Crying In My Tacos

How pride and grief found me at a lunch table

This is part of my College Move-In Arc, where I write about the messy, tender, and unexpectedly funny moments of sending a child out into the world

College drop-off is supposed to be a milestone filled with pride and joy. And it was, just not only that. In this reflection, I write about the ease that caught me off guard, the lunch that unlocked my heart, and how sending my son off reminded me of ending therapy with a patient I’ve done deep work with.

I am out West today, two short days away from dropping my oldest son off at college. If you have read my last two posts, you already know the swirl of feelings leading up to this trip. In my head, I had imagined these days would be jam-packed, frantic runs to Target or Walmart for bedding, towels, razor blades, shower caddies, notebooks, and more. The full cliché.

Instead, the shopping took just a few hours. Boys are easy like that. My friends with daughters have been preparing and accumulating for months, so the ease of this morning caught me off guard. With extra time on our hands, my son and I decided to make the 38-minute drive from our hotel to his new campus. We wandered the town, browsed the bookstore for school merch, and then sat down for a relaxed lunch. Somewhere between the sweatshirts and the coffee mugs, it hit me: I have done this before.

Not dropping a child at college, that is new. But the act itself, letting go of someone who is ready to be on their own, I have been doing for nearly two decades. Parenting is, at its core, a long series of goodbyes. Letting them sleep in their own crib. Letting them wobble through their first steps. Walking them to preschool and then stopping at the door. Waving from the curb as the school bus pulls away. Handing over the car keys. From the moment they leave our bodies, we are practicing how to let them go.

It is not just parenting where letting go feels familiar. Sending my son to college reminds me of ending therapy with patients I have worked with for years. In both cases, I have had the privilege of watching someone grow into a fuller, more authentic version of themselves. I have invested love, effort, and sometimes my own tears into the relationship. And then, just when I want to hold onto it most, it is time to step back.

When therapy ends on a healthy note, it is not because someone is “done” growing. None of us ever are. It is because they are ready to stand more fully on their own. They may check in occasionally or return when they need the anchor of that connection again, but the regular contact ends. Still, we remain woven into each other. They carry an internalized version of me. I carry them too.

My son does not need me the way he once did, but he still carries me with him. He can call on that internalized version of me when he wants to. And just like my patients, I hope he does. To be clear, I also hope he calls me on the phone😅.

At lunch, he talked about his bittersweet goodbyes to friends, the heartache of leaving his girlfriend, and the excitement of classes that actually interest him. He did all this while convincing me to order an appetizer before our already calorie-heavy lunch, something I still sometimes resist after thirty years of an on-and-off eating disorder. Somehow, he has often been able to coax the healthiest parts of me to the surface.

When he went to the bathroom, I found myself crying into my tacos. This was not the script I had written in my head. I had predicted pride and joy, the clean satisfaction of a healthy launch. But humans are notoriously bad at predicting how we will feel in the future. That is the trouble with affective forecasting, a term I first learned in a social psychology class. Our guesses about future feelings rarely match the reality.

The pride is here, yes, as is the joy. But so is the grief. And so is the reminder that letting go does not get easier with practice, it only changes shape. I have been rehearsing for this since the day he was born, and it still caught in my throat.

Surprisingly though, it also fills me up even as it hurts. Because now that I am nourishing my body, I cannot help but feel more. And even though my heart aches at the thought of goodbye, it is also fuller for having loved him this long, for having been so close for so many years, for having had the privilege of watching him grow into someone who can step forward without me.

He will live his own life now, and I will keep living mine. We will both carry the other inside of us, ready to be called up when needed.

In the end, sending him off carries both the satisfaction and thrill of watching someone I love soar, and also a tangle of more complicated feelings. Pride and joy sit right beside grief. Maybe this is why we are so bad at predicting how we will feel in moments like these, because no forecast can capture the way so many emotions can pull at you all at once. Whether saying goodbye to a patient you have worked with for years or to your child at a college drop-off, the only thing left is to feel it all and then let go, trusting that you will always remain part of each other’s story.