It's been quite the week. I mean, it's been quite the year, but you knew that already. On Monday, I drove Hannah up to Montreal to begin her first year at McGill University. Actually, she has to first quarantine for two weeks in a hotel before she can move into her dorm. Canada has been pretty strict about limiting visitors, especially those from our COVID-ridden country. Because H and I are both Canadian citizens, we were able to get in, although I had to promise the border agent I would drop Hannah off and leave the country immediately, not getting out of my car at any point before I left the confines of the Great White North.
Here we are in 2003 and 17 years later, just before we left for Montreal:
It's a big life moment, sending your kid off to college. It didn't happen the way we would have liked. Ideally, we would have gone up earlier in the summer (Lily was supposed to take a summer course at McGill) to set Hannah up with a bank account and stuff like that, and then we would have taken her to school in late August and helped her move everything into her dorm. But thanks to COVID-19 and the supremely shitty way the U.S. has handled (or not handled) it, Canada has closed its border to non-essential travel from the U.S. Classes are being done remotely and many international students are being denied entry. The dorms are still open (mostly for first-year students) and we wanted Hannah to have some semblance of a freshman year, so we decided to send her up there anyway.
We were a little concerned about how the border crossing would go, because we had read that some parents weren't allowed to cross the border with their kids and had to call a car service to take them the rest of the way. I felt like being a Canadian citizen and having no plans to stay up there, I'd be allowed to drop her off, but you never know. I had the number of a car service in my phone just in case. We got to the border around 2:45 on Monday and there were no other cars there. It took only seven minutes to get through. H had filled out a travel plan using a Canadian government app, so the agent had that and looked at our citizenship documents and U.S. passports, but he spent most of the time going over the quarantine requirements and the penalties for violating them.
From the border, it was another hour to downtown Montreal and Hannah's hotel. I had to circle a few times before I could get a parking spot out front. I got all of her bags loaded onto a luggage cart and then it was time to say goodbye. It was still tough to drive away from the hotel, but I was quickly distracted by having to figure out how to get back to the highway out of the city. Eventually I did, and then I had five hours of solo driving to think about how much I'd miss the kid.
It's not like we were attached at the hip anymore like in that first photo. She's 18 and very independent, and she very much enjoys spending time alone reading/watching TV/online/listening to music. Reminds me of someone else I know. Although she still would go through phases where she'd just come out and hang out with us to watch a show or just be goofy. If there's one good thing about the last five months, it's that I got to spend a lot more time with her than I probably would have normally.
This is Day 6 of her quarantine. I'm sure she's bored out of her mind, but she's been reading, watching TV and FaceTiming with us and her friends. It's very strange to get up in the morning and not see her snoozing in her room across the hall. Lily took very little time to clear out their shared bedroom of everything Hannah-related (we're turning our guest room into her room for when she's home), but she definitely misses her big sister. We're adjusting to life without Hannah. We probably won't see her again until sometime around Christmas, but at least we're connected via technology. When I went to college, I would call home once a week just to check in, but I would only go home once a month (I was only half an hour away from home, so it was easy) to work and make some money. I was happy to be out of the house, especially considering things were not so great there at the time. Hannah's happy to be out of the country, but at the same time, she misses us and her friends and also is sort of in this weird stasis period where she is literally stuck in a room for 14 days. Normally, she would have made a bunch of new friends and gone to see the city, but that will have to wait until the 24th.
And so our partially empty nest situation has begun. We've got Lily for two more years and then she's off (and she can't wait). That will be REALLY weird. But this is weird enough for now.
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