One of the side-effects of having triplets is that more
people know me than vice versa. As a
result, for the better part of the last year, hundreds of people - from
relatives to friends to people I barely recognize - have asked what it would be
like having our three children headed to school at once. In the last month this has changed to, “What
is life like now that they are out of the house?” I planned to chronicle this as a series of
Postcards over several months, but it was easier to live in denial (i.e. if I
didn’t write about it, they might stay home forever). Now that it has happened, I have created a single mega-Postcard to try to capture the highlights.
Friday August 14, 2015
As the Somerset County Fair drew to its close on a perfect
late summer evening, D1, D2, D3 and D4 walked through the grounds together as
four full-grown young women. This was
their last day as simultaneous permanent residents of The Garden of Estrogen –
the final page of a chapter that began nearly 19 years earlier when triplet
girls loudly announced their entrance into the world.
The next day would be hectic beyond belief as the girls
began to scatter, but for now, amidst the white noise of the fair, there was an
almost surreal calm. I had a few moments
to reflect how we got to this point – not the whole 19 years, but rather the
more recent steps that led up to this moment.
The Fantasy
That all of our children would follow in our footsteps to
Cornell University was a certainty. 18
years of Big Red Brainwashing appeared to be a success as we attended the
family admissions lecture at The Queen’s 25th reunion. Of course the kids would apply E.D. (stop
snickering – that stands for Early Decision), and all would be settled before
the holidays. Perfect, right? Well, there was a lot that had to happen
first.
The Standardized Tests
Every child who wants to attend college in the United States
has to endure a battery of standardized tests.
It starts with the PSAT, then proceeds to the SAT (generally 2-3 times),
the ACT (because some kids do better on one format than the other), the subject
tests (called SAT-2), and advanced placement tests. Each exam has varying levels of preparation
ranging from on-line to special classes (not practical for triplets) to
good-old-fashioned practice books.
Between D1, D2 and D3 the best guess is they took about 40 actual tests
and well over 100 practice tests. And
because The Queen and I needed to be on hand to explain the answers on the
practice tests, we feel like we are ready to go to college all over again. “If two chords of a circle intersect at a
point outside the circle, then the location of the point marked X in the
diagram is (a) the midpoint of line segment QR, (b) one of the foci of the
shaded ellipse, (c) the location of buried treasure, or (d) it doesn’t matter
because this is one of the experimental questions.”
The Essays
Several years ago an enterprising company devised something
called The Common Application. The idea
is that so many schools ask redundant information, why not put it in one place? Ask for one main essay that shows what the
kid can write, and then let each school tack on a supplemental essay (just
because they can). At present several
hundred schools participate and I think it’s an amazing idea. Unfortunately, here is where our Cornell
fantasy started to diverge from reality.
The girls decided to check out a lot of schools, and apply to quite a
few as well. And, as we discovered, many
of them did not use the Common Application.
I think D3 may have written over 20 essays alone. Some of the topics were cool. My favorite was The University of Wisconsin,
which asked D1 to write about an aspect of herself that would surprise people. She wrote about being a girl who loves
football. The challenge was fitting each
essay response into anywhere between 100 and 750 words. And of course, despite our pleas to get it
done during the summer, most of this happened during the last few
weeks/hours/minutes before applications were due. Not only are The Queen and I ready for the
SAT, but we are now expert essay reviewers as well.
Now we have the actual college selection process…
The Cowgirl
From the time she was about 10 years old, D1 has been
infatuated with cows. As readers of
these Postcards know, it has become a family endeavor that increased the
female/male ratio in The Garden by three bovine beauties. It has also resulted in seven annual
pilgrimages by The Queen, D1 and D4 to the National Holstein Convention. When it came time to select a college, there
were only a handful of schools in the running.
D1 visited all of them.
Fortunately, the best dairy science program in the country is in the
School of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, so it was not a surprise
when she informed us that she would be Ithaca-bound. That’s one into Cornell.
The Soccer Player
As committed as D1 has been, D2 was actually the first to
begin the college search process. About
a year after our kinder-soccer player announced that she would play in high
school, she extended the objective by announcing that she would play soccer in
college. She never wavered from the
plan. The actual athlete recruiting
starts freshman year in high school at “showcase tournaments”. The kids email coaches asking them to come
watch them play. Many also attend
recruiting camps. Rinse and repeat for
the next 3 years in places like Long Island, Richmond, Pittsburgh, Atlanta,
Orlando and San Diego. I was D2’s
primary travel buddy, and between the long drives and the plane flights, it was
an experience I would not trade for anything.
