It was a sad moment indeed. Michael put his arm around my shoulder while we walked the last 50 feet to the car. I struggled to keep my composure, with only partial success. "You know," I said, "your mother would have come if she could have come." My wife's job had kept her from making the four-day drive from western Canada to deliver our son for his first year at Swarthmore.
"I know," he said.
"I'll miss you--we all will."
"I know," he said again. "I'll e-mail you as soon as I can." I believed him about this, though I didn't know then that getting e-mail operational would take him nearly another week--an eternity.
Sad indeed. But it was a moment I am thankful to have experienced, thankful to have provided for Michael. Bringing him to Swarthmore has filled me with memory and hope.
My own freshman orientation, 34 years earlier, began under different circumstances. I had arrived by airplane, traveling parentless with a high school classmate who was in a daze equal to my own. There was no one to greet us at the airport, and the taxi driver said he didn't know what or where Swarthmore was. So he drove us all over southeast Philadelphia to get to campus--and, I suspected later, to earn a higher fare.
My 1963 arrival hinted at the tone and hues of my college experience to come. Swarthmore would be a separate world from my faraway home in California, a world I constantly felt I was constructing out of whole cloth, one that I found it difficult to communicate to my family of origin, my California family.
Take dinner, for example. When that taxi finally brought me to campus, dinner was immediately transformed from a daily family gathering to a rendezvous with friends and acquaintances. This was more than a simple change of faces. My new Swarthmore peers cared about me as youngsters care: When dinner was over, they went their various ways. They were not like parents. When parents finished with you, they still cared and cared, sometimes until you suffocated. But there were no parents at Sharples Dining Hall, no matter how often I went. California was too far away for them to come.
Or take the problem of choosing a major. Like a lot of my classmates, I wasn't sure where to focus my studies. But I was sure what I did not want to study. I did not want to major in any sort of science, I told myself, even though I had been especially successful in that area during high school. And I did not want to study music, even though I had real talent as a clarinet player and amateur pianist up to that point. These choices must have seemed like self-destructive perversity to my parents, both of whom enjoyed all things scientific and musical. But their involvement in these areas was precisely my point: I wanted a fresh start, a new life, my own identity.
What I hadn't counted on was how the search for independence was transformed the minute I left home. What began as a quest to escape suddenly became a challenge to commit--to what? I had no idea, either on my first day at the College, or for a long time afterward.
The distance from home had helped to feed an unfortunate belief: that my mother and father did not want me living at Swarthmore. So I felt, at least, and so I told my classmates. "Why get yourself a good liberal education?" they had asked before I settled on Swarthmore. And indeed I had asked myself this question as well. I knew the official answers and had stated them more than once, repeating them to myself as well. But my parents did not echo any support for liberal education back to me. So in the end, I too held back from fully believing in Swarthmore. It was the least that I could do--;a loyal gesture to show that I still connected with my roots.
On graduation day my parents did not come. They gave me money instead--the $600 cost of their plane tickets--with which I bought a car. At the time I did not trouble myself about their absence; I did not want to add to their financial complaints. Besides, I told myself, a car would be important to have. Meg Holmberg's parents, the ones from Grand Forks, adopted me for lunch after the ceremony. It was the first and last time that I met them.
In the end I felt that the important people from my past never understood my Swarthmore experience--or valued it much. If they did, they never said so; a wall had grown up that allowed feelings of care and understanding, but not expressions of them.
These thoughts played through my mind all over again last August 23 as my own son walked me to the car for what felt like the last time. I wondered, would he feel as cut off from home by coming to Swarthmore as I had felt? Would he hear my declarations of support for his decision or only my creaking anxieties about the high cost? My wife and I are no richer than my own parents were in 1963--in fact we are probably less well off in real terms. It's not as if we can afford Swarthmore easily, and it's not easy to keep silent with Michael about that.
All of which has made me take another look at my parents' intentions back then. Did I take my father's worry and my mother's silence as opposition, when all they actually had done was express their fear and worry about their finances and my future? They were scientists, both of them, persons not given to eloquence, not skilled in subtle strategies for "getting through" to an anxious son. They talked to me in the only way they knew how, perhaps clumsily, and perhaps creating an impression, but not a reality, of indifference.
It occurred to me, too, that I had badly misunderstood my parents' intentions when I worked so hard to deny family influence in science and music and when I worked so hard for my independence. Yes, they would have liked to see me enter these fields, but they wanted much more for me to stand on my own two feet. Ironically, in rebelling I was simply doing what they wanted me to do. For the first time now, I remember that it was my father, not myself, who had actually coined the phrase that I later adopted about my Swarthmore experience: "You are constructing Swarthmore out of whole cloth," he had said.
As I walked up the tree-lined lane with Michael, I finally decided that things would be different for him than they had been for me. The difference is not due just to the fact that I had actually been able to bring him to college; as poignant as that day on campus was for me, it neither proved nor substi-tuted for my love for Michael. What made the difference, I decided, was our underlying hope--parents' and child's--for what Swarthmore has to offer. When I finally collected my thoughts after leaving Michael that day, I realized that Swarthmore felt to me like a bridge to a wider world for its students and for my child.
I had never satisfactorily shared that hope with my own parents, either in 1963 or any time after. In 1997, though, my own child and I already knew--and agreed on--what Swarthmore could offer. I was sure that Michael had more parental support.
Yet this difference in our respective relationships pointed toward a fundamental similarity in our experiences as well. In both cases, 1963 and 1997, the parents wanted independence and growth for their child. But my metaphors for these goals had changed during that time. In 1963 I saw college life as a tapestry that I was weaving, something that was quite unlike what had existed before. In 1997 I preferred to see Swarthmore as a bridge that looks like this: Michael arrived at Swarthmore as "himself," as the boy-about-to-become-a-man, an individual whom his parents (and he himself) already know. But immediately the College starts teaching Michael that there can be more to him than he ever thought possible. More in his case than science and math and more than an isolating commitment to academic excellence. There can also be friends and personal commitments, and gradually there can be deeply felt emerging values.
Just maybe, I thought after we were done with our goodbyes, Swarthmore will allow Michael to place his intellectualism into a broad human framework, one full of caring and welcome disclosures of human feelings, and one where he will not need the myth of always and forever being different from others.
At the end, on graduation day, I want to attend rather than send money. I want to see my son there--the boy I always used to know, except there will be more of him by then. On graduation day he will still like science, but he will see more clearly its purposes and limitations. He will still play and enjoy music, but he will appreciate a wider range of it. And he will still have his wonderful sense of humor, except he will use it with such nuance and subtlety that none of us will be able to keep up. n
Kelvin Seifert '67 is professor of educational psychology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Michael Seifert is a member of the Class of 2001.
Swarthmore College. All rights reserved. 1998