BY LORI SENDER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
It's been more than two weeks since my son left for sleep-away camp and I wish I could say I've actually gotten used to it, that I'm no longer missing him so viscerally, so down to the bone. That the walloping kick in the gut has gone. Whereas in the first few days it felt like someone had cut off my limbs, leaving me in this vestigial phantom-mom state, all hugless and nonembracing, now mothering had become mostly illusion and smoke screen. Hardly based on reality, on the mundane, on such quotidian tasks as serving up his morning mango juice with two ice cubes (see mom vacuously staring out window, taking deep exhaustive breaths, retracing her steps in the house). Oh for god's sakes, I might as well be withdrawing from a Schedule ll drug.
This morning I heard on WNYC that college students and their parents communicate back and forth (via phone, texting, e-mail, etc.), on average, 13 times a week. That today's children have been raised with such painstaking connectivity to us that even though we set them loose, they just keep coming back. It seems we've set ourselves up for a preternaturally postponed phase of empty nesting. Soon our sons will go Italian on us, off to college only to live at home into their thirties.
