Brigitte Bowers: Are college campuses the new vacation resorts?

I was supposed to cry when my husband, Matt, and I dropped our son Casey off at Challenger Hall, his university dorm, about 400 miles south of our home.

That morning, as we prepared to say goodbye, he suggested we say our farewells in the parking lot. We had, after all, already seen his room the day before. Matt wanted to prolong our departure, to see our son settled in the dorm one last time before starting the seven-hour drive home. But I wanted a clean break, the quick hug and final wave as Casey trudged away, his backpack the last thing we’d see as he turned the corner.

It was two against one, and so we said goodbye in the parking lot.

“Mind your manners,” I hollered as Casey walked toward Challenger Hall.

And then Casey disappeared, and we drove away from the university.

I waited for the tears to come, but instead I just felt a quick tug at my heart as we left our firstborn to fend for himself in a city of over 3 million people.

On the way home, I worried about my lack of motherly instinct. Was I so devoid of tenderness that I could abandon my child on a strange university campus, right in the midst of an urban jungle 400 miles from home, without so much as a single tear of regret?

But then it occurred to me that I did not feel as though I had just moved my son into a dorm far from home. In fact, I felt sort of bewildered, as though I had expected to drop my son off at a university but had discovered instead that I had transported him to an all-inclusive vacation resort by the sea.

I felt I had, in some vague way, been tricked.

This odd sense of having been victim to a bait-and-switch first occurred the day before, when Casey stayed in his dorm to unpack.

Matt and I that day visited what in the 1980s had been called a student cafeteria, but now, in 2015, is called a restaurant.

The residential dining hall, recently refurbished, included five areas offering various cuisines, but was in no way a typical pretzels-and-soggy-pizza food court. Salmon and stuffed prawns were on the menu. There was a build-your-own hamburger station with half-pound patties, sautéed mushrooms, brioche buns and greens I have seen only in fine dining establishments.

Overseeing it all was a guy that looked a little like Mario Batali. He greeted us at the door, and treated my husband and me as though we were potential investors.

“We’re also remodeling a few of our other restaurants,” he told us. “One place will have fire-baked pizza and deliver anywhere on campus.”

Where is the character-building hardship, the greasy french fries and rubbery scrambled eggs that used to be predominant features of the undergraduate experience?

What if Casey liked it so much that he never wanted to leave? Could such luxuries turn him into one of those perennial students roaming the dorm halls at 28, forever just a few credits shy of graduation?

Later, we walked around campus with Casey, past cascading fountains, a Jamba Juice, a bookstore with a Perk’s Cafe and a sushi restaurant. Then we toured the rooftop garden, with a view of the ocean, above the sixth floor of a dorm near Casey’s. We visited the recreation pools, the climbing gym and, finally, the beach.

We left Casey on Sunday. Six hours later, having safely navigated our way through Southern California, my husband and I stopped at a diner near Bakersfield, where I ate a salad made with iceberg lettuce and some unripe tomatoes.

Still, I waited for the flood of emotion a mother should experience after dropping her child off at college for the first time, but I was preoccupied with images of my son eating fire-baked calzones and frolicking on the beach.

I wasn’t sad. I was jealous.

That night, Casey called to tell me about the surfing he had been doing all afternoon. He couldn’t stay on the phone for long, though. He had a concert to attend.

Since then, he has joined the sailing team. He has, he told me, been to the beach every day.

To be fair, I have seen evidence that my son is attending an institution of higher learning. I know for a fact that he bought books. There was a late-night request to send him his graphing calculator. During one phone conversation, he mentioned that he had to print out a syllabus.

So, the hardships will come. The 10-page essays due in one week. The nights spent studying until his head begins to droop and he wakes up five hours later, still sitting at his desk. The first calculus pop quiz, given at 8 a.m. on a Monday. I will feign sympathy when he calls home with these stories, but I’m pretty sure a part of me will be relieved that, finally, my son is in college.

This story was originally published October 16, 2015 at 11:49 AM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Are college campuses the new vacation resorts?."