letting go of the stuff

my daughter came home from college for the the labor day weekend. it was great having her here. she helped to finish moving the last bits from the old apartment and then helped me to clean it and get it ready for the inspection on tuesday. she leaves today to go back to college.

it seems like a lot of the stuff in our lives is an "adventure". a couple of days before i went to get her, my exhaust system decided to develop a hole in it that is making for an interesting drive. it sounds more like a race car or a souped muscle car than the sedate little CRV i'd like it to be. obviously, there is no money to fix that right now ... so i have to live with it. but it made the 1.5 hour drive (one way) to get my daughter and the drive back with her loud. we turned up the radio and talked a bit louder in order to hear each other. and the stares from the ppl standing on the street in the city she's at were a little unnerving. it reminded me though that there were times when i would hear someone's loud exhaust and think, u really should midasize that. i wonder if ppl think that about me now when i drive by.

the new apartment is "coming along". its finding a place for everything that is difficult. and yesterday i went to make scalloped potatoes for lunch and realized that i had sold the only pan i had that would accommodate them... oh well ... i improvised and we did just fine.

the other thing i did yesterday was to put away the huge portraits of my ancestors in their gilded (but flaking) frames. however, in the process of doing so i ripped a hole in one of them. two of these pictures don't have the glass any more -- probably a good thing knowing me with glass items -- which would have protected this picture had it been present. at first i was like, i hate my life, and then i was like, well, i didn't really like their picture anyhow coz they looked mean. plus, what little i knew about them said that i wouldn't have liked them in real life anyhow ... so what did it matter.

but it got me to thinking about all the stuff i've carted around from place to place that has little to no meaning to me -- like these portraits. who are these ppl?? what were their lives like. idk a lot about them and honestly, i'm tired of carting this stuff around. is this how ppl's old tintype photos end up in boxes at antique markets??? relatives just get tired of hauling around photos of ppl they don't know and have no one else to pass it on to who is even the least little bit interested???

its difficult for me to say this because i am a scrapbooker and i had a store dedicated to that for years and told ppl how precious these things were. and now here i am confessing how much it bothers me to have to move my own dead relatives' portraits from apt. to apt. -- especially when each consecutive apartment gets smaller.

a friend came over last friday while i was cleaning and sorting and she commented on all the little pictures i have scattered all over my house of my immediate family and how at some point she was going to inherit this very same sort of thing from her mother and she was not relishing the idea. i feel sorry for my kids when i die -- they'll have to deal with all this stuff.

if this move has taught me anything at all, it has taught me that i need to start letting go. but where do i do that. with my great grandmother's blue willow china, the old portraits, the new photos. that's my problem ...

and so it begins

yesterday i went to the mailbox and pulled out a large envelope from one of the two colleges to which my daughter applied. i knew instantly what it contained because everybody knows that when u get accepted to a college u get a large envelope and when u get rejected u get the smaller one with just a letter saying sorry...

so i brought it into the apt. and i called upstairs to her that she needed to come downstairs right then. she got all panicked because i'd been home since Wed. after injuring my back at work -- and she figured i'd fallen and couldn't get up (said with that annoying Urkel voice).

she stopped halfway down when she saw i was holding up a large envelope, and started to get all excited. she opened the envelope and tears came into her eyes and i said, "what" -- even though i knew that "what" was a given. we both ended up laughing and crying and hugging and omygosh, if i'd had a camera handy i'd have taken a photo of that look on her face when she opened the envelope and read its contents.

and so it begins... she's on her way to becoming an art student at an art college, and what fun she will have, and what fun she is looking forward to having. and i'm going to learn to let go in a bigger way now because its her adventure and not mine. and i'm excited for her and happy for her and kinda sad for me -- but more excited and happy for her than i am sad for me because i know this is a fulfillment of a desire that's been in her heart for a long time. and i'm so proud of her, but that's just one of a myriad of my emotions ...

and so ... it begins ...

college visits -- part two

this past week has been a whirlwind. my daughter is a junior in high school and she had the week off for spring vacation. only for us it wasn't much of a vacation. we were looking at colleges and i spent the better part of 22+ hours driving. i've been through this before with my eldest child (now 21). we looked at 5 schools from one side of PA to the other for him and he ended up not applying to any of them only to end up in a huge school that he hated and dropped out of after a year. i had decided i wouldn't try to give advice this time. obviously, sometimes the best laid plans go awry. i'm a mother after all ....

of course her top choice was the first one scheduled -- with three more to follow (and two others that will have to be scheduled at a different time -- there r only so many days in the week). most of them had programs or tours that started at a decent hour (say 11 or 1) so that we could do a day-trip sort of thing. that wasn't so bad even though it made for a really long day for me (especially with my shoulder issues). see, even though she can drive, she can't drive my standard transmission car, and she hasn't gotten her license yet (feels its a waste of perfectly good money when she won't need it at college and will still have to pay insurance).

