By Drew Magary
Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season.
We’re in a hotel room, early in the morning. My bed is lumpy. The A/C in the room has only two settings: off, and the surface temperature of Neptune. My daughter and my wife are asleep in the double bed next to mine. None of us have unpacked our bags, because none of us plan to stay in this room any longer than we must. It’s Wednesday. First day of college for the girl. Check-in starts at 9 a.m., and we plan to get there early because my wife and I know that it’ll only get more crowded than Disneyland as the day progresses.
But right now we’re still a good two-plus hours away from the opening bell, so I get to loll in bed a bit longer. I have been waiting for this day for 18 years, if not more. I think about all of the days that have gone into this one. I graduate from college one day in 1998 and think to myself, “Oh shit, now I have to get a job.” I clumsily propose to my girlfriend one day three years later, in a parking lot. Our first kid is born five years later. A gruesome affair. Forceps are required. The girl comes out, screaming and covered head to toe in blood. I have never been one to crave power—I still don’t really understand why so many other people do crave it—but now my wife and I have been given sole dominion of another human being. Small. Bloodied. Helpless. Terrible at speaking English her first day out. It will be our job to nurture this girl. To build her into a person.
So we get to work. There’s a day we give our daughter her first bath, in the kitchen sink. There’s a day we dress her up in her first Halloween costume, a ladybug. She has digestive issues (all small kids do), so we spoonfeed her prune juice one day and she makes an EWWW face as the brownish liquid dribbles down her chin and soaks her bib. To this day, she still reflexively says Ew when presented with anything, prune juice or otherwise, she thinks is gross. And then there’s her first day of kindergarten, and her first bus ride. The great, hulking yellow bus coming over the hill, scooping her up, and taking her away.
I remember all of this while lounging in my knobby hotel bed. But lazy time is over. I have to get up. I won’t open the blackout shades just yet, although I have a great deal of experience in being the bad guy who has to wake up the kids for school, for early flights, and for long car rides like yesterday’s. We drove 10 hours to get here. The girl’s boyfriend shows up at our house before the crack of ass just to see her one last time. Her younger brother makes her an origami pendant necklace that has a secret “I’ll miss you” message folded inside. When he gives it to his sister, they both break down and cry in each other’s arms. I don’t take a photo. I don’t need to. Then our oldest son comes down the stairs and I tell him to say goodbye to his sister. He says, “Wait, she’s leaving today?” then half-hugs her and puts in his AirPods. We all have our ways of coping.
We drive the 10 hours. It sucks.
But now we’re here. There’s an unsealed IKEA box sitting on the desk. It’s a nightstand for the girl’s room. I get up, turn on a small lamp, and put the nightstand together. First try. No missing parts. Nothing accidentally installed backwards. This is clearly a charmed day.
I wake the ladies up. We grab a shitty complimentary breakfast in the lobby, and then jam our suitcases into an already-packed car. It’s getting hot, and the girl’s dorm has no air conditioning. Tuition at this school costs more than a pro football team. But there’s no time to quibble with any of that. We have work to do.
I pull up at the back of the dorm and a coordinated team of helpers tells me where to park, and where to unload all of the girl’s stuff. We’re the first family to arrive at the dorm this morning. Score. Our daughter has all of her clothes packed into multiple IKEA storage bags. When I carry the bags from the car to the unloading area, I imagine they’re all stuffed with cash that I just stole from a bank vault. Gives me a silent thrill. Having shades on while I do the job only enhances the effect.
The dorm is situated on a hill. The girl’s room is on the fourth floor. I assure my wife that the dorm will have an elevator. They have to have one for disabled kids, I reason. Wrong. There’s no elevator. If you suffer from polio, this won’t be your dorm. We have to hoof it up the hill, and then up the stairs. Over and over. I planned on this being an emotional day, but it’s getting hotter out (and in), and now I just want a shower. My boxers are damp, which is never fun. The first things we unload in the girl’s room are the table fans. We turn all of them on, and then we begin to unpack the rest.
This doesn’t look like a fully realized dorm room yet. The walls are bare, as is the mattress. My wife and the girl set about putting away all of her clothes (there are many), and they instruct me to go to the welcome center to grab all of our kid’s orientation materials. In 2024, those materials consist of 10 flyers with 10 different QR codes to scan. Nevertheless, I have to procure them. So I go downstairs and walk back toward the middle of campus.
More days float through my head along the way. The day I scream at the girl because she’s charged a bunch of shit to our Apple account without asking us. The day she and I ride a legit roller coaster for the first time (she loves it; I haven’t ridden a good coaster in decades and am equally jazzed). The many days I help with the girl’s common app essay, telling her I’ll edit her like she’s my colleague and not my kid, to take away the helicopter parent element. The day she gets into college. This college. Early admission 2, which is a new thing and a good one. She reads the acceptance letter in her room and then bounds gleefully down the stairs, laptop in hand, to show us what it says. I can’t believe it.
That phrase gets overused, but in this case it’s apt. This is my dream. I’m a dreamer by nature, so my lifegoals closet is bursting at the hinges. I’ve wanted to be rich and famous and overly sexed. But above all, I’ve always wanted a family, and I’ve always wanted to put my kids through college. I entered the workforce 26 years ago. Fatherhood was distant that day. Advanced fatherhood, more so. Now college day is here. This is what my wife and I worked for. What we saved for. What we lived for.
Fuck, it’s so hot. The college’s welcome center is giving out free Italian ice to anyone who wants it, and I savor mine like I was just rescued from a shipwreck. I get all of the orientation swag and place it in a small cardboard box because they ran out of free tote bags for the parents.
