Ready to Launch

 We spent the past week getting ready for our oldest to go to college on Thursday. I will say up front, I was not all right. Each day my anxiety built, to the point where Thursday morning, every time I had a moment alone I felt my heart pounding and my breathing get ragged.

"This is just anxiety," I would tell myself. "You are not having a heart attack. Every kind of change requires growth and stretching. You are stretching." 

But once we got on the road -- Mom, Dad, and Eldest -- I felt more at ease. It's not as if she's nervous about going. She's been half-gone for a month, chatting with her classmates online, developing a set, starting in-jokes, being on calls until all hours, creating a new social life. 

The night before she left, I heard her in my room (where she could get some peace from siblings) belting out a tune while on a call. 

"Were you singing with the Japesters?" I asked, surprised. (The Japesters are her freshman chums. The rest of us track them through her, as one follows a soap opera or a neighborhood group.)

"No," she said. "This was a call with the Discord fan group for that piano covers guy I watch on YouTube."

"You're in another Discord group?" I said. "You guys call each other? How can you sing over an internet call without the sound cutting out?" 

She shrugged it all off. "It all works out if you sing really loud."

This is probably sound life advice.

By the time we dropped her at college, all worry was gone. She ran into someone from her freshman chat group in the hall. We even met a few of the Japesters, who actually have real names instead of handles. The kids are all right. They are all ready to launch.

Life won't slow down here. Darwin and I talked all through the three-hour drive home. We're planning a launch of our own: we're self-publishing one of my NaNo Hallmark/Shakepeare mashups in time for Christmas sales, and it's all a great game of budgeting, marketing, and design choices. (More on this soon, for devoted readers.) And at home, nothing is static. The 6yo just lost his four front teeth. The almost-17yo is applying for jobs. The almost-12yo broke his arm two weeks ago, and has been brandishing his cast in a perpetual Dab to annoy his sisters. The 10yo is making plans to raise money to go to camp next summer. The 14yo is getting ready to paint her bedroom yellow, the hardest of all colors. The baby, who is actually a big 3yo, is chatting all the time. We miss the Eldest, but we can't sit around thinking about it or people will eat the food off our plates and take over our pillows. We hope we don't see her again for a good three months.