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Betsy Tanner, right, sits with her family during dinner in their home recently.
MCT photos
Geoff Tanner, 18-year-old triplet, left, works on lighting the grill, while his sister Emily, center, and brother Alex joke with him in the backyard of their home in Wilmette, Ill., last month.
MCT photo
HICAGO — It was in the delivery room on a cold Friday in December 1990, minutes before her triplets were born, that a doctor’s bellowing voice started the clock ticking to a day Betsy Tanner has dreaded ever since.
“You’ve got 18 years,” the doctor said, “till they all go to college.”
Now, in a Wilmette, Ill., living room, the final hours have arrived. Plastic hampers fill up with mattress pads, laundry detergent, computers galore — the essentials of dorm life far, far from home. They’re in triplicate and, as always, in order of birth, one each for Geoff, Alex and Emily.
“I’m a wreck,” Betsy Tanner says. “All I’ve ever wanted to be is a mom and have them at home.”
Like the Tanners, parents everywhere are engaging in the biggest off-to-school rite ever there was: sending a kid (or two, or three, or heaven help you if it’s even more) off to college. Every step along the way — from the nursery school door clear to the high-school parking lot — comes with a lump in the throat.
But college? It seems a class all its own.
Parents are left ticking through a proverbial list, making sure they’ve covered all the essential how-to-get-through-life lessons before that last curbside hug. All the while they’re trying to grasp just how they got here so fast — wasn’t preschool just last week? And wondering what in the world they’ll do with all the surround-sound silence and that bed that no longer looks as if monkeys were wrestling with the sheets.
That’s how it feels to Tanner, 53, who has two other children sandwiched around the triplets. She sent her firstborn, Scott, off to college a couple of years ago. But this is a different story.
“It’s a lot of kids, and it’s all at once,” she says, curling onto a chair on her screened porch. “They’re all afraid I’m going to make a huge scene, and I plan on doing so. I made them all a lovely offer to keep them home and home-college them. … They’re appalled I’d even say that.”
Tanner can’t talk too long about this leaving thing before the tears come.
Beyond the jokes
The reshuffling of life is a rite of late August/early September. It’s the month when back-to-school butterflies — even for parents — flutter like the orange-spotted wings of the migrating monarchs that alight in the Chicago area at each summer’s close. You hear jokes and sighs aplenty, variations on the theme of how life begins in September, once the kids are back in the classrooms. In at least one North Shore town, a caterer is called, invitations go out to a good 100 moms, and the annual They’re-Back-in-School bash marks the first kid-free Friday.
Only that’s not all you hear. If you listen closely, all across Chicago and beyond, you’ll pick up the sound of parents struggling through the turnstile that shoves kids off to kindergarten, propels preteens into junior high and steers teens into high school. Or the biggest gulp of all: college.
Next time you see that kid you’ve just sent off, chances are, he or she will be changed. Even more of a grown-up. Not so much the little kid whose hair you tousled as you shooed that sleepyhead up the stairs to bed.
Or at least that’s the plan.
“All life passages are essentially emotionally violent,” says Patty Rust Kovacs, a college counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School.
Kovacs figures that during the last 20 years, she has sent about 1,200 kids — other people’s kids — off to college. But come the end of August, she’ll send off her own second and final college-bound kid, Kelly, who auditioned her way into Boston University’s College of Fine Arts.
“After this, no one’s ever the same again, and that’s why we cover it up with caps and gowns and bridal dresses,” Kovacs says. “Some people respond with roll-up-your-sleeves and bring-it-on. And some respond with wanting to stay stuck.”
As for Kovacs, she counts herself among the sleeve rollers. “How can I be sad?” she says. “She’s stepping into her potential, stepping into her future.”
Kovacs remembers a college counseling session where the counselors walked down the aisles handing out tissue boxes. She thought that a tad dramatic. But then all around her, parents began “sobbing with sorrow.”
“Some people react with real grief,” she says. “They’ve been so happy and fulfilled with their family system.”
For Tanner, the whole last year has been an acute awareness of what Kovacs calls “the chipping away of the preciousness of time.”
“Every morning I thought about it,” Tanner says: “ ‘This is the last October, the last Halloween, the last … ’ ”Her voice trails off, but you can hear the unspoken list ticking right through to graduation from New Trier High School, then on to summer, and summer jobs, and the family’s summer vacation out West, right up to the day the loading begins in the rented 12-passenger van.
“This summer, every time they walk out the door, I watch them,” she says, “and their whole lives flash back to me.”
A chance to sleep
Not everyone, of course, is a basket case.
Take Monte Lewis of Oak Park, Ill., who in a few weeks will be driving his first, Emma, off to Barnard College in New York City. “It won’t really hit us till we drop her off,” he says, claiming to be unfazed. “We’ll talk about it on the car ride home.”
Or Jamie Hubbard of Glenview, Ill., who says that naturally she’ll be lonesome once she ships her third of three, Clare, off to Butler University in Indianapolis. But what she’s really looking forward to is this: “Closing the door at night, turning the lights out and going to sleep at 10:30. I always go to bed at 10:30, but I’m not asleep till I hear that garage door close.”