Hope, tears and Keurigs: What it feels like to drop your last child off at college
She has always been our baby, ever since she showed up a week late in 2007 — our fourth and final child, and our only girl.
Funny from the day she emerged, she stepped on a bathroom scale once at age 4, not sure of its exact purpose. Then she rubbed her hands together and said: “Let’s see how old I am.”
She’s 18 years old now, and we dropped her off at college last week. Around two million American families will participate in that same bittersweet ritual this month, packing up their own cars with hope, tears and Keurigs.
For me, at least, I look at our daughter and the camera roll on my iPhone automatically pops up and starts scrolling by itself inside my head. There she is the day she was born — we hadn’t found out the baby’s gender, and so a few seconds after she was born, the doctor let me tell my wife: “It’s a girl.”
There she is as a baby, being cooed over by her three brothers. There she is with her dolls, most of whom she named “No-no.” There she is a few years later, complaining about one of those same brothers after she kept teasing him: “I hit him softly, and he hit me hardly!”
There she is fearlessly playing defense in one of the dozens of soccer games in which I coached her. Winning the school spelling bee in seventh grade. At prom. At graduation. On the floor petting our two rescue dogs. Standing up together at all the concerts she persuaded me to take her to (and buy her tickets for) — artists I had never heard of but wound up liking: Winnetka Bowling League. Slaughter Beach, Dog. Noah Kahan.
I’ve always had a nostalgic streak, but it didn’t feel quite like this with our three boys. I missed the first one’s college drop off entirely due to a work assignment that took me out of the country. The next two college drop offs I attended, and they weren’t easy, but both my wife and I felt like when we were leaving sons No. 2 and 3 that they were ready to have us go home and get on with college.
Not that Georgia, our daughter, isn’t ready to take on the University of South Carolina, where she has enrolled as a freshman. She’ll do great.
I’m just not sure we’re ready. Elise and I have been married for 28 years and parents for 27. Taking care of kids — that’s No. 1 on the list of what we do. What we feel like we’ve always done.
And while we aren’t really empty-nesters — our 24-year-old son has temporarily moved back home to save money after getting a job one mile away from where we live — we also aren’t the same people who not that long ago had four kids, two dogs and two cats all living under the same roof in an everyday state of chaos.
Believe me, I know we’re blessed. To have four healthy children, a supportive extended family and an opportunity to send all four to college — that’s always been our American dream. It doesn’t work out that way for a lot of people, and I’m not complaining about a bit of this.
I also don’t want our daughter to come home. She needs to be in college. She’s been preparing for this most of her life.
It’s just a little sad, you know?
We didn’t have Georgia until we were in our early 40s. We were always among the oldest parents at all her school functions. And by the end of high school, with our other kids all in college or working and us in our late 50s, we knew enough to treasure what we had with our last child.
Georgia has always been an affectionate person and a creative storyteller. She hugged us a lot. She told us far more about the day-to-day drama of high school than any of our boys ever dreamed of sharing. We knew she wasn’t perfect, with her penchant for procrastination and her severe allergy to the idea of a clean room. But we loved having her around most every day for 18 years.
Of course, she’s still only two hours away. But it’s different.
Any mom or dad who has nervously dropped off a kid at college — or at summer camp, or at preschool — knows this sinking feeling. As a parent, the days sometimes crawl by, but the years flash by in a blink.
Last Friday, we drove her to Columbia. We all met her roommate for the first time, and she seemed terrific. They both brought Keurigs and love coffee — that has to be a good sign, right?
We stayed a few hours to decorate her room and eat lunch. We saw other parents — dads holding drills, moms lugging suitcases — get done what they needed to and then drift back toward their cars.
But we sort of kept sticking around. There were still a few things to set up. And did we need to go buy another storage bin? And was she positive those push pins would work for those posters?
But she gently said she could do all the rest of it herself.
So we knew it was time.
The three of us walked down the stairs into the dormitory lobby. We told her we loved her, and we cried a little, and then I walked out in the bright sunshine and tried to remember where I had parked the car.
I kept my phone in my pocket, but the camera roll just kept going in my head.
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This story was originally published August 20, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
