When you drop your child off at college, you cannot just go back to your hotel room and cry.
Just... I tried that once, okay? It's not a great strategy. Once I got started, I did not stop crying for a week.
Instead, go somewhere. Anywhere. Ideally, someplace where you can DO something and not just sit, because if you just sit you might start crying, and if you start crying right when you drop them off you won't stop again for at least a week.
So the three of us spent most of the day with the older kid, moving her into her temporary new digs on the campus of the organization where she's going to help crew a tall ship and perform oceanography research later this fall--
We saw SO many seals on this beautiful evening, and they were all adorable and looked like dogs and surely there were sharks stalking them just out of sight so we basically saw a bunch of sharks, too.
Also, so many pretty rocks and shells that we did not keep because we were on national park property--
The kid even did me the huge favor of asking for my camera, and then getting some sneaky photos of me as payback for 18 years of sneaky photos of her living her life in the wild:
I look like I'm taking a contemplative evening walk, but I have left everyone behind and am marching along the beach focusing all my mental powers on searching for seals.
Found one!
It was perfect, because nothing less than genuine physical emergencies can generally tear me away from the beach, and by the time we got back to the hotel I, at least, was too tired out to do more than take a hot shower, put on questionably clean sweats, scarf my leftover burrito from lunch, and fall asleep without thoughts of despair about what my life is supposed to look like now that its entire purpose is all grown up and about to leave me alone with just my thoughts for miserable company.
Ahem.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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