"I've *tried* to get rid of them!"

This is purely for the humor of it all, nothing more.

 

Son 1's university is planning several days of orientation for new students before classes start.  We'll drive him there in a few weeks (I think "we" in this case means me and Son 2), arriving on a Tuesday night.  The dorms open Wednesday, when he moves in.  I figured then we'd turn around and come home – hell, it's an eight-hour drive each way.  But reading the pamphlet I suddenly realized that they have "parent orientation" events planned through Friday afternoon, after which  -- they suggest most delicately! – it will be about time for the parents to get the hell out of town and let their children adjust to school.

 

Three days of parent orientation?  What in God's name can they possibly plan to tell us that requires we stick around for three days?

 

Well, I e-mailed them to ask, and I suppose I'll hear back in a while.  But in the meantime the boys and I looked at the pamphlet a little more closely and saw that it talked about helping parents adjust to their children being away from home for the first time.  Oh.  Right.  They've scheduled three days because they figure that we're all helicopter parents who can't bring ourselves to let go.  So they've got events for us to keep us out of the way of the students.

 

But honestly, Son 1 will do just fine without me there.  He even suggested that he could single out other new freshmen who look particularly beleaguered by their parents and try to help them cope: "Hey, man. I know how you feel. I been there. It's OK, you'll get through it."  Maybe he'll have a whole social circle set up by the time classes start the next Monday.

 

We also had visions of me going to one of the parent gatherings and addressing them all in something like this vein:

 

I'm just here to tell you that you don't have to worry about leaving your children here on campus while you go back home.  Kids are resilient.  They'll do just fine.  I know this for a fact, because even when you want to get rid of them, they keep coming back.  I know I've tried to get rid of mine, over and over, and nothing doing.

 

We sent the oldest one [that's Son 1] to Europe when he was just 10.  For two blissfully quiet weeks he was away, but then he came back.  So then we tried sending him away to boarding school for high school, more than two hours from home.  But every vacation, like clockwork, he came back unharmed.  Usually he brought a stack of unpaid bills with him, for excess snacks he'd eaten over the previous semester that the school had obligingly run up like a bar tab.

 

With his younger brother [Son 2] we realized we were going to have to step it up.  So first we sent him to Australia, where every indigenous life form except the koala bear is poisonous and carniverous.  He came back.  Next we sent him to Costa Rica, figuring he'd come down with, … oh I don't know … yellow fever or malaria or something.  He came back.  Then we sent him to India, with the fond thought that maybe he'd get eaten by a tiger, or stepped on by an elephant, or abducted by a yeti, or even just banged up in traffic.  But no, you guessed it … he came back.  Finally we sent him, too, away to boarding school – this time to a school way out in the middle of nowhere, where they have to chop the wood to build their own fires for heat, and where casually ignoring frostbite is a badge of honor.  But every vacation he comes back, three inches taller than he was six weeks before, hungry, and toting a big sack of dirty laundry.

 

Try as we might, we just can't get rid of them.  Our kids keep coming back home at regular intervals, safe and sound, despite our best efforts.  Yours will too.

 

Thank you.

 

Whaddya think?  Suppose it would go over well?