Almhult Smaland

Soon after my son left for college, after I picked up all the clothes he left on the floor, cleaned all the gum wrappers out of the car and put away the football and tennis racquet he decided not to take with him after all, I felt myself running out of things to do. I liked the feeling of restoring order, so I even went on to put my things away. After all that was done, I had two things left over.

One was an 8-pack of wooden hangers from IKEA. The other was a shrink-wrapped set of plastic ware – 17 individual containers with green lids to store leftovers, also from IKEA. Neither took up much space because they were all wrapped up but you could see how they might quickly overtake a kitchen or closet.

My son bought both these items for school but took neither with him. I told him he would need smaller, thinner hangers and that his refrigerator would probably only be able to accommodate two storage containers, not 17.

I vacillated about returning the items to IKEA. I think I’m the only person on earth who doesn’t worship that store. I find it big and confusing, and even though it’s only 15 minutes away, it always feels like it’s a whole-day trip. Plus, my son didn’t keep the receipt.

I could have easily given both items to a friend or neighbor but something in me kicked in after my son left; I needed everything back where it belonged.

I put the hangers and the plastic ware in the car along with five other things I had to return (including my son’s rented snowboard). I had a three-hour window – plenty of time to make all my stops – and off I set with my list and my optimism still intact.

I know it sounds like I’m making this trip for the sole purpose of returning the IKEA merchandise, but in fact, the snowboard was late and I was about to be charged for it.  IKEA was sort of a happy afterthought. A side trip that would put everything right in my world. I looked up the address of a Ski Barn near the IKEA store and was almost giddy about how efficient I was about to be.

I spent my first hour trying to find the Ski Barn on a treacherous, unfamiliar highway and finally gave up. I also couldn’t find the “nearby” Bed, Bath and Beyond even though I had their street address, a GPS system and my iPhone. Ultimately, I decided to just head straight to IKEA. 

Although I’d never returned anything at IKEA before, there were two things I should have recognized as harbingers of doom: First, the Returns Area has a seating area that can accommodate 100 people and second, they have one of those machine where you “take a number” just like at the deli counter. My number was 28. They were on number 2.

For 30 minutes, I watched the woman on the next bench (Number 25) crawl out of her skin while I daydreamed about what it would be like when my son came home for Thanksgiving.  Would he be heavier? Hairer? Taller? Smarter? Would he still feel like this was home?

When it was finally my turn, the clerk said she couldn’t give me a refund, only store credit. I begged, but she wouldn’t relent. She handed me a gift card for $9.60 and took my merchandise.

Tired and dejected, I could have just returned home. I had already been there an hour. Instead, I forced myself to enter the Swedish labyrinth that is IKEA and spend the gift card. If I didn’t use it now, I never would.

I snuck in by the check out registers and made my way back, through the shelves of boxed furniture parts, to the “showrooms.” I thought I would get myself a new teacup or some candles, but nothing struck my fancy. I wandered aimlessly for 45 minutes, picking up cheap little knick-knacks with umlaut-laden names and placed them back on their melamine shelves.  At one point, the urge to leave became so intense that I actually considered re-buying the plastic ware set and the hangers, thinking they were not that useless after all.

Eventually I settled on a pair of pot holders in a color I didn’t really like, displaying two Swedish words I didn’t really know, simply because they were $4.99 each and I could use up my whole gift card.

I looked up the words when I got home: Almhult Smaland.  It’s the town where IKEA was founded.

Disappointed that I bought potholders that commemorate a store I have no affection for, I decided to make up a new meaning for Almhult Smaland: A nuanced phrase conveying that almost everything is back where it belongs.

Cold Turkey

I went for a walk with an old friend – a woman who also just sent her oldest (a son) off to college. After 45 seconds of small talk, we began to commiserate about the lack of incoming information.

Her son doesn’t call her much either, but unlike me, instead of complaining about it in a blog, she’s spent the last several weeks in due diligence, interviewing elders to determine where realistic expectations should lie.

I told her I was jealous of the moms of girls – women who got calls or texts daily, sometimes every few hours.

She called that phenomenon The Dump and Run. Kids, mostly girls (but not always) calling moms and unloading for 45 minutes, spewing their unresolved problems or just venting about the day, leaving the hapless mother to a sleepless night pacing the house and putting her face in a bag of OREOs because she knows there's nothing she can do to help.

The mom then calls the kid the next day to check in.

"How are you doing today?" the mom will ask.

 And the kid says, “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You don’t want that,” my friend counseled.

No, I don’t want that. But I want something. Is there nothing in the middle? Because it seems to me that between a kid who calls every few hours and a kid who doesn’t pick up the phone at all there is a lot of real estate.

