View from Here
Cutting the Cord
By Emily Morrison
For someone used to dispensing parenting wisdom in columns, articles, and social media posts, you’d think I’d have cornered the market on well-meaning mom advice. But you’d be wrong, because when it came time for my youngest to choose his college, the guru of “letting go with love” lost her ever-loving mind.
Picture it: a mid-spring drive to Vermont on a day that should have dawned bright and sunny but instead felt windy and joyless. I should have read the foreshadowing on the wall.
The trip was cursed from start to finish.
We drove six hours to show our kiddo our alma mater, the school that spawned two English teachers like ourselves, so he might bask in the glory of those days of yore.
But there was no basking. No glory. Honestly, there was just snow, quiet walkways, and a girl who spoke at the speed of light while giving the campus tour as if she had somewhere better to be.
Though we met for a chat with one of our favorite professors, who affirmed all that was lovely about going to a place where professors actually remember their students 25 years later, our son remained remarkably quiet.
We thought maybe the trip could be salvaged by a walk downtown through the bustling shops and cafés, past the glimmering lake, and ultimately into the birthplace of Ben & Jerry’s.
We thought wrong.
Instead, we saw one homeless person after another, wearing multiple layers of clothing for protection against the cold, picking through trash cans and clothing bins. I almost invited them all out for ice cream, but with the snow, it didn’t seem like the right time for a cone.
What had become of our old college town?
On top of this, our hotel room smelled like it had hosted a Woodstock revival, and we had to stay outside until the manager arrived so as not to give our son a secondhand contact high on his first night in Vermont.
The next morning, on our way to get breakfast bagels at the campus grill, my son said, “Mom, I just can’t shake the feeling that this is your place. Not mine.”
And there it was: the ugly, beautiful truth. It was his time to create his own story, not be an echo of ours.
So he chose an in-state school, and it’s perfect for him — a thriving, high-tech hub of health, science, and wellness, where he will undoubtedly be the sole English major walking around with a beat-up copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany, but so what?
He’ll be the best darn English major that school has ever seen. It’s glorious, really.
Letting him choose his own path felt like cutting the last, thickest string between us, the umbilical cord we were inevitably meant to sever.
This was the first necessary, brutal step toward him becoming, well, him.
In pop psychology terms, this phase is called “separation-individuation,” and it is generally meant for babies separating from their mothers in early childhood (though most modern psychologists believe this is a lifelong journey that recurs throughout adolescence and later adulthood).
In my leg of this voyage, I’ve been pulled over twice for driving a car with a missing headlight, an outdated license, lapsed registration, no proof of insurance, and an expired inspection sticker.
I’ve also backed into my husband’s work truck (without much damage to either vehicle, but still), and I’ve had a colonoscopy that honestly felt like a two-day vacation compared to the rest of my life.
To cope with all this real-life drama, I’ve been bouncing between Turkish soap operas and AI-generated mafia romance stories on YouTube.
They are terrible and everything that’s good in the world, simultaneously.
Here’s the thing: Despite the youngest kid separating-individuating, car kerfuffles, a colonoscopy, and trashy love stories, the haunting reality remains: soon I’ll be treating my dogs like my actual kids.
But on the upside, I have three incredible, grown humans who are truly, stubbornly, passionately following their own dreams.
And that has to mean something to a pretend parenting expert like me.
It means I didn’t just cut their cords. I taught them how to fly.
