Separation from teen gives mom new anxiety

I recently participated in an important experiment.

The variable: My 17-year-old was away at camp for most of the summer.

The hypothesis: I can be separated from my child for long periods – especially important since he’s touring colleges this fall.

The hope: I can do this.

The conclusion: I can’t.

Almost every summer since he was 9, my firstborn child has gone away to the same wilderness camp that his dad and his uncle attended, 450 miles from home. First it was one week. Then two. Then four. This year, it was eight.

With each camp, I got better at letting him go, partly because I knew I had to, partly because I knew camp was good for him. At camp, he was his own master and teacher, away from the mother who reminds him every time he inhales to feed the dog, don’t chew with your mouth open, did you remember to wear your retainer? Every year, he comes back from high ropes and sailing and daily, 7 a.m. polar-bear swims in 57-degree Michigan water, more confident, more calm, more himself.

This year, the camp was the summer. School was out on June 8, and he left three days later, not just to be a camper this time, but to be a counselor-in-training, then a counselor. His duties included taking his cabin of 14-year-olds sailing for a week.

I was proud of him.

And me.

My friends were astonished that I wouldn’t see my son for two whole months.

Meanwhile, I was Zen Mom.

“Don’t tell anybody,” I said Week One, Week Two, even Weeks Three and Four, “but after all these years, I think I’m getting used to this letting-go thing.”

When he is gone, the house is quieter, neater. A phone without a teenaged boy to answer it does not ring every five minutes. In a house without a teenaged boy, nobody drips food all over the kitchen floor. There is nobody fighting with me for the computer, or losing every single, solitary set of keys to the Jeep.

During his time away this summer, my son and I traded lengthy e-mails. To my captive audience, I could wax prolific, and long, with my philosophies on life. He e-mailed me back what a great mom I was. I imagined him away at college, sending me daily “I love you, Mom” e-mails.

“By next year when he goes off to college, I will be all done with separation anxiety,” I told my friends.

Somewhere about Week Six then, just about the time the e-mail lovefest began to trickle down, first, to “Don’t have time to write,” then to silence, I started moaning.

“Parents and children are not supposed to be far from each other,” I wailed to my husband. “The Japanese say that even if an extended family does not live together, parents should live close enough to carry over a bowl of hot soup. Native Americans are known for their deep extended family ties. My African friends tell me about village and community. What’s wrong with us?”

Clean kitchen or no, future manhood or stunted growth, I walked around mumbling, “This isn’t right” and “I miss my son” until finally it was time for my husband to drive the eight hours to pick him up, while I stayed home and gutted the house in preparation for his laundry.

I nearly fell on him when he came through the door. I must say, he almost fell on me, too.

“I’m so glad I don’t have to be anybody’s mommy counselor anymore,” he said. “It’s good to see you, Mom.”

He was as glad to see me, as I was him.

Ah, but just as the bloom comes off the rose and the rivers flow to the sea, just as phones start ringing when teenagers are home and Jeep keys mysteriously disappear, so do boys turn into men who can’t wait to fill out college applications.

“Mom, I can do these myself,” he said when I come into his room the next morning to help fill them out.

I think I’m going to need a good therapist.

Debra-Lynn B. Hook, who lives in Ohio with her three children and her husband, has been writing about family life since 1987. E-mail her at dlbhook@yahoo.com.