When I return to the hall, our daughter’s room looks more like a dorm room. The closet is filling. The drawers are filling. Up go all of the girl’s posters. No Reservoir Dogs poster. No blacklight. No tapestries. No empties of Natty stacked in a pyramid on the windowsill. Not yet, anyway. I help take more shit out of the IKEA bags, and then stow every empty bag into another empty bag. Bags of bags. Every family has them.
We’re getting close now. I’m not crying. We’ve got a three-hour drive to my folks' place after this is over, so I’m keen to get on the road. The dorm stairwell is choked with kids, parents, gigantic roll-aboards, boxed-up mini-fridges, and more table fans. Our daughter needs coat hangers, so my wife goes on an emergency Target run to get them. Dead on my feet, I lie down spread-eagle on the girl’s dorm room rug. A random mom pokes her head in, and I tell her I’ll get up to say hi.
“Oh please,” she says. “I’d lie down too if I were you.”
So I don’t get up. My wife returns from Target with the hangers and some other unforeseen necessities. This will not be the last post-matriculation errand we have to run for the girl. But it’s the last one for now, because my wife and I have to go. We have to get to my parents, and we have to leave the girl to begin life on her own. I still get hints of the little kid in her once in a while, but she’s grown now. It’s time to cut the cord. She’s already made like five friends just while we were walking to the dining hall and back. She doesn’t need us anymore.
We walk back to the van. My wife breaks down and hugs the girl for a long time. I get choked up, but don’t break down completely. I wonder why I don’t. I should be fucking bawling right now. Maybe my Zoloft prescription is working too well. Maybe I’ve grown, against all odds, into a stoic. Maybe I’ve finally learned a bit of grace in my middle age. Maybe I’m an asshole.
Or maybe, probably, I’m feeling too GOOD to cry. This day, above all other days, is the one I’ve wanted my whole adulthood. And I’ve had a dream life in so many other ways: cool job, nice money, big TV. A privileged life, and not merely in socioeconomic terms. I am honored, and quietly humbled, to have lived the life I’ve led. I can only hope I prove myself worthy of it. Today I feel, indeed, worthy. Victorious. Happy. So happy. The kind of deep happiness that will be coded into my cell structure forever.
I hug the girl tight and then get in the car. My wife has a good cry in the passenger seat, I hug her too, and then we’re off.
We drive three hours to my parents’ home. My mom and dad are waiting for us. My dad has seen better days in his life. But I can still get an occasional twinkle out of him, which is all I need. I see him smile and give me a loving “Hey pal,” and then I hug and kiss him all over. I’m good. He goes back to bed.
I shower. Finally.
My sister and brother arrive at the house. My mom makes dinner for us, because entertaining is her lifeblood. She sets out places in the dining room, and beseeches me to sit where Dad always has. Every Thanksgiving. Every Christmas. Every birthday party. Every family event. I have never eaten in that chair before. That’s Poppa’s chair. I have my own chair back in Maryland, but his chair here is his. I say that maybe Alex, the oldest of the three siblings, should get to sit there. Alex thinks I’m being weird, which is probably accurate. It’s just a dining room chair. It’s not a throne.
So I sit. My mom serves dinner. We eat. We drink. We laugh. We talk about the girl’s first day. I think all of the days that led to this one. Days in my own college dorm room. Days in my New York apartment, cooking shitty dinners on a George Foreman grill. My wedding day, which was even sweatier than this one. The day the girl was born. The day I started a “blog” about raising the girl and telling my wife, “I think there might be something to this new thing I’m doing.” The days our sons were born. The day I nearly died. The day our daughter nearly died because she got a pretzel caught in her windpipe, Dubya-style.
I don’t know when I, a once-proud sloth, became a Type-A personality. But I know that at some point, I realized that I lived for a well-executed day. Not necessarily a productive day, just any day where I’m able to accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish: knock off some work, work out, make a nice meal, run an errand before the game starts, call my mom, whatever. If I can crank out a solid day for myself and everyone I love, then I’m all right.
I’m all right on this day. The food is good, my family is tight, and my kid is finally out on her own. I’m quietly sad that she’s gone. When we get back home, I’ll still feel her presence around every corner of the house. When we get her on the phone for the first time, she sounds 10 years older than when we dropped her off. Like a grown woman. I know I’ll miss her, but I also know that I’m excited for her. I spent many days, and wrote millions of words, in pursuit of this day. Starting now, our daughter will get to stack up well-executed days of her own. Some of those days, she’ll fail just as I did. Or she’ll get her shit done, but it’ll be exhausting. A good day isn’t necessarily an easy one. Lord knows this day hasn’t been. Did I mention that her dorm had no fucking aircon?
Regardless, it was a good day. And if you have one good day, you get to keep it forever. Every day you live contains every other day within it. Days both past and in the future. That’s the gift of time, and of life itself. I learned that from my mom and dad, and my daughter learned it from my wife and me. I have relived my youth through my child’s, just as she’ll relive parts of her own life through her own children, and just as those children will live on through their children. Days passed down through years, through decades, through centuries. Generations living through one another, living forever.
Dinner ends. I go up to my bed and lie down to sleep. My work is done here. We have two more kids to get to college, but that job can wait for tomorrow. Right now, my brain gets to take a break. And when my brain wants a break, it only wants one thing: football. Football, football, football. You have fun taking all those tests, girl. Me? I’ve got games to watch. My name is Drew, and this is your Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo.