Our only requirement on D2 was that she pick a school that she would
like to attend even if she did not play soccer.
She plans to major in operations management which resides in the
engineering program in some schools and in the business program in others. Somewhere along the line, D2 attended a
recruiting camp at Emory University and fell in love with Atlanta. Hmm…
The Undecided
D3 had no idea what she wanted to study, and she had such a
rich and varied high school experience she was not in a great hurry to find
out. The Queen and I made sure she saw
quite a few different schools – we needed to help her understand that despite
her consuming passion for music, Pitch Perfect was not a real college. Eventually she started to develop an interest
in business leadership that led her to select The Kelley School of Business at Indiana
University in Bloomington. Coincidentally,
IU also has a great music school as well.
For the record, we are fine with their choices, and The
Queen, D4 and I have a whole new wardrobe of sweatshirts, golf shirts, baseball
caps, etc. from Emory and Indiana. We also
quickly discovered that of the twenty six American colleges who took the melody
for their respective alma maters from Cornell (“High above Cayuga’s Waters…”),
two of those twenty six are – you guessed it - Emory and IU. D2 and D3 need only learn lyrics.
* * *
So the triplets had settled on three different points of the
compass - which evidently leaves the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for D4 who, as
we revealed in a previous Postcard, is named for a mermaid: Ariel. Perfect!
Meanwhile, senior prom, awards banquets, the final concert
of the triplet French horns, graduation ceremonies and parties raced by, until
the time came to actually begin the transition process. We really didn’t know what would happen when
the Staffin three became individual college students, and it was a little
unsettling to think about for all of us.
I think as a family we stayed in denial for as long as possible.
First Orientation
Indiana holds freshman orientation in early July, so D3 was
the first to have the experience. She
flew out, found her way from Indianapolis to Bloomington and back again, and
had a wonderful time. When she got back,
we had our first big “Welcome to College” moment.
Apparently the big thing on college campuses these days –
and a significant part of orientation - is “consent”. Excuse me - consent to what? Call me old
fashioned, but what happened to NO!!!!! OK,
maybe I wasn’t so old fashioned when I was actually in college, but having four daughters changes even a former
fraternity president.
In some states this has all been codified into a set of
strict guidelines. For example, in order
to have sex in California, consent must be (1) verbal, (2) affirmative, and (3)
ongoing. So basically all encounters
resemble the deli scene from When Harry
Met Sally: “Yes, Yes, Yes!!!” But I
digress.
The Load Out
We had to figure out how two parents could get three freshmen
moved into three different campuses within a five day period. Look at a map. This would take some serious planning and
some help from at least one third party.
However, first we had to get them equipped.
Over a series of weeks, we engaged in an exercise whose objective
I now understand is to transfer as much of the collective parent and grandparent
bank accounts as possible to that of Bed, Bath and Beyond, while still leaving
just enough to make the first tuition payment.
BB&B has this program called “Pack and Hold”. The stated purpose is to avoid loading up the
family car with stuff that can be held for pick up locally. However, in reality what happens is that the
freshman still stuffs the car beyond any reasonable load limit. Then after emptying the car into a dorm room,
one must show up at the store to pick up everything that was ordered, and buy a
bunch more stuff. Great business plan –
buy their stock!!!
Anyway, this was how we handled the move:
- Saturday: D1 heads out of
town for Cadets 2 drum corps practice (first goodbye). D4 and I work county fair takedown all
morning. Then D2 and D4 leave to
stay with The Queen’s mom. The
Queen, D3 and I load up the van with D2 and D3’s stuff and start driving
West. We stay overnight in
Wheeling, WV.
- Sunday: D2 gets on a plane
for Atlanta to attend preseason soccer camp with only what she needs to
survive for 5 days. The Queen, D3
and I continue to Bloomington via Cincinnati, eventually arriving in the
evening. D1 returns from her
weekend and picks up D4, who will stay with her at home.
- Monday: Move-in day at
Indiana, including multiple trips to Bed, Bath and Beyond.
- Tuesday: Leave Indiana, say
goodbye to D3. Drive to Nashville
to celebrate 25th wedding anniversary in the epicenter of
country music.
- Wednesday: Drive from
Nashville to Atlanta via Alabama (because neither of us had ever been
there and we really wanted to drive aimlessly on back country roads in the
middle of a torrential thunderstorm), finally arriving in the evening.
- Thursday: Start moving in
D2 (in between soccer practices).
Locate and visit the correct Atlanta-area Bed, Bath and Beyond.
