Welcome to Ask Amy from What Fresh Hell Laughing in the Face of Motherhood, solving your parenting dilemmas one question at a time.

This week's question comes from another Amy, a listener on Facebook, who wrote in to say,

Hey, ladies, I'm a longtime listener.

How about an episode about Amy's experience with her oldest child off at college?

I'm a mom who's sending her first one away to school next year,

and my heart is already slowly breaking help.

Okay, Amy, this is the beginning of the second semester as I'm recording this.

So at this point, I have left my oldest child at college and driven away.

And we've also done three visits home.

He's gone back to college after three different visits, fall break, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

So I'm a real expert at this now.

The first thing I want to tell you is that how big it feels that your child is going to leave the nest and go away to college, it is way bigger ahead of you than it is in the rear view mirror. If you've had a big birthday, turning 40, being like 39 and a half, I feel like, when it was so hard, because I'm like, I'm turning 40 and what does that mean? And what is it going to be like? And then, of course, you turn 40 and it's fine, and you're 40 and a half. And you feel much better you're 40 and you're at 40 and you're a

39 and a half. This is the same thing. How is this going to be and will it be hard? That was harder

than how it actually felt driving away. Your kids experience this differently from you, right?

And as I like to say, the suffering is in the gap and there is a gap. There's supposed to be a gap, right? For you, it's an ending. It's a closure of sort of 18, 19 years of very hard work and remembering when you change their diapers. And for them, it's a beginning. It's a leaving the nest. It's doing something for the first time. So they're looking forward and maybe you're looking back.

In that moment, I think it's okay to be sad and tearful or emotional, I guess I would say.

For me, at least, it's way harder to clamp down on my emotions than just to, you know, express them.

So I was a little teary, but I was able to express to him how happy I was for him, how excited I was for him, which I really was. Another good thing about this, which I think is easier is the way we communicate with our kids is such a sea change from when we went to college. My son got on like a shuttle bus and we stood there and watched him drive away because of course course, we were like, wow, this is it.

This is it.

You know, this is the moment we were leaving him in the college. We're going to walk away. He gets on the shuttle bus. We're looking at him in the seat. As a shuttle bus starts to pull away, we wave to him excitedly. He doesn't even look up. He's looking at his phone the whole time as he pulls away. Like he is completely non-sentimental about this, which was so funny we had to laugh.

So that broke the tension for me and for my spouse.

But 90 minutes. time as he pulls away. Like he is completely non-sentimental about this, which was so funny we had to

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