Life as a Boarding Parent
By Mary Montague, mother of Katie Damron '08
On Sunday, Putney accomplished something in addition to conferring diplomas on its graduates: the school moved into a rooted place in my soul. I was not expecting this; the planting took me by surprise, growing through a half-dreaming, half-wakeful night after graduation, continuously hearing "Innsbruck, I Must Now Leave Thee" replaying in my head, along with an unbidden, insistent, running recitation of a line from Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill", "...and wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land."
I thought I couldn't bear it that my child was not still in this magical place (never mind the achieved goals of learning, growing up a lot and going off to college), and that we won't be coming back to see her in the "middle earth" of Putney. We parents have watched them all grow up — the class of 2008 — sitting in on four years of classes on Parents' Weekends, attending four years of dramatic and musical productions. Ben R., Noah B., Otis W., Claire D., Katie — goodbye to their vivid, youthful energy shining from the Campbell Theatre stage.
I think I am particularly struck by this shift in our lives because Putney is both so far from our Virginia home and is also so much "a place apart". Making the decision to have Katie matriculate there was a big undertaking for our family. "You are sending her where for high school?" incredulous friends have asked for the past four years. Our decision for Putney was based on my conviction of the importance of progressive education and in Putney's unique approach to it. But also, as a family therapist working in a boarding school, and as a mother, I know deeply the importance of "staying connected" to one's child during these years. Could we manage "connection" and still have Katie live at Putney? We determined to try.
This graduation weekend, I was surprised to find myself still mentally traversing the distance we had agreed to live with these four years. Managing that distance has in itself come to be part of our family's experience of Putney, the landscape between "there" and "here" an emotional one as well as geographic. Handling the fact that Katie was to be so far away gave us, as a family, a work of forging "links", which take many forms: e.mail, phone, car trips, plane, faith. Each is aimed at the same thing: bridging the wide gap between us and my daughter — a long distance in miles, culture, history.
From the shores of the southern Chesapeake Bay, where we live, to Putney on its hill, is a journey of about 750 miles. This is 1500 miles round-trip, about twenty-six hours behind the wheel. At four car trips a year (plus a couple of airplane trips), it's about 6,000 miles. The long trips have come to have their own place in Breck's and my lives: this is when we talk about everything we don't have time to talk about at home, make plans (most never carried out, only to be brought up again on the next trip), prioritize our work and, perhaps of most value, reflect on our relentlessly busy daily lives. Our youngest daughter, now ten, was six when the Putney-runs began. We've gone from Bitty Baby being handed up to Daddy in the front seat, on the New Jersey Turnpike, to taking turns answering math word problems she's formulated on her own from her solo place in the row behind us. Endless alphabet games, twenty questions...on this last trip, we gave in and agreed to use license plates and to working backwards through the alphabet (there is no "q" on New York plates, FYI).
"The Trips" take a lot of time, and also mandate time off from our seven-day work week (a rhythm of work familiar to boarding school employees), of career jobs and running the Inn, making arrangements for our youngest daughter when she couldn't accompany us. In the change of pace and place provided by setting forth in the car for twelve hours, we've joked the long journey to be with my daughter at school has come to represent a "micro-vacation" for us. We take the same deep breath of satisfaction, "we're here!", pulling up the Putney school drive, with the mountains falling away all around, as we do when as a family we arrive at the summer island cottage for our annual stay.
For Katie, the remove to Vermont was a leap of faith and, in my view, a very brave thing for her to undertake in ninth grade. There was sending her back and forth during the school year. I imagined Jane Cyr reeling Katie out like an early airplane antenna, the spooled line unrolling her through the skies, and me on the Virginia end, reeling her in. There was seeing her off regularly at Patrick Henry airport, repressing between each farewell the memory that, as soon as she's waved good-bye from the other end of the security check and disappeared to the gates, I will be beset for a little while with worry and sadness — and an immediate, briefly overwhelming sense of loss. More often than not, she is on the phone to me a few minutes later from the gate or her seat — and I always wait for the real relief of the later confirmation, "I'm on Thomas" (Thomas Transportation). I don't think we could have "done Putney" without cell phones (or without Jane Cyr)!
There were extra trips, required, too, as though the gods of family life wanted to make the point that we had really stretched our limits. Fall of sophomore year, when Katie needed me more than I realized - I, or her dad, flew up every week for six weeks. Special trips were called for, too - being there to hear her sing at the Winter Concerts, and her own voice recital in the spring of junior year.
Now, it's over. Katie is an alumna, so I guess we are alum-parents. I almost couldn't leave, Sunday afternoon, after we finished getting her out of the cabin. I kept thinking of "...here where the world is quiet..." (Swinburne) and "...near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields..." (Spender), with the white clouds, blue skies and the finally warm June sunshine on the emerald hilltop, and on the still, green, Putney gardens. We drove away as a family in silence, Katie's request: "let me say good-bye to this place in my mind."
And so, the school is not any longer where my daughter works toward an important milestone, and where we will make complicated plans to go, four or five times a year. When I "couldn't leave" on Sunday, when I heard "the farm forever fled from the childless land", I realized Putney had, in a manner of speaking, reverse-planted itself inside me. The gift of this remarkable school moved, during the event that is Commencement, from an active work to become a private emblem, a jeweled seed in a closed locket - etched with the final, exquisite song the departing seniors gave us. Our "linking" is over: Putney is there, we are here; the distance in between isn't going to be closed any longer by the work of connection, by the long trip back and forth. Now the "fact" of Putney has begun: a foundation and a beginning in Katie's life, of course, but also a blossoming inheritance in ours.
Mary Williams Montague June 2008
(Mother of Catharine Carter Damron '08)