- Friday: D1 leaves for
Cornell with my sister (also a Cornell alumna, so she knew exactly what to
do to effect the move). The Queen
and I continue to unpack D2 and spend time with relatives in Atlanta. Meanwhile, back in NJ, D4 goes to the
Hunterdon County Fair for the next 2 days to show her cow.
- Saturday: D1 takes a bus
back to New Jersey for drum corps rehearsal. The Queen and I attend freshman parent
orientation at Emory.
- Sunday: D1 goes back to
Cornell, The Queen and I leave Atlanta (third goodbye) and drive 14 hours
back to NJ, stopping along the way to check out Virginia Tech, which we
had heard is very pretty and which we both wanted to see.
- Monday: D4, The Queen and
I are all back home: Recovery time!
* * *
The New Normal
So after nearly 19 years, we finally discover what it is
like to have one child in the house.
Granted she is not in a high chair and needing a diaper change every few
hours, but this three person family thing is fascinating.
People ask us if the house is quiet now. Our answer is, well, sort of. D4 is very different from D1, D2 and D3. They are a force of numbers. D4 is a force of nature. To put it in the language of science, we may
have lost three quarters of the weight, but only one quarter of the volume. Nevertheless, we are thoroughly enjoying
getting to know D4 in a way that has not been possible before. Of course, D4 suddenly getting a boyfriend
was a jolt I was not ready for, but we are surviving that experience as well.
The Group Chat
When The Queen and I were in college, we called home once a
week. Sometimes we received letters or
care packages. Other than that, we were
on our own. My sister was at Cornell at
the same time – which would have been helpful in case of emergency - but she
was a 20 minute walk away and spent 24/7 in the design studio, so we did not
see much of each other the first few years.
Obviously the world is a bit different now with cell phones – we got
quite a few calls or texts early on “How do I…”
What we had not anticipated was the group chat. It turns out that these three are not going
to school as separately as we thought.
Sure they have individual experiences which are unique to their
campuses, and are already making new friends.
But there is a constant chatter of texts that literally fills the
day. There are at least three separate
streams: The all-family, which includes
the Queen’s mom; the nuclear family (just the six of us); and the Sisters (just
the 4 of them). I suspect there may be a
triplet stream as well. When I say my
phone burns up with literally hundreds of texts some days, I’m not
kidding. Sometimes in the evening my
phone is vibrating so much I miss calls because I think they are just
rapid-fire texts.
To add to the hilarity, the triplets share an Apple account. Every time one of them does a software update
on her iPhone, if she doesn’t remember to fix the message settings, all three
of them start getting each others’ messages.
This precipitates an electronic “Who’s on first?” until the offender can
be identified and corrected.
By the way, I have also discovered through this group
chatting that civilization has come full circle. Between all the emojis (little pictures
embedded in the text) and abbreviations, the language that passes back and
forth is so cryptic we seem to have returned to hieroglyphics. I finally realize what the pyramids are:
giant text streams between the pharaohs’ children at school. The classic Egyptian sideways two-dimensional
pose showing the half human/half dog with one arm up and one down? It’s the ancient LMAO, which translates to
“Laughing My Anubis Off”
Last but not least, there is the Skype video conference. The four of them get on a call and it’s like
they never left home. Or they have a
one-on-one tutoring sessions in biology (The Queen), accounting or economics
(The Gardener).
The net result of this high volume of multi-directional
communication is that D1, D2 and D3 are each in some sense experiencing
Cornell, Emory and Indiana, and so are the three of us back home.
Wow, did this all really happen?
Amidst all that has taken place the last few months, the
biggest hit for me happened as we pulled out of the driveway for the first leg
of the trip to Indiana. The car was
crammed so tightly with D2 and D3’s belongings there was barely room for D3 in
the seat behind The Queen. I looked back
at the house that had been The Garden since we moved there in November, 1997
(even before we called it The Garden). I
stared at the window of D1, D2 and D3’s bedroom, and knew that we were turning
a page that could never be turned back.
I love the women they are becoming, but I already miss the girls they
have been: The Queen pushing the triplet stroller coming down the driveway,
first day of school, soccer, bicycle lessons, Halloween costumes, everyone flying
out of the garage into the minivan to get to so many different activities, and what
seemed like a thousand other memories that whipped through my mind in an
instant. I suppose every father feels
the same thing as his daughter heads off to college, but somehow times three it
seemed magnified. I have no idea what
will happen in The Garden going forward, but this has been an amazing
time. This is definitely NOT the last
Postcard, but nevertheless a heartfelt thank you to all my readers for sharing
the journey.
The Gardener
