On college tours, colds, and choosing challenge over comfort

plus, the disturbing truth about nasal spray and how it's maybe a metaphor for life

This view is from the living room of an Airbnb in Houghton, Michigan, where I’m writing this, earlier this morning. Houghton is the home to Michigan Technological University, known as Michigan Tech, where my son Owen is considering attending in the fall. The city is also known as the “gateway to the Keweenaw Peninsula”, the northernmost part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where my grandmother grew up and my mother was born.

Owen and I were up here all weekend, and I had big plans for us. I’ve been here a few times before, but on this trip I wanted to really get acquainted with the city and the school—hit up the local restaurants, hang out in the coffee shops and library, go to a college hockey game.

Instead, I spent the majority of the weekend in bed and on the sofa, and am only just beginning to feel human again (which is convenient, since we’re supposed to check out and start our long drive home in about twenty minutes.)

What I’d thought was a minor and already-receding cold on Thursday night started feeling like something else entirely by the end of our campus tour Friday—and by the time we checked into our Airbnb that afternoon, I couldn’t wait to lie down. And down I pretty much stayed.

Our Airbnb happens to be located above a bakery, so Owen ran down several times to keep us stocked up on soup and pasties (a Cornish meat pie that became a local staple in the U.P. due to the influx of Cornish copper miners in the 1800s). The unseasonably mild weather and sunlight taunted us outside the large glass door off the deck of our Airbnb overlooking the Portage River, but I wasn’t even feeling well enough to go for a drive.

It’s a bummer. But at least we got in the most important part of the trip—the college visit—before I went down for the count. Owen has been strongly considering Tech for a month or so, after getting wind of their solid reputation as a hands-on, immersive educational experience and as a haven for the nerdily-inclined (for a taste of what I’m talking about, please accept this Reddit thread as Exhibit A.)

Owen was intrigued by the academic reputation, but not as crazy about the location: its distance from home, its distance from other cities of any size, the nearly-unthinkable amount of snow they get most years (202 inches on average).

While this winter has been unusually mild and dry, this photo - taken an hour after the one at the top - is a reminder of how unpredictable the weather can be up here.

Up until January or so, Tech wasn’t even seriously on Owen’s radar. The two options he was weighing at that point were a university close to home, where he already knows several people attending including his cousin, and a university campus in…Tokyo.

Daily I could see him struggling with these two remarkably-different choices: Stay within an hour’s drive of home, surrounded by familiar surroundings and people he already knows, or plunge himself into a completely unfamiliar environment halfway around the world?

And while Tech, on first glance, might seem like a compromise between the two, in actuality going here would introduce two brand-new discomforts: extreme weather and remoteness. (I adore this region, but let’s face it, it’s not Tokyo—and it’s about as hard to get home from here as an international city.)

Yet we were both sold by our department tour, in which we got to visit multiple labs, watched students working on all manner of projects, and learned about potential career paths neither of us even knew existed.

That’s what young adulthood ideally is, right? It’s an introduction to a world beyond the one you already know and understand, an opening of possibilities. That can happen in so many different ways, from working to traveling to college to military experience, and this particular option—and college—happens to seem like just the right fit for Owen. I think he agrees. But choosing it will, at least in the short term, bring him a fair amount of discomfort.

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I’m not usually one for taking cold medicine. Partly this is a philosophical choice - I like to let my body do its healing thing when I’m sick, which just doesn’t happen all that often. Also cold medicine makes me feel really weird, like my head has detached from my body and is floating like a balloon a foot in the air. But by Friday evening, with a pounding headache, mouth-breathing due to congestion and generally miserable, I found myself reaching for medicated nasal spray to relieve the inflammation in my sinuses.

It worked incredibly quickly, and within a few minutes I could breathe normally again; but its effects wore off by night, and Saturday morning I woke (if you can call it that, since I’m not sure I actually slept) desperate for another hit. Immediate relief!

