Wave Goodbyes!

I let go from that last hug that lingered a few seconds too long. One last look back… As I walked to the car park beside Honors College, I saw him in the distance, waving goodbye. My heart heavy with emotion and tears threatening to flow, I left Purdue’s campus for the last time that summer of 2023.

As I drove back to Chicago, I reminisced over my last weeks with my only son and consoled myself. His 18th birthday had just been celebrated with the new friends he had made. I had left his dorm room more organized than it will ever be from here on out. I had done all I possibly could to set him up at Purdue. He was right where he wanted to be. I had done my job.

On that long drive, I kept thinking about the unsaid lessons I still wanted to leave with him:

• “Be a good person.” “Make good choices.” “Do good things.” Now it’s your turn to manage our messages and figure out what moves your needle even a fraction off-centre. Find, embrace, and act on the things that matter most—to you.
• Be humble. Just about everyone at college knows more than you do about something, in fact, lots of somethings. Accept that you have a lot to learn and embrace the boundless opportunities to expand your mind.
• Be curious. Not only are questions the fastest way to get an answer, but they also show you care. “How are you?” and “What do you think?” are good places to start.
• Don’t judge. If you can master this concept before you leave Purdue, you’ll be light years ahead of your peers. And your parents. (O.K. maybe not your parents but definitely some of your parents’ friends😅)
• Have fun. Does life get better than college? It does, but with caveats and constraints you can’t yet understand.
• Take risks. The only way to see the nighttime beauty of fireflies flitting through the trees is to walk through a dark forest.
• Persist. In life, a little bit of bad almost always accompanies any amount of good.
• When friendships haven’t gelled yet and schoolwork is tougher than you thought, accept that you’re going to be a little homesick. We miss you too. More than you know.
• Connect with the not-so-obvious. Befriend someone who seems different. Take a class that doesn’t count toward your major. Visit places that feel foreign.
• Find your tribe, but remember becoming an adult is about finding your voice too.
• It’s easy to move with the current, but swimming upstream, though harder, yields far more reward. Think twice about taking the easy way out.
• Mistakes are inevitable, so don’t run from them. Learn from them instead.
• Talk less and listen more—to professors, upperclassmen, people whose opinions you share, and more importantly, to those that you don’t. Listen with your head. Listen with your heart. Just listen.
• Bring joy. Make the campus and the world a better place. If you do, you’ll have succeeded far beyond any other measure.

But for now, he was in a place where he would no longer live in the long shadow cast by his Type A parent and would instead start to define himself on his terms: good and bad, right and wrong, moving forward and backward, and sometimes standing still.

In the days after your teen flies the nest, you will likely stalk their Instagram pages and check your phones for missed calls or texts. However, the balance of offering space and availability is tough but necessary. Remember you cannot teach them struggle. The only way they will learn is to actually struggle. This position is not intuitive for parents—it is actually the opposite of what we are biologically wired to do—and yet this is the time to begin reassessment.

A new me, a new you.

As you drop them off at Purdue, thousands of miles away, they and their friends are literally scattering all over the world. When you return home, your house and hearts will suddenly feel empty. I too realized then how fleeting everything is. “It goes quick,” people tell you when you have a baby. I thought they were referring to growth charts and milestones like walking and reading, pimples and school runs. Now I realize they were referring to our role in our child’s life. More than me, my kids were the centre of my wife’s life. All her time had been spent on bringing them up, and the vacuum his absence created was really tough on her.

We talk incessantly about missing our kids when they leave. Less focus, though, is given to the arguably even bigger moments that come after this one. We will miss who we once were—and the struggle to reimagine who we are now. For you, these next few months should be filled with a ruthless prioritization of what matters and defines you. If you’re like us, with one more child still in the house hurtling towards her last year in high school, suddenly there’s another clock ticking before they, too, will leave. That realization will make you double down on insisting on “enjoying their last year” with them. However, even my younger child missed her brother- her post was so poignant.

Regardless of whether you have another child at home or not, this might also be the time to develop interests in new hobbies and creative pursuits to fill the hole in your life. Inevitably, your refocusing will affect your work, your routines, and the time you devote to them.

Yes, this will happen again!

Remember this: around the time this year that you drop off your teen for their first year of college—after many farewell dinners, emotional social media updates, and dorm essentials stuffed into enormous bags—we will be going through the same ritual. Except in this case, our child will be starting sophomore year. We naively believed we were done with goodbyes, but it happens again and again. Bad news, it doesn’t get easier. Good news, they still need us, profoundly!