Column: My Mother’s Day present this year is two college-educated sons

By the time this column appears in print it will be Mother’s Day, and I will have received one of the greatest gifts a mom could receive.

My younger son will have graduated from college the day before.

I am now the mother of two college graduates, a distinction I welcome with equal measures of pride and nostalgia. As excited as I am over my son’s achievement, I can’t help yearning for a time that I’ll never get back. Such is the life of a parent.

Now that I have reached this milestone, I offer not so much my wisdom – I have precious little of that – and not exactly advice either.

Let’s call these observations. Since it’s Mother’s Day, and I’m in a giving mood, I share these tidbits in the hope that they might be of use to parents who have yet to send their kids off to college.

• College students lose stuff. The more valuable an item, the greater the likelihood that it will go missing. Laptops, cell phones, that expensive jacket you just bought, these are all susceptible to “I’ve looked everywhere but I can’t find it”; “I let someone borrow it and they lost it”; “I put it down for a minute and then it was gone,” and “Someone sat on it and it broke.”

My son’s roommate was “cleaning” their apartment last fall and mistakenly threw my son’s wallet down the garbage shoot. An hour-long Dumpster dive did not turn up the missing wallet, which contained the driver’s license that my son needed to board a flight home two days later. I had to overnight his passport to him, and he spent the day after Thanksgiving at the DMV.

I’m not sure there’s a lesson to be had. Just be warned that something like this will probably happen to your kids too. Patience will be required.

• You kids will get lost, both literally and figuratively. They might not be able to find their classroom on the first day, or they’ll look up from their phone and realize they have no idea where they are. Someone invariably doesn’t make it back to the bus on big group outings. Or they get on the wrong bus. Or they fall asleep somewhere and no one can find them.

Yes, cell phones can help them find their way – assuming they haven’t misplaced the devices (see above), or their battery hasn’t died, or the friends they’re supposed to be with don’t fail to answer their phones.

College students also sometimes find themselves feeling lost in their new environment. They might struggle academically, or worry about fitting in, or realize they don’t like their major. There are a thousand ways, large and small, that they might lose their way.

The best advice someone gave me before my older son started college was that every time a student encounters a problem a parent’s response should be, “So what are you going to do about it?” Most kids eventually find their way.

• They know more than we think they do. A British survey recently found that one in five people don’t know how to boil an egg or change a light bulb, a finding that feeds our current obsession over whether today’s youth are being taught enough practical skills.

I think we need to relax a bit and not freak out if we fail to send our kids off to college without them knowing how to build a brick wall (my husband’s go-to example of a real-world skill). My sons taught themselves how to boil eggs and change light bulbs. Should they ever need to build a brick wall, I have no doubt they’re capable of learning how to do that too. Either that or they’ll program a robot to do it for them.

Not only do my sons know more then I tend to give them credit for, but they now know a lot more than I do about certain subjects. Parents of college students must get used to the idea that their kids just might surpass them in certain departments. That’s a good thing –– why else did we send them to college if not to learn?

This brings me to what I consider my most important observation:

• They’ll change. Often we parents have a hard time catching up with with where our kids are developmentally. We tend to think of them not so much as they are now, but as they were when they were younger. Then we treat them that way.

But when kids go to college they often change and change fast. Many are living on their own for the first time, and their maturity skyrockets. Some kids who were shy in high school come out of their shells; some who didn’t take their studies seriously when they were younger kick into a higher gear academically. And vice versa.

As parents, we need to get to know our college student children all over again. We must appreciate them as the young adults they have become, not the little munchkins that we used to pick up whenever they fell. Those kids are gone, and we have to accept that.

And if you forget, expect your suddenly grown-up child to remind you with a pointed, “Mom, I’m not a kid anymore.”

But don’t worry: they’ll still need you when their wallets end up in the trash.

Happy Mother’s Day.

PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.