her top choice soon became no choice (we didn't even get to hear the presentation before she stated that she was pretty sure she wasn't going to go there or even bother applying). she's got that gift of discernment and something about the place really bothered her -- i'm thinking it was the very hilly terrain and the communal bathrooms (see she's spoiled because her brother's school had bathrooms in each dorm room). as she was announcing this i was left thinking, i just drove over 3 hours and into a screwy city with no city map in my hand and will now need to get us out of said screwy city and drive another 3+ hours home for u to tell me this???? all the time wondering if we were going to have a repeat of her brother's experience and if we were -- we could stop right now...

the second school we visited, her art teacher recommended. its kinda "out there" as colleges go, if u ask me. its for that "bohemian" crowd. i don't see my daughter as a bohemian -- but evidently she was thrilled. the school is in a refurbed dept. store -- i'm all for recycling and the space was huge and impressive for what they had in it and what was yet to be developed. everything reeked of cigarette smoke (including the refurbed hotel that served as a dorm -- each room had its own bathroom). my daughter doesn't smoke. as a matter of fact, she has asthma -- but on the day we visited she had a bad cold and couldn't smell anything. i wonder if a follow-up visit will change her outlook on it. i was looking at where its located and trying not to think of her walking alone at night from the studio to the dorm. of course, should i care whether its bohemian and smokey and potentially dangerous if she's getting a great education??? i can see that my views on this r obviously too motherly.

the third school is in our state and she's considering it her "safety" school. its an ok place even if the one all-female dorm (which is in a victorian house) is 30% lesbian. again -- we're talking artists here and they basically march to a different beat all the way around i'm discovering. but my daughter's reaction to this school was "well, its not going to kill me to come here, but its obviously NOT at the top of my list." alrighty then....

yesterday was probably the hardest day. friday night we'd gone to a worship meeting at church and even though i had thought we would leave early, we didn't depart until close to 10pm (and the meeting wasn't over). then i had to get up at 3:45am to drive 2+ hours to get to the last school we would be visiting early enough for their presentation (which, btw didn't start on time because some other parents couldn't seem to get their acts together to get there in time). needless to say, i was yawning a lot throughout the parental presentation. i was grumpy on the tour and they didn't even show us the living spaces for the students (they r building new ones for a third of the incoming students, but they still could have shown us the existing ones -- and the tour guide didn't wait till everybody was in one place to talk and often talked while walking so that those of us at the back of the pack couldn't hear her -- so we missed a good deal of what was being said, and yeah u get the picture).

even though i was impressed with the security and the school and the location (2 hours vs. 3+ for her new top choice), she still had stars in her eyes for the bohemian school and basically was blowing anything else off -- so y were we there?? idk

probably the best thing about the day was getting to see the sky that papa god was painting as we drove there and laughing about how mom was a dork for stopping to take pictures of it only to have a state policeman drive up behind her and ask if she was having a "kodak moment." then said daughter got the hiccups because she hadn't eaten any breakfast before we'd left (teens r like this u know) and so we laughed about how she knew i was going to scare her to try to get rid of them and "don't do it mom". when we got home, we both crashed in the livingroom (her on the floor and me on the couch) around 7. when i woke up at 9 and suggested we both go to bed i figured i might well be awake early and sure enough -- here i am at 3am writing.

throughout this whole college visit thing a couple of things have surfaced. first of all, i have a really tough time with the idea of my daughter sitting in a classroom with a naked man or woman in front of her that she's required to draw (hey, i'm a mom, sometimes we'd like to put a plastic bubble around our kids to protect them from stuff and keep them as innocent as possible for the longest period of time). something about seeing metalwork statutes of men with erect penises on the bohemian tour set me off i think and after that all naked drawings on the walls of the schools made me cringe (and i'm not a prude) ... even michelangelo managed to give david a flaccid penis.

secondly, i have no sense of art as its being expressed now. i've been reminded by my daughter that anything can be art and "can't u see what the artist is trying to say?" um, that they like other ppl's garbage and painting it all green makes it art??? yeah, even though i was raised in an artistic household, some things just don't speak art to me. i'm sorry....

i want my kids to have to have the best experiences they can, but i also realize that i can't tell them where to go to school. my daughter, for instance, refuses to look at colleges anywhere beyond a 3-4 hour drive -- which may be a good thing -- or a bad thing (limiting) if u get my drift. if i had been making the decision for my son, he would have gone to the smaller school in PA that we visited because for me, it seemed a good fit for him. instead, he chose a huge state school in the next state over and was miserable because he got lost in the shuffle. i can't tell my daughter where to go, but in a sense, i want her to be safe and happy and not be exposed to things that might tear down her morals and values. i think that's a pretty hard thing to find when we're talking art schools.

at some point i know i have to cut the umbilical cord. i've been reminded of this all too often with my son. what most children don't realize is that its very hard for a mom to do that. our purpose was to raise them, nurture them, teach them, protect them. yes, we have to let go, but after 18 years of doing our job, its hard to "switch gears". i've been calling on papa god more and more lately for strength to let go. after all, i was just a caretaker -- he is their protector -- they really belong to him and they were just on loan to me. once my job with them is done, i will be left "unemployed" -- which is essentially what i am in the real world anyhow. and then the question becomes -- what is my purpose now??

yes, this whole college visit thing stirs up a lot of emotions. i'm so glad i have papa god with me -- he surely is my rock to lean on. and who would know better than he about letting go and giving freedom to a child....