Another friend reminds me time and again that this is what boys need to do. They need to SEPARATE. As in, become their own person. Why, I’m not sure.  This friend has no children but his advice comes with sobering cautionary tales. He has several friends who did not separate successfully, and those men are still living in their parents’ homes – the men themselves all over 50 years old.

I don't want that either.

So I’m trying to go cold turkey. Not picking up the phone. Waiting until he calls me.

Here I am. White knuckled and waiting.

Nice Shoes!

Early on, when I still cared about whether my son’s dorm fridge remained in the middle of his dorm room, I would ask him about it when we talked.  Again, early on. When we still talked.

I asked him for three straight days if the fridge was still in the middle of the room and each day the answer was yes. So I stopped asking.

I'd try to get some business done with him through text messages but it wasn't nearly as efficient as when I used to have him captive in my kitchen during breakfast.

Is the meal plan working out? 
Did you get the birthday card from Grandma? 
I had a dream about you last night: you had a big rubbery nose.

Sometimes I'd get an LOL; most of the time, nothing.

I didn’t hear from him for a long while and then I got a text: I’m at the mall and I’m about to buy some jeans and shoes. Can I put it on the credit card?

I said of course. After all, he’d texted me. Unprompted.

Later I sent a message asking if I could see a picture of the shoes. This went unanswered, so I sent it again the next day.  Eventually he texted me a picture of his new shoes. They were sitting on top of his desk next to a bottle of Advil. You could see the wastebasket next to the desk – its contents piled almost six inches beyond capacity.

Get those shoes off the table. Someone is going to die!
Jesus, empty the garbage.
Why is the Advil out? Are you not feeling well?

Of course I didn’t write any of those things. But it took all my willpower. All of it.

Nice shoes! I wrote.

No response.

My Continuing Education

Last Thursday, I got a text message from a friend: “1010 WINS just mentioned Nude Week at your son’s college.”

1010 WINS is our local all-news radio station. “What about it?” I wrote back, trying to appear cool.

“I didn’t really hear the details. Just that it was happening," she wrote.

Initially I thought they must be reporting on the tradition, during finals, where naked people pass out donuts to those who are studying. This seemed a ludicrous tradition to me when I first heard about it, but it’s part of the college’s lore and I’d been indoctrinated to the event (at least anecdotally) so I just shrugged off the news piece.

But then the super sleuth in me realized that finals are a long way off.  It’s not even midterms yet. And no matter how slow a news day it is, 1010 WINS would not be reporting about a silly college tradition months in advance.

So I googled “Nude Week” and got a snootful.

Apparently, beginning Monday the university will host a week-long celebration of nudity which includes nude cabaret, nude open mic nights, nude yoga classes and bodypainting. I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone that this news left me shaking my head in wonderment.

Why Nude Week?  Nude donut passing isn’t enough? I’ve finally managed to shut up about the co-ed bathrooms and now this?

“If you were in college, and you saw a bunch of people prancing around naked, wouldn’t you just think it was funny?” asked another friend who had to listen to me go on about Nude Week for close to half an hour. “Really? Does this really offend your sensibilities?”

I mean, I’m not “anti-nude” – especially when it’s other people’s nudity. But I feel like there’s a time and place for it, and it seems like an entire week of it is way too much.

There’s so much attention that needs to be paid during the college search and application process, it’s just now dawning on me that I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what it might actually be like once my kid is at a college.  I didn’t think it would be like a nudist camp.

I thought they would all be sitting around on lawns wearing heavy rimmed glasses and Doc Martens, talking about Kierkegaard.  I really did.

I Want An Abberant Boy

It’s been three weeks since I dropped my son off at college. His school didn’t have a week-long wilderness bonding trip or multiple days of jam-packed orientation the way many schools seemed to for their incoming freshmen. He arrived a few days before class started and there seemed to be two or three things for the freshmen to do – only one of them mandatory. 

“I’d like to talk every day for the first week,” I said to him on Sunday as we were about to leave. “I just want to feel like you’re settled.  Then we can scale back to maybe once a week.”

“Ok,” he said. “But we don’t have to talk again today, right?”

Given that statement, I should have realized that our Daily Phone Calls would come to an end by Wednesday.

Many of my friends have girls in college and I’ve asked them, almost in jest, whether they speak to their daughters every day. “At least,” they say. Meaning, you talk more than once a day??? “Oh sure, sometimes.”

Moms of boys paint a different picture.  “Once a week. If you’re lucky. Sometimes once every two weeks.” That seems to be the general consensus. 

