FRESHMAN FINALE

Here I am on the train, my last day as a Freshman Mom. I am headed to Boston to pack up Taylor’s room, most likely break all my Nail Spa nails in the process and hopefully reclaim a quarter of my T-shirts and favorite DVD’s. Valentino, the black t-shirt and the documentary better be there.

I feel like anything I say at this point will be a cliché. It’s over. It went fast.  It went well. It was life’s natural progression progressing naturally and for a change I stopped kicking and screaming and learned to go with the flow.  It was all fine.

I like our life now as much as I did before, or I’m used to it.  But it’s all just swell.

I can’t quite believe it’s over, her first year in college, wasn’t she just in Pre-K?  Of course I can’t quite believe I turn fifty-two this week, wasn’t I just in Pre-K?

We had some memorable times here on Freshman Mom.

I am not going to bore us all with what they were, they will all be up on the blog and archival from today’s post on. If you get a yen to remember what it was like in those first few weeks they were gone, you can log on and all the posts and comments will be available for a sentimental journey. And if you have any friends who are going through it you can pass the link on to them and they can maybe get over  some of their  speed bumps by reading about how we did it.

In fact for the next several days the blogs will be mostly in the form of a diary. There is too much going on for me to come up with new material – I think!

The plan is this I will arrive in Boston at noon, head for the hotel, which is next to an outpost of my gym EXHALE!!!! Down ups for days despite the work out I will get packing.

Now I am an expert packer. It’s my OCD in overdrive. I can and do move into a house in record time. I refuse to live with boxes for even a night.

This has meant I have unpacked without a break for twenty-four hour stretches, but it can be done.

Taylor only has a room, but I’m expecting a lot of crap to get through, much of it I used to call my own. But we need to have it all boxed up and ready to store and ship by noon tomorrow. It will be done.

It will be all I do today, until I break at seven to have dinner with my friend Ti-Grace Atkinson. If you don’t know who she is Google her.  Yes, she is my friend and while we are an unlikely pair, we have become quite close.  She is a super intellectual and one of the founders of the Feminist movement. And me, well the jury is out, though neither of those apply.

But Ti-Grace through her long, well thought out, probing and enlightening emails is teaching me how to think about life in different ways, and me, I’m teaching her how to shop. No joke.  Friendships have been formed on much less.

Tomorrow we are going to the mall, after the last box disappears.

Then Tay and her leftover junk move into my hotel room, until Friday when Glenn and Lucy arrive.

Sarah Funke who has worked for Glenn – well, since before I met him is getting married to Patrick Butler at Harvard and there are festivities all weekend in Cambridge.

I then fly back with the two girls. Glenn stays one day in Boston for business but we get home on Mother’s Day, and Lynne and Aaron Horowitz the in-laws with the mostest are coming to town for Mother’s Day, grandparent’s day at Lucy’s school and Taylor’s and my birthday.

They didn’t know this, as I was keeping quiet, there was a good chance Tay and I were flying out to LA on Monday for two days. I’m not talking about why as these things fall apart too easily and this has been rescheduled and I will tell you about it when we are in the studio and they say “Two minutes to air.”

But I got the email yesterday that we didn’t have to go and was so grateful. I didn’t want to leave Lynne and Aaron and I didn’t want to land and turn around and fly out ten hours later and I didn’t want to miss Lucy’s school production of Macbeth and I didn’t want to spend my birthday on an airplane. And I really wanted to film this TV show on Tuesday for an Indian station, as I will always do any press that involves India.

Now when you see this don’t laugh as I have the terrible habit of involuntary vocal mimicry. Which means when I speak to people with certain accents I automatically start speaking with their inflections.

Whenever I hang up the phone from talking with an Indian friend, the kids will say “They were Indian you did your Indian voice.”  It happens with Brits too and when in France I start doing that thing French women do with their mouths when they talk, it’s part pout and part kiss. It’s weird.

So that is the next five days.

Lots of photos.

Lots of captions.

Some dialogue.

Hopefully three workouts.

And total elation that Sarah is getting married and we are there to watch it.

And still utter disbelief that this year has gone by so fast.

I now understand why I did not go to college, there is no way I could have lived like this. We got it done with fifteen minutes to spare.

She’s now a Sophmore and I’m just a tired mom!