When Your Baby Leaves Home

When your baby leaves home you are either overjoyed or sad. I was overjoyed, until I could not reach her on her phone for days, and then a week, and then ten days. Her roommate said her stuff was there, but “I never see her.” I asked if she could tell whether or not she had been there recently, and she told me that she could not. These were pre-texting days. My helpless eighteen-year-old daughter was four hours away from home, at a college she had chosen. I was worried, so I called everybody including the phone company down there. I asked everyone to put a note on her dorm door, telling her to call her mother. We got a call that night from an angry daughter who said this to her dad, “What does Mom want?” She was embarrassed and irritated that six people had yelled at her to call her mother, and there were two notes stuck to her door that said ‘call your mother’ - one from the phone company. Six people who cared. Six strangers I do not know. Six angels. I wondered which four did not step up.