These days, social media is full of parents bemoaning the bittersweet moment of driving away from colleges and universities that just six months ago they were bragging about joyously. This time, though, they leave without their child.

I remember that acute pain. Walking by a bedroom that no longer vibrates with electric guitar or bass riffs rattling the door knob.

“Oh, how I’ll miss this,” I thought more than once. I still do.

No one asking for a clean shirt. No one scrounging around for a Pop-Tart at bedtime.

This poem Mom wrote in 1975 – “The Leaving Child” – keeps popping up as I wander through her work. Studying it, I don’t know if it was born from her anxiety that Dave was heading to college the next month (and me a year later) or from memories of her own leaving for college back in 1948.

Who knows? “The Leaving Child” could have been sparked by a news article she read or the angst of a close friend.

Mom loved when her poetry brought about deep thoughts. As much as I’d love to find a little explanation scribbled in the corner of the page, I know better. Mom is saying “look it up” as she did with spelling words when we were kids. Only this time she’s not referencing a dictionary, but instead our brain, soul, and heart,

The Leaving Child

her roses strangled in the vases
her pillow suffocated in the sofa
the lamps stepped back into the walls
the Steinway lay down on its legs like
an old stallion and seeped into the carpet
the curtains fell like snowfall
and the books were cremated
music became a potpourri of sound
and smell and memory
the portraits shriveled like old skin.

outside by the locked door
close as ivy pressed the leaving child
hearing the madness, hearing her death inside.

~ Joan Vayo July 27, 1975

Best wishes to all those starting up a new year of school. And to all of us who know our schooling will never end, only those who teach us will change.

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“The Leaving Child” © July 27, 1975 Joan Vayo. All rights reserved.

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