On Wednesday, it will be two weeks since we said goodbye to Jennifer Lynn at Pepperdine where she is beginning her freshman year. Since then, my Inbox has been filled with emails from the Federal Student Loan Department, the company assigned as the loan servicer, and the Financial Aid office at the school.

I feel very well informed about the indentured servitude that we have entered into in order for her to attend college. But when it comes to hearing from Jennifer with the news that I am really interested in knowing such as “Are you making friends? How do you like your professors? How’s the food at the cafeteria?” And just because she doesn’t live at home any more, doesn’t mean I’ve given up my maternal right to nag…”Have you written a thank you note to your aunt yet?” – the communication from Jennifer has been very sparse.

I’ve gotten three texts from her in 12 days and one of the messages was at 2:13am. She let me know she has been super busy but she “feels good about coming here.” Hmmm, what is going on at 2am that is making her feel so good? I would be more worried if I didn’t know the school was serious about enforcing curfew times for boys and girls dorms.

Even though I miss hearing Jennifer monologue about the details of her transition to college life, not hearing from her is actually good news because we had a very different experience with her older sister’s adjustment to going away to college. There were many teary phone calls from Valerie telling us how she missed home and that she felt like she didn’t fit in.

Looking back at that time in our lives, we have commented that we were glad we didn’t have Skype set up. It’s tough enough listening to your daughter weep, but watching the tears roll down her cheeks? It might have been enough to put us over the edge. I know more than once we were darn close to jumping into the car and barreling down I-5 on a mission to rescue her from school in Southern California.

If the alternative to having lots of communication with a very unhappy freshman is not hearing from her at all because she is so busy mixing and mingling and taking every opportunity to get plugged into the campus environment, I’ll take the latter.

So until she carves out a few minutes to call or text or email or Skype, I’ll just keep checking her Instagram account. If anything really noteworthy happens, I’m sure I can find out about it there.

(Visited 5 times, 1 visits today)