Re-homed

Report day for incoming freshman at the dorms of my old alma mater was last Sunday, 24 September 2017. There's a whole second dorm community that's gone up in the 20 years since I graduated, served by the exact same inadequate parking lot as the old dorm. To head off a massive jam of emotionally fraught middle-aged people trying to park their cars and contemplate the incremental but undeniable advance of their own mortality at the exact same time, the organizers smartly gave us all staggered report times so we wouldn't all arrive at once. Plus, they give you a window of exactly 30 minutes to unload and get the fuck out of the way to make room for the next wave, so it's a whirlwind of angsty positive motion, without quite enough time to stop and build to a full-force existential nervous breakdown. So it went pretty well.

There isn't really much of anything to look at once you're inside the dorm room itself, unless you count the roommate. The room is about wide enough for me to touch both walls with my fingertips if I stretched my arms out, so the entire tour takes about as long as a theatrical double-take.

The roommate himself seemed fine. Some white kid from Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world. I checked the Wikipedia page and it doesn't seem to note that that place produces pillow-smothering roommate murderers at a rate any higher per capita than any other place, so I guess it'll be OK. From what I understand of Gilroy, the biggest concern, demographically speaking, is that he'll get my kid hooked on synthetic opioids, but the joke's on him because our hometown already competes in that category on the national level.

My son's mom and I went to drop him off and, since we only had the one very temporary parking permit, we went in one car. That means the drive home was just the two of us, the mutual divorcees, alone together for the first time since she moved out back in '10. It could have been awkward I guess, but the fact that we'd just set our oldest boy off at a good school, having made it all the way through Inland Southern California public schools without impregnating anyone or learning to cook meth* or getting a neck tattoo, we were feeling fairly accomplished, if not a little wistful and maybe the tiniest bit self-satisfied. Somehow we've ended up doing a pretty good job with that kid. The other two, yeesh, but that one... well, I don't want to jinx anything. It's only been four days. Fingers crossed.

It's been a week of looming and crashing momentousness around here and I for one am exhausted. This week I've been trying to train myself to cook food for just three people, which is harder than it sounds when you're used to four, especially when the missing fourth one is an 18-year-old boy-man who contemplates food less in portions than in piles. Besides that, everyone just feels a bit off kilter without that extra voice around. We've been adjusting by doing the thing we know how to do best: taking it out on the middle son. He didn't know he'd been hiding out for 16 years, shielded by the trailblazing presence of his older brother, out there trampling a path for him to follow. I wouldn't say we're trying to make him cry every day, but it's just a cathartic, happy coincidence that we've been able to. The way I look at it, self-esteem is on the most subjective of scales. You need points of referential comparison. In other words, if everyone has high self-esteem, then nobody does. That's why god gave us middle children, everybody.

Other than that, I'm out here trying to figure out how to be a single person again, for the first time in my forties. It sounded scarier before, but I just divested myself of one of my offspring and that didn't kill me. What's a Tinder coffee date with a stranger going to do to me?

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*or at least if he has learned to cook meth, he's been considerate enough to do it in such a fashion that I can't tell he knows how to cook meth. If you can't get full social responsibility, at least shoot for good manners. Still feels like a win for us either way.