Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Reckoning with the conflicting imperatives of the college drop-off experience

One of my favorite writing spots overlooks the last bend of a brackish tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. Just before it melts into fingers of salt marsh headwaters upstream, the creek is wide but the water is skinny – a perfect shallow training pool for juvenile ospreys and a demonstration ground for human parenting.

Ospreys mate for life and return annually from low latitudes, on almost the exact same day of March, to their mid-Atlantic breeding estuary. They stake out a down-river piling, build an elaborate nest, and by Memorial Day it is a home, to hungry chicks and constantly-working parents; one guarding, one fishing.

In mid-summer osprey parents take the juveniles up the creek to its last bend, to learn to fly and fish – much as I took my teenager to learn to drive my pickup truck on country roads far from our suburban home. The flying, like the driving, is wobbly and erratic at first.

Parent ospreys demonstrate a dramatic fishing technique – a slow swoop over a spotted fish that turns into a violent dive into the shallow water, followed by furious wing flapping to get airborne again. The maneuver goes from elegant to desperate in a half-second, even when executed flawlessly.

The youngsters’ first attempts at fishing are comical. Before they have mastered the swoop-y slowdown, they take a crack at the dive, only to freak out and pull up short of the water. This apprehension goes on for weeks, until eventually they’re getting their legs wet before abandoning the dive. Just when you think they might never learn, something clicks, and they get comfortable enough to crash talons-first into the water until they are submerged. These initial dives never produce fish, but they do yield confidence, and in the nick of time. Around Labor Day, juveniles get their first fishes – much like high school seniors flash brilliance in their passions.

That point in September is when the human parenting analogy overlays again. Just as junior ospreys figure out how to feed themselves, mom and dad skedaddle - not just down the creek, but down the coast to South America, trusting their offspring to round out their fishing mastery alone until instinct tells them where and how to fly south.

For a decade I have watched this annual osprey soap opera play out. I wave at the nesting mommas who give me a wary eye in the spring. I smile at the helter-skelter hatchling flights and scan the poplar trees on the creek bank for the overseeing parent. I chuckle at the terror of the abandoned first dives. And I worry when autumn’s chill arrives and the only ospreys remaining on the creek are the slow-learners, still fattening up before departure.

The predictable disappearance of the osprey parents seemed cavalier, even cruel, to me, until this week, when I drove away from a college campus leaving my own little chick to discern where her instincts tell her to fly.

If the daddy ospreys had the neural connections to reason, I now suspect they would have a lot of internal questions bouncing around their bird brains as they hang a right turn out of the Chesapeake and point their beaks southward.

Did I do enough? Did I fully convey the skills needed to survive in a world where treachery from bald eagles and great horned owls abounds? Did I let that chick fail enough to maintain the confidence to persevere through the adversity we know will come? Was I a good steward of the instructional window that did not seem scarce at the time?

I am betting the daddy ospreys are more conflicted than cruel, torn by dueling parental impulses. Proud but self-doubting. Excited and anxious, both at the same time.

If your social media feed is like mine, it is now full of photos of smiling 18-year-olds standing beside tidy dorm room beds that will probably never be made up again. Posts overflow with photos of parents whose smiles were forced into place for only as long as the shutter speed required. Mine was – a pure muscle contortion that took every ounce of determination I could momentarily muster, to suppress the flood of dread about my own migration with the chick left behind.

The only emotional comparison is grief. Physically, I felt that same cellular-level panic of a certain end - but not the end of childhood, as the metaphor might imply. It is instead the end of an exclusive opportunity, to impart and instruct full time, even when it was not obvious.

My chick and I will stay close. We will talk often. She will still rely on me, and for important survival stuff, since unlike the osprey, I can dispense advice via Face Time and cash via Venmo. As wings stretch and she becomes a fully independent bird, we hopefully will become even closer, and in new and exciting ways.

The social media comments on the photo of my forced smile – and her genuine grin - from the chick’s extended village family are all bird-like. “Soar” and “fly” are the verbs of choice, and those words are appropriate. She will do both, some aided by her instruction, and some in spite of it, thanks to pluck and wisdom I trust she can, and will, find on her own now that the old birds have left her on the creek.

If You Missed It: I wrote about the joy of the college search process in a column last spring, called The $50 Sweatshirt Acquisition Tour.

My Most Recent Political Analysis: The other column this week at The What For was Swapping Edges, a thought experiment asking what Democrats should trade to avoid losing three presidential elections next decade.

The Archives: All 38 of my columns are found on The What For website