mom required!
The arrangements, though, have drawn occasional criticism online and from experts who worry young adults won’t learn enough essential life skills with so much additional support.
Some are concerned that:
... young adults might not learn to rely on themselves or their peers. Larry Nelson, a professor of human development at Brigham Young University, said that helping students learn new skills can foster growth, but there is a fine line between support and coddling.I'm all for those care packages! I loved getting that Campbell's Soup mug in the mail.
“There’s nothing wrong with a care package,” Dr. Nelson said. “But as soon as anything crosses the line into doing it for them, that’s where it gets problematic.”
I do realize that kids today are under tremendous stresses that didn't exist back in the day: the environment, AI, student debt, etc. That social media and mobile phones make plenty of things better, and many things worse. And that parents want to do whatever they can for their kiddos.
But maybe one of those things is to just let the kids grow up or something.
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