As she drops her daughter off at school, Karina Moreno reminisces about when she was moving in to college.
In the summer of 1992, mom drove us down the dusty Interstate 5 freeway to drop me off at UCLA for my freshman year of college. It was a hot August day and we were in a navy-blue Honda Accord hatchback under open sky.
There was little to distract from our tangled emotions, teary-eyed and giddy with possibility. Memory can be a hazy thing, but there are certain things I will never forget from that day. My mom hugged me tight in the stairwell at Sproul Hall, imprinting things I would carry with me like doodling in the margins of my notebooks and the second major I picked up in women’s studies.
Last week, I delivered my own daughter to college. Many things were different. Her drop off involved a cross-country flight instead of a six-hour drive. There were Amazon packages cluttering the halls, QR codes to report maintenance issues, and roommates that had already met on FaceTime. But many things were the same.
Anxious students sharing old elevators awkwardly smushed by mini-fridges. Sweaty palms and nervous laughter. Stomach knots that are the hallmarks of being excited and sad at the same time. My husband and I were assigned the job of hanging up a full-length mirror, a must-have for three girls crammed into a 200-square foot dorm. As we aligned the mirror to the doorway, I caught glimpses of our daughter setting up her room. She was adorning the walls with album cover photos, a love of music she inherited from her dad.
Then she was unpacking her journal alongside treasured books, a literary lover like her mom. Letting go is both the triumph and tragedy of parenthood. That mirror reminded me that regardless of what she remembers about her own college drop off, regardless of all the newness and change that comes next, she will carry pieces of us and we will carry pieces of her. With a Perspective, I’m Karina Moreno.
Karina Moreno lives in Oakland and works for a charitable foundation in San Francisco.
upper waypoint