When the Logistics Turn Into Leaving

Last night, the "original four" (our group text name) sat down at the table with the calendar and tried to find packing list suggestions. If you're the parent of an older teen, you'll appreciate how this came about: my husband and I were in bed, one of the boys asked a question about a mattress topper, I said we needed to meet soon about it, and he said how about now. And so it goes. Family meeting at 10 pm.

We had two lists for two colleges, and a calendar that has been nearly impossible to pin down. If you have seniors, excuse me, graduates, you know exactly what I mean. They are working, and they are squeezing in every last night with friends. For weeks we kept saying we’d sit down and go over the schedule, and for weeks the schedule belonged to everyone but us.

So we finally backed into it. We laid out the work shifts and the social plans and counted what was actually left, and the answer was two and a half weeks of the four of us under one roof, with only a handful of nights where we’d all actually be home for dinner. So we did what you do. We put a family dinner on the calendar, a going-away dinner, official enough that food requests were submitted, and the menu looks suspiciously like a birthday dinner.

Honestly, as of late, I have been remarkably unemotional through all of this. I haven’t even been too, too knee-deep in logistics. Sure, I know there are parking spots and move-in times and bedding and forms and now a payment schedule. When it comes to boys, at least, the shopping is fairly simple (God bless the girl moms, it feels very lopsided, as so much does at this age), and even at arm’s length, I have been treating this whole season like a project to manage. Logistics are a wonderful place to hide.

And then somewhere between the packing list and the dinner menu, it hit me.

Wham. These guys are leaving.

Well, duh.

But also, OOF.

And I think we all were a little caught off guard by my eyes filling up with water out of nowhere.

The part that got me even more deeply is that they are leaving each other.

They are identical twins. They have shared a room, a school, a team, a birthday, a face. They have never spent more than a week or two apart, and that includes the months before they were born. In a few weeks they’ll be in two different states, and for the first time in their entire lives, when something funny or terrible or ordinary happens, the other one won’t be down the hall. I can prepare myself to miss them. I don’t quite know how to prepare them to miss each other. I suspect this is scarier for them than is being verbalized, and I suspect it will also be the making of them, and we all know it.

But I know, even mid-wham, that they will come back. Thanksgiving will come, and the room will be loud again. And then, and this is the strange fine print of parenting, I will be hoping they leave again. That’s the deal, and that is good. The whole point of this is that things are never going to be the same, and that in many ways they are going to be better. I genuinely love parenting almost-adults. The conversations are better, and honestly, so are the people.

But they are never going to be little boys at my table again, and both of those things get to be true at once.

I started this newsletter in March 2025 to document the admissions journey in real time, and now the journey I was documenting is soon pulling out of the driveway and boarding a plane.

I plan to return to what I originally started this Substack for: the practical, technical stuff you’ve been asking me for, the things I wish someone had written down for me. But I couldn’t get to any of that until I got through this. The Substack is graduating into a new phase too, it seems. We’re both figuring out what the next chapter looks like.

For now, there’s a dinner on the calendar and some intentional presence to squeeze in.