Move-in day always stirs up a bunch of mixed emotions.

Kids no longer kids, now moving into the “real world” – which for some might be just a vacation from mom and dad for the next 4 or so years; and non-stop partying.

For parents, it's letting go of their kids, and watching them set out on their own (albeit beset with college loans that will eventually have to be paid off.)

I remember it vividly – and look back at it with fond memories. And it’s not as though my daughter was going off to school in a far off place. That place was “Willy P” – short for William Paterson up in Wayne – a little over an hour’s drive away.

But it may have been a universe – seeing is how she’s a only child, and my wife and I didn’t know how she’d take to dorm life.

Short answer – she loved it; and came into her own once she left the protective nest that was home.

However, I could remember what it was like bringing her there.
We’d passed one of her favorite haunts – a coffee shop called “Mr. Jitters”; and it was then that she broke down crying saying how much she’d miss her friends. Only to make new ones once she got to her dorm.

The hard part was for my wife and me. Leaving her at the dorm was a bitch – but we knew we had to do it – and allow her to start life outside of the protective cocoon we’d provided all those years.

Once while driving her home for her first weekend back, we listened to a song that I’d been playing on the station where I had been working at the time. It was called “Twenty Six Cents” by a Canadian group “The Wilkensons.” And the main lyric is about a mother saying to her daughter about to leave home that she can call home anytime she felt lonely.

The lyric goes something like this: “…here’s a penny for your thoughts, a quarter for the call…and only your mama’s love!”

Oooofaaa! Nothing like a country song to make you tear up. And after hearing the first verse of the song, my daughter yelled at me to turn it off. It was just too much to take!

But I’ll bet those were the range of emotions you had on moving day. Either as the one leaving or the one left behind.

Was moving in to a college dorm a sad occasion for either you or your parents – or a happy one? What do you remember most about move-in day?

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