The laundry jug

My mother cried and gave me detergent. I made granola.

Quick announcement: As I mentioned in a recent Holding The Room newsletter, I’ll be holding a free comms office hour next week, July 28, 2-3pm ET. Hop over to register and I’ll add you to the private calendar invite!

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I remember, during the run-up to leaving for college, a distinct feeling of why isn’t my mom reacting to this more? I was, admittedly, a little attention-starved in general, and also in an age-appropriate state of self-absorption. Fifty-two-year-old Christine would point out: she had already sent five other kids off to college. This was no big deal. She had a lot of other important crap on her mind.

The only prep I remember was an emotionless run to TJ Maxx for a comforter. Then, on the sidewalk at Wheaton College, saying goodbye, my mom suddenly burst into tears, dove into the trunk of her car, and handed me a giant jug of laundry detergent.

Oh, okay. She had been thinking of me after all. And her loving instinct was to help me keep my clothes clean.

That memory came back to me last week, in the final stretch before Laurel’s departure for medical school. When people find out she’s on track to become a doctor, the response is usually some version of, “oh my god, you must be so proud — a doctor!“ I am proud of what she’s put into getting to this point. And what’s filling me with pride right now is that I am not even a little bit worried about her finding her feet in a new city. She thrived in college. She navigated two years of apartment living and full on adulting in the Bronx. She’s savvy on public transit, loves to cook, crushes meal prep, makes friends easily, and is resourceful as hell.

I would be proud of her no matter what she’d chosen to do, because she’s figured out how to be a kind, thoughtful, and hard-working person.

That’s a lot.

So circling back to the laundry jug: my version of it was food.

I have a thing about food sitting out too long. This is not a personality quirk, it’s trauma. When I was 42 weeks pregnant with Laurel, I got a horrendous case of food poisoning from pasta salad that sat out too long at a Labor Day BBQ. It led to aggressive barfing, an intense fever, fetal distress, and an emergency C-section. So yes, I went down a rabbit hole researching lunch totes for Laurel’s med school locker. (Apparently people just help themselves out of the community fridge, which, no. Absolutely not.)

Then I went into snack preparation mode. I claimed one grocery tote’s worth of space in the packing plan and spent last week preparing to send Laurel off with her favorites:

• Two big jars of mixed nuts: mixed by hand from big individual Costco bags because hello, savings, and also then you can include the best nuts, no filler nuts

• A double batch of coconut peanut butter energy balls: the recipe I use is no longer online, but this one comes close

• A batch of Shalane Flanagan’s superhero muffins: a dozen muffins, packed for easy freezing plus the dry ingredients for two more batches she can make in her new apartment

• A batch of homemade granola: packed into two quart containers

• A double batch of King Arthur’s no-bake chocolate and date energy bars: instead of bars, I cut them into small bite-sized squares for easy snacking

• A giant bag of chia seeds and the Trader Joe’s chocolate almond bark she loves

It felt both vaguely unhinged and deeply comforting. I know she’ll enjoy every bit of it.

I’ve been a bit of a disaster these days given some other life circumstances, if I’m being honest. But I made the space for this. And I think my mom would recognize exactly what I was doing, because it’s the same thing she was doing, sobbing over a jug of Tide in a parking lot 35 years ago. We can’t walk our kids into a new life. So we hand them what we can carry: something to keep them clean, something to keep them fed, and the unspoken message underneath both: I’ve been thinking about you the whole time.