AUTONOMOUS LIFE

College Visitation Rights

An impromptu coping strategy

This past summer my youngest son and I spent a good amount of time doing that thing we do — mom-and-son endless cuckoo banter. Once we start, we can’t stop. Then we pig laugh. If you want to be funny, you should do like us. My son and I are excessively funny, especially — and only — to us.

I take that back. Maybe you shouldn’t be funny to the extreme that we are. People near you at mini golf will think you’re two lunatics. If you were that person at mini golf, message me. I can explain everything.

After a fun summer of lunacy, my son drove back to college to begin his fourth year, while I was left at home with mom-tears. All our fun met an untimely demise. I was bereft.

He’s not a child, or even a teen. He’s an adult. But this will be our family’s last year of kids’ education, and this has hit me harder than I expected. Plus, I really missed our antics.

What’s next

I knew I needed to move on, start to assimilate, grow a new identity. I tried to come up with ideas for how to cope, something to help me work on this natural separation process between mother and child — internalize this next stage of life, branch out, see what’s next.

Then I got it. I could live with him. What a great idea. I could crash on the couch at his apartment he shares with three other guys. Sit in on a few of his classes. Be a fun addition at the college parties or talkative company when he strolls in a romantic park with his girlfriend. We could be study buddies!

Separation should be an easing, not an abruption.

I packed my stuff in five minutes and got down there in two hours flat. I parked next to his car in the parking lot, grabbed an armload of luggage, and climbed the stairs.

That look on his face when I showed up — hard to explain.

“Mom??”

“The one and only!” I bowed like a Broadway star, but then fell over because my backpack was holding a three-week supply of canned fish.

I didn’t care. I was grinning all teeth. Not so much him though.

“Mom, is everything okay? Why are you here?”

“Honey, everything is fantastic,” I told him, “I’m here to visit!”

Then we looked at each other for a little quirky moment. My face was like, this is going to be awesome!! His face was like, she better not be serious!!

“Sweetie, aren’t you going to invite me in?”

I let myself in while my son followed behind.

“Mom, um, which hotel are you staying at? Did you tell me you were coming down?”

“Lovebug, this is a spontaneous visit from your mom. I thought we could hang out together impromptu. Oh boy — we’re going to have to clean off that couch.”

Automatic autonomy

After a while my son got the message that I was going to stay, if not for the three weeks I’d planned, then the three days he enlisted my husband via emergency phone call to insist that I adjust to. This meant I’d need to squeeze weeks into days, as if Star-Kist ever tried to squeeze a whale into a can.

I got straight to it.

“Honey, I want to check out your autonomous vehicle class. It sounds cool.”

He looked at me with blank eyes. Or deadpan. Maybe we were joking again like old times.

“People interested in the university can sit in on classes,” I told him.

“For prospective students, Mom.”

“I’m prospectively going to have paid a lot of money for a lot of your classes here, sweetie. I’m prospectively interested in automatic vehicles.”

“Autonomous.”

“Exactly.”

The next morning, I got up early because I didn’t want to be a schlepp on my first day of class. I showered in the disgusting bathroom and then got all dolled up. First impressions are key. My son wasn’t on board.

“Mom! You can’t wear that!” He looked at me like I’d gone mad.

I scanned his outfit — one of the three pairs of shorts he wore all summer, and one of the two shirts. Enough said.

However, I’ll admit, walking across campus in a gown was not good wardrobe planning, but it worked out in the end. The autonomy vehicle professor slowed down in his car to see what my outfit was all about. My son wanted to disappear, or so he said under his breath. In a few brief moments of chirpy conversation, the professor offered me a ride to the engineering building, and voila. Life works out, see?

I had a fabulous time in class. Folks stared as if they’d never seen a middle-aged woman in a gown in a graduate engineering class before. The only things that mattered were learning about autonomic vehicles and spending quality time with my son.

Since I was already dressed for success, I suggested I go with my son and his friends to their party that night. He was ready to put his foot down when his roommates started laughing with small spasms and snorts. “Dude, your mom totally has to come with us!”

I beamed.

I tell you, I was the life of the party. I’m sure I talked with every single person there, especially the drunk young couple who started yelling at each other in the backyard. I hurriedly intervened and set up a makeshift couples’ therapy on the back patio of the building. I was a hit because once I finished working my magic, they told their friends about me.

Joke or no joke

Soon, there was a line of students around the apartment building waiting to sit in the chair across from me and be cured of their concerns. This is when my son butted in line and sat down in the chair.

“Mom,” he said, in the most serious voice I’d heard out of him in a long time. “I think this is great what you’re doing, but I also think it’s time you go back home to see Dad. He said he can’t find the butter anywhere.”

“Are we doing our joking thing now?”

“No.”

“But are you joking about the butter?”

“Yes.”

“So, should I joke with you now, or not joke?”

“Not joke. It’s time for you to let me do my thing down here, while you do your thing at home.”

I was sad because he was right. I had no business here. I was forcing my will on the inevitable. Kids will launch, and I hadn’t accepted that mine already had. I sighed.

“Can you let me finish my therapy first? Then I’ll go.”

“Fine. What are you telling all these students, by the way? They seem happy after they talk to you.”

“First, I listen to their problems, and then I tell them they should go call their mother and tell her to butt out of their life.”

“You do?!”

“Heck no. I tell them they should go play the lottery and see if they can win a ton of money. Because if they do, between you and me, they can buy two houses next to each other — one for them, one for their mother.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Only partially.”

Thanks to Amy Sea and BOFace for cleaning this thing up. ❤