First, rent a van. Get a big one, as big as you can afford and/or the school will allow you to bring. Get the maximum allowable van. It will beep when you pop it in reverse. Pop it in reverse often over the three days you have the van in your possession. Each time, look around in a panic trying to ascertain where that beeping is coming from, who is about to back up nearby. Amaze yourself with your inability to remember yourself.
Walk through the dining room grumbling about all the boxes, all the paraphernalia, all of the extraneous supply. The helicopter keeps dropping off canisters to boost morale amidst the quagmire. Express skepticism on the practicality of all this stuff, much less the loading and unloading, and the fitting into the linoleumed dorm room. Get gently reminded at first that your opinion is not relevant in this situation, that you are on a need-to-know basis in terms of logistics and purchasing. Later you will be less gently reminded. Try to accept your figurehead status.
Manifest indifference to the ever-growing hubbub, the percolating of anxiety, the friction of expectation. Walk around saying stuff like “people go to college every day” and “people have been leaving for school for a hundred years.” Wonder why no one in the family wants to hang out with you except the dog. (You’ve finally learned that the only thing the dog understands is tone of voice, so if you keep that in check the dog will hang indefinitely.)
The day before you leave, take off work to pack the van, and then grump around the house because the stuff that goes into the van is not yet ready to be packed. Everyone is supposed to help you pack the van, but everyone is scattered, running about, going to appointments. Feel resentful as you stare into the vacant rear of the van. Finally, after dinner go up to kid’s room and see that everything is lined up neatly for retrieval, see how the room looks irrevocably changed, looks like someone is moving out. Grab the bags silently. Make several trips unable to say anything to anyone, to think anything. Pack the van slowly in the dark after everyone has gone to bed while listening to Death Cab for Cutie on your airpods and feeling like this is it though not able to articulate to yourself what “it” is.
Drive the van by yourself because everyone else is in smaller, more reasonable automobiles. Listen to your jazz music loudly until it annoys you into silence. Get a Chipotle burrito and eat it while driving to save time and regret it for the rest of the trip. You’re certainly going to have to pay some kind of cleaning fee now. Resolve, not for the first time, to stop eating burritos.
See the Buc-ee’s. Pass by the Buc-ee’s because you are trying to make good time.
Pull into town. Remember your own innate fondness for college towns. Subsume yourself with nostalgia for your own youth. Itemize the body parts you’d chop off, the small crimes you would commit, to experience that college time again, that pre-time, those Before Times, before you became what you are now, two parts [redacted], one part [redacted], three parts [redacted]. Before you became a parody of the dad figure in a sitcom rerun. Before you became the less funny version of that.
Find the dorm and try for once not to panic about parking.
Resolve for once in your life not to complain. Resolve to be a source of warmth and light for at least this one day. Resolve not to raise your doubting questions, your parental skepticism, your dad sarcasm, your husband cynicism. Resolve briefly to be the person all those people out there wish you to be. Resolve not to gripe even when after unloading the vanload of crap you go to the trendy mexican place where every other recently moved in freshman is eating, so that you stand in line for an hour, in your sweat-dried moving-in clothes, gut gnawing, a situation about which you would have normally pulled a full Yosemite Sam.
Emphatically hold the door for other dads and moms. Like start holding the door open when you see them pulling into the parking lot. Practice a kind of yuppie solidarity. Resist the urge to compare and contrast the cartloads of crap that the other parents are pushing into the dorm.
When it starts to rain while you’re unloading, say incongruent statements to fellow dads, like “Feels like I’m being peed on by frat boys!” and “This is like something out of a Cheever story!” and “Did you ever grow up with one of those little train sprinklers?”
Almost pick a fight with the bearded RA who won’t get out of the way while you’re pushing a cartoload down the hall. He just stands there explaining something unimportant, like the mail room. Almost say, “Hey chief, how about you move your fat sophomore ass out of the line of traffic?” because you are sweaty, and he is annoying, and you are inexplicably gunning for a fight, searching for someone to hate, someone to unload all your angst upon.
Say aloud, “This dorm is co-ed? Since when?”
Practice your emotional detachment skills when nothing quite fits the way it was intended. Do this by drifting into a semi-nap, while leaning on a desk in the still-vacant room next door.
Realize that every sentence you’ve said to your kid about college has really been a mistranslation of “I want to go back to college so bad I could spit.” Belatedly realize this was perhaps not the best foundation for life advice.
Find the distant lot where you’re supposed to park the van after unloading. See that it’s across the street from a field of corn, incongruously. Say aloud to the van, “Well, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Do a 37-point turn, with beeping, trying to fit the van in between a Yukon and an Audi. Try to forget that you clipped the side mirror of a Ford F-150 earlier with the van’s own Dumbo-eared side mirrors. Turn the van off and then have yourself a little come-apart. Practice your breathing and resolve to get in better shape once you get home, realizing that you’ve got a lot more hills to climb, parentally speaking, and that you’ve kind of let yourself go here lately. Try to make it back to the dorm on foot without calling to ask how to get back to the dorm.
Realize that taking kid to college is not unlike taking them to swimming lessons. Realize that everything you’ve done as a parent has been like swimming lessons: too loud, a real pain in the ass in terms of logistics, too expensive, run with startlingly less expertise than you’d imagined, annoying somehow both to parent and child, but provided to save the child’s life in case they happen to find themselves located in water, either accidentally or intentionally.
Swing by the dorm one last time to hug your kid and say goodbye. Rehearse in your head all of the pithy wisdom you’ve accumulated in your life so far. Outside the dorm, lose all of those sentences and be left with statements like, “gosh, it’s hot” and “so did you get registered for all your classes?” and “think that de-humidifier will be sufficient?” Coagulate all your father-strength, like a hero at the end of a Marvel movie, in order not to have a come-apart on the front steps of the dorm, while other families are unloading their vans of supplies, and your kid is itching to get back upstairs and get this life phase started. Realize that nothing you say in this moment will supplant the years of actual lived parenthood that the kid has experienced, and realize that you can’t remember the quality of that parenthood experience and hope that it wasn’t too damaging all told. Reflect that it’s probably for the best you don’t have perfect recall of every moment and interaction. Resolve, not for the first time, to be a better version of yourself. Resolve, not for the first time, to get by the gym every once in a while. Try not to crush kid with power of your hugging.
Get lost driving out of campus the back way. Marvel at the resources and divisions of the modern R1 state university. “Swine lab?” Stop at the Buc-ee’s. Fill your van tank at one of the endless gas pumps. Relieve yourself at one of the endless urinals. Walk around and marvel at all the stuff you could buy to make yourself feel better. Marvel at the arrangement of twisted freaks that occupy a Buc-ee’s at any one moment in time, like Wal-Mart and Disney had a lost weekend together. Take a picture of the Beaver Nuggets display to send to your kid later. Then, on second thought, buy a pack of Beaver Nuggets as a potential snack option for the drive back, because who are you kidding? You are not above Beaver Nuggets.