When you see your child in pain, it’s terrible.  As a Mom you so want to take their pain for them.  A friend of mine just saw her son have very serious surgery and it broke my heart reading her comments about having to watch him suffer.  In the end, he’ll be much healthier.  Still… it hurts a Momma to see her child suffer.

My own is at college sick.  I’ve paced all week worrying about her.  She’s already bad about calling home or returning text messages, so when she says she’s sick – maybe with strep throat – and won’t call me, I worry.

This is one of those times that I am hopeful to have raised my child completely enough so she knows when to seek medical help.  Hello antibiotics.  Please do your thing with my baby.

My friend Brittney recently moved to New York.  A conversation,

She asked how long I’d been in New York, and I told her, and then she asked how I did it, living in this big city all by myself.

I said I didn’t mind it at all, and that I found it very easy to meet people in New York.

“Family is everything. It is everything. It is all we have.”

She said it with such gravity, such certainty, that it sounded perfectly true.

I suggested that perhaps without family, friends could serve as companions. She shook her head no and took a drag off a nearly-gone cigarette.

I am looking forward to the day when my Annie decided it’s okay to be friends with her Momma again. These college years must have been torture for my mom, too. Family is everything.  And I’m missing my baby girl today.

This piece published in The Chronicle of Higher Education was written under a pseudonym.  He (or she) writes about the “ghostwriting” work they do for students in need of papers.  This writer is the person students find online to write papers on their behalf.

It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had written a short research proposal for her a few weeks before, suggesting a project that connected a surge of unethical business practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.

I don’t make the money this ghostwriter makes and – fortunately – mine work is not for a cheating student.  I write for a company where no byline is given.  Instead the information is simply posted as a “news article” on Twitter with no author listed.  Just the link through.

Have you ever cheated?  I may be of the minority when I say that I have not.  I like being able to look in the mirror each morning unburdened by that kind of guilt.

H/T Brittney.

I have really struggled this weekend.  One of my dearest friends happens to have a daughter who is the same age as my own Annie and the young adults are also dear friends.  But mother and daughter are really struggling at this time. The fight is over grades – the daughter won’t tell her Mom the grades she received this semester in college (and they were very bad) because she’s over 18 and doesn’t have to tell her.  Mom is understandably angry as I certainly would be too!

I’m only hearing one side of the story – and that’s the side of the daughter because she’s ended up at my house a few times as their words blow up hugely and she walks out the door and heads to our place because it’s walking distance.

My advice to her yesterday, “Tell your Mom. It’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be fun.  But do it and get it over with.”  The young student teared up and said I just didn’t understand how angry her Mom would be.  I told her she was just making the anger worse by refusing to tell.

We spent the day painting over at another friend’s flood-damaged house and finally – between the four of us painting – we came to the conclusion that perhaps if spoken words weren’t going to work, she needed to write them down for her Mom.  When she finished writing the five page letter, she let me read it.  It was an angry letter, so I sat with her again and explained, “It’s okay to feel this way, but you also need to acknowledge that you love your Mom.  Tell her why.  Don’t speak only angry words because as a Mom, it would make me even more upset.  Make sure she knows that you love her because in five years or 10 years or 20 years, you don’t want this one angry letter to be what your Mom keeps as a memory of your young adult years.”

She rewrote it.

Referee really is not one of my many hats but I’m beginning to think I should look into finding a job as “life counselor.”

College girl Annie is really struggling right now.  She’s finishing up her freshman year of college – only three weeks of classes remain – and she’s sick of school.  I so recognize the symptoms, but not sure I really have an answer for her other than the dippy, “Just hang in there, sweetheart!” and “Not much longer! You can make it!”

Sigh.

She’s also mad because the plug for her laptop is fried so she has to go to the computer lab to write her papers.  I’ve ordered a new plug charger for her today.

She’s also mad because of the Freshmen 15.  Yep.

She’s mad because her Dad won’t let her drive the car to campus (we fear she’ll be the school taxi and with gas so expensive… well no.).

I am really looking forward to her return home for summer break.  I think she just needs some Momma TLC.

This was a great weekend in my house … we celebrated Annie’s 19th birthday on Friday with a surprise party.  I wrote a nice post at my personal blog about the years of infertility we experienced before we had her.  It was all good, happy, memorable times.

Then this morning I received a random text from a “friend” of my daughter’s former boyfriend.  She had broken up with him before going to college because she didnt’ want to marry the first and only guy she ever dated.  Annie wanted to experience college without being committed to spending a lifetime with someone she wasn’t sure she really loved anyway.

The text said, “Hello Mrs. T. I found your number through the internet. Sorry to bother you but XX may no longer be with us. He disappeared last night. I am a friend

Second text, “of his and he was upset because he was told by many people that she had a boyfriend but she wouldn’t tell him then she started ignoring him and he disappeared

Third text, “Well I was mainly just letting you know what may have happened.”

This was all from a friend named “Sara” who – when I asked my daughter – is the same person who sends her hundreds of text messages including garbled numbers and nonsense.  It’s important to note that he lives several hours away and hasn’t done anything more than threaten his own well-being.  It makes me sad for both him and my daughter.  Clearly he’s devastated, but equally obvious is she is ready to start a new chapter.

I suggested it’s time for my daughter to change phone numbers.  If the behavior continues, we may be getting a restraining order.  Any other ideas are welcome.

Annie came home for a few hours on Saturday with a friend.  She was traumatized at the big room changeover, but she’ll learn to live with it during semester break and over the summer.  She left me a note on the white board on our fridge, though.

Annie home from college eating ur food.

She’s happy, so I’m happy.

We successfully moved Annie to college. She was so cute, so scared, so excited!  She had a busy weekend meeting her Resident Advisor (RA) and some of the other people on her floor.  She learned that one girl in the cast of one of her high school plays now lives two doors down.  She also learned that maybe having a roommate won’t be as horrible as she thought.

Annie said she spent part of Sunday just walking alone around the campus figuring out where her classroom buildings were and the distance between them.  Then she met with the other “Fellows” of the scholarship award and they hung out awhile.  This morning she texted and said she was walking to her first college class.  Then Annie later called and said it might be fun… but hard!  She was having pizza, soup, and a cookie for lunch.

These are the days.