But this time, the effects seemed even more short-lived, and early Saturday afternoon, mouth-breathing once more, I found myself scrutinizing the teeny-tiny print on the back of the bottle to find out when I could get my next hit, errr, dose. I did not like what I saw. Wait, I have to go twelve hours between doses? And I shouldn’t use it for more than three consecutive days? Can that be right? I took to Google to find out whether the manufacturer really meant it and found myself going down the Internet rabbit hole of health-related research.

The TL/DR: Yes, they mean it. All kinds of nasty things can happen if you use these sprays too often or for too long, including a condition called “rebound congestion” in which the very blood-vessel-constricting action that once provided relief can backfire as your blood vessels try to compensate for the shrinking and open up more and more. The result can be stubborn nasal congestion that can take a year or more to resolve. So, the very thing that was bringing me comfort in the moment could create a lot more discomfort down the road.

I’m sure there’s a metaphor there, though my early-morning dose is beginning to wear off and I’m feeling a little too thick to sort it all out at the moment. I’m planning to power through, though, because I know there’s something better for me on the other side of this cold if I can just get through this temporary discomfort first.

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Owen’s the first of my kids to give the college decision this much weight, and it’s been fascinating (and occasionally frustrating) to watch him wrestle with his competing desires: one, to prioritize comfort and familiarity, and the other, of seeing what he’s capable of when familiarity is stripped away; when the comfort of easily returning home for a weekend just isn’t an option.

The Reddit thread I referenced above about the pros and cons of Michigan Tech contained a comment that lodged itself in my head and stayed there the entire time I was writing this (bolding mine):

“The remoteness of the campus builds "grit", self-reliance, and interdependence. Unlike closer "suitcase schools", it doesn't become a ghost town on the weekends. Because I couldn't bring my laundry home to mommy on Friday, I learned to "adult" (as the millennials say) very early. And, because everyone else is in the same boat, I learned how to meet people, make new friends easily, and rely on others.”

Should I be embarrassed to admit that I flinched when I read that bolded sentence? Because truthfully, there’s a not-insignificant part of me who wants to be that “mommy” doing Owen’s laundry on Friday nights while he tells me all about his week at school, as though college was just a sleep-away version of high school. As though nothing had really changed.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with young people intentionally choosing schools closer to home, staying home and working, or any number of other arrangements—it can make sense for all kinds of practical and emotional and developmental reasons. All three of Owen’s older brothers have come and gone liberally in their first few years after high-school graduation, and yes, I’ve occasionally done their laundry and even made them meatloaf.

But I’ve had enough lengthy (ohmygoshsolengthy) conversations with Owen about his school options to get a strong sense that it’s not actually what he wants. The excitement in his voice when he talks about the further-away schools is unmistakably more compelling then the tone he uses when the closer-to-home option. He’s a little wary, but ready for the discomfort—and what’s more, he wants the challenge.

The truth is, this college visit was just as much for me as it was for Owen, and it wasn’t really about sightseeing—it was about foreseeing a new way of being. I needed to fall in love with a future in which my fourth son spreads his wings and flies father and a little more decisively than his brothers did at his age; a future in which his younger sister is the only child I see on a regular basis; a down-the-road future, fact, in which they’ve all dispersed to their own grown-up lives removed geographically and logistically from mine.

So maybe lying on a sofa and fighting my way through illness was the more appropriate way for me to experience Houghton this time around. If I’d been feeling better, it might have been fun to drag Owen to all the places I want him to see…but then again, if he chooses to attend Tech, he’ll have plenty of chances to get to know the area on his own terms, under his own steam.

Who knows? Maybe one day in the near future, it’ll be Owen giving me a tour of his city: the place where he learned to fight through the unfamiliar, make his own way, and find out what he was really capable of all along.

Happy Sunday, friends! Before you go, you might want to check out these links:

• Learn about the Keweenaw Peninsula and Houghton area via this episode of The Tea’s Made with local author T. Marie Bertineau.

• Sarah and I discussed Owen’s college decision-making process at length in this recent episode of The Mom Hour.

• If you’re a paid subscriber, make sure you don’t miss this week’s So-Slow Book Club thread (can you believe we’ve already done an entire season together?)

Have a wonderful day & week to come.