Oh, yes, there’s the aberrant boy who calls every few days just to chitchat.  Not with a problem or out of loneliness, but because he enjoys the connection with his mother.

I know it’s unreasonable, but that’s what I want. An aberrant boy. 

I want my son to pick up the phone delightedly every third day and call me to share the minutia of his life. I want to know if they serve pickles with the turkey sandwiches in the Blue Room, and if they do, I want to know how they’re sliced.

I want to know which Eminem song he’s playing over and over again while he does math problems and I want to know which shampoo he prefers – the Mango or the Coconut.

Of course, what I really want are the psychological profiles of his roommate and his new-found friends. That may happen once cows start to fly.

To be fair, he did give me a run-down the other day of which cafeteria he eats which meals at, but I wasn’t really paying very close attention. In fact, I wasn’t listening at all, but instead trying to calculate how many more questions and answers I could jam into our conversation before he said, “Ok, I have work to do, I have to go now.”

Intellectually, I know that the number of times a boy calls (or, in my case, doesn’t call) doesn’t necessarily have to do with how close they feel to their mothers, but instead perhaps how determined they are to develop independence. Still, I can’t resist the urge to shoot him a text every once in a while.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“You’re alive, right?”

“Do you still love me?”

How I Waste Time

When my son was looking at schools, most tours included a peek into the dorms. Not his school though. You’d have to wonder why a school would not show prospective dorms – at least I did. I decided that it must be because they were too heinous to view.

At someone’s suggestion, I googled “dorm interiors” for his school and found some pictures that somewhat supported my theory. Not heinous exactly, but the rooms looked only a small step up from prison life – with cinder block walls and thin, tired mattresses. 

“He’s not going to care what his dorm room looks like,” my husband predicted. “If it’s out of this house, he’ll be ecstatic.”

That was pretty much true. We arrived at his dorm building, found his Spartan, concrete hovel and he instantly treated it as if it were the Taj Mahal.

On my third trip out to the car to haul in yet more stuff, I noticed a sign on the bathroom door across the hall. It was the universal icon for Man. And right beside it, the universal icon for Woman. 

Co-ed restrooms? Men and Women showering and pooping in the same room together? There must be some mistake! How could any good come of that?

I got the bathroom key from my son and scurried inside.  Three stalls, three showers, two sinks, one urinal. 

Egad.

Suddenly it became very clear to me why there are no dorm tours. This was the university's dark, little secret.

My youngest child went to a highly progressive preschool that had no toys at all in the classroom, only wooden blocks.  At first blush, I considered this outlandish, but the teacher – who hailed from the renowned Little Red School House – explained in painful detail the philosophy behind this decision.  Every teacher in this preschool had a Master’s degree in Education that included a practicum in Wooden Blocks, and they could tell you why, educationally and developmentally, a block-only classroom was a superior educational model.

I really want to call my son’s university and have someone – anyone – provide me with a similar rationale for co-ed bathrooms. But not only do I lack the nerve, I highly suspect there isn't one.

Besides writing about this and complaining to anyone who will listen, I spend an unseemly amount of my day googling phrases like “why do dorms have co-ed bathrooms?” And then I lose myself, sometimes for hours, reading the commentary from students.

All of which say precisely the same thing: “It’s weird for a week, and then it’s no big deal.”

My New Mantra

“This is not my problem.”

That’s been my new mantra for the 13 days since I dropped my oldest son at college. I left him with his mini-fridge in the middle of his dorm room, no apparent wall space to accommodate it. His smoke detector was chirping every 7 minutes, probably needing a battery. And the all-important full-length mirror had yet to be hung.

A lot has changed since our parents dropped us at school. Opening the trunk of the car...handing us a duffel of clothes and a milk crate of record albums. I don’t think I’ve shopped this much in preparation for anything other than having a baby. Which is ironic in a way, no?

As they checked in, each student received a packet that included a website address where you could fill out a room report, logging in anything in disrepair so you wouldn't be charged for it at year's end. My son’s closet door wouldn’t slide closed and there was also a hole in it. His top desk drawer was nearly impossible to pry open. The kids have 72 hours to fill out a report. I was reasonably certain this wasn’t ever going to happen.

“That linoleum floor will get cold by October, should we get you a rug?” I asked.

He said he and his roommate would take care of it, but I don’t have high hopes for that either.

These are not my problems. These are not my problems. These are not my problems.

“Ok, well, I guess you’ll figure it all out,” I said, those particular words strangers on my lips.

And I left, feeling not sad or lost like I thought I would, but rather unexpectedly unburdened, a feeling that I find foreign and needing to be remedied, like a splintered piece of fingernail that I can’t keep the rest of my fingers off of.