I’ve learned that distance isn’t what it used to be during my daughter’s first semester at college. It is not that the length of a mile has mysteriously shortened, but rather the sense of space between home and school has shrunk. There are so many ways for me to keep up with her and what she is doing that she might as well be down the block, not in another state.
Comparing her experience to my own 30-some years ago, cellphones and e-mail are the most obvious game changers. When I went off to college, if my parents wanted to reach me, they had to call a public phone, hope someone sober would answer, leave a message that I might or might not get, and then wait for me to call back. And that often took days.
Mail was even slower, sending off a letter that would take three days to reach me and then at least as long for a reply. We scheduled once-a-week talks that lasted five minutes or less because long distance was so pricey.
Today, I expect my daughter is reachable 24-7, by text, e-mail or cell, and she expects the same of me. Whether it is to say when she is arriving home or to ask for her winter coat, we can be in regular contact.
My wife loves this, relishing the access to our girl’s exciting college life through regular communications and various social media. But I’m not so sure.
It’s one thing to see a picture of my girl and her roommates in their Halloween costumes (“How fun!”) or to check on the score of her rugby game (“How exciting!”), but quite another to read her friends’ comments about the morning after a particularly wild party (“TMI!”).
One of the benefits and purposes of being away at school is having your deeds shielded from parental scrutiny. A freedom of college is not having someone telling you to turn off your light when you are up at 2 am arguing with friends about whether it makes a difference to the arc of “Harry Potter” that Dumbledore is gay.
What my daughter and I are supposed to be building are boundaries, defining what is her private life and what is shared. We may disagree about where this division should fall, but that’s part of the process. I would like to know when she is visiting friends at another university, and she might feel this is none of my business. We will work this out.
I have set up some rules to help me with this: avoid regular checks of social media and never comment or “like” anything; e-mail only important information or questions requiring answers; call only when I need an answer now or when a discussion is necessary.
For the rest of the stuff I want to tell my girl — the dog got sick, the dryer is broken, the million little things about life at home — I send her a letter. I is a retro thing to do, I know, but it makes the distance meaningful, like it used to be.
