A roundabout move out

What goes around comes around. And sometimes, you end up going around and around and around.

That’s how I felt last week, when I pulled up to bring D2 (daughter #2) home from college and she informed me that first, we were just going to make a quick detour to help an international student take her mattress to storage. Is this your friend? Not really. How do you know her? She posted on a listserve that she needed help, and I knew you’d say yes.

She then reversed the appropriate directional flow of intergenerational guilt, daughter reminding mom that she owed the world this service to repay for the many times she needed assistance as a Lone Soldier in the IDF. In those tough years, with my baby overseas and me unable to help her out or even welcome her home with a pot of chicken soup, many generous people gave her rides, meals, Shabbat invitations, and yes, lots of soup. When she extended her service following 10/7 instead of taking her planned 10/20 discharge, a former New Jersey neighbor who had made aliyah drove through rocket fire to fetch her from base on a day off. We are eternally grateful to these incredible mitzvah mamas and papas, extending themselves to help my kid.

So off we went, armed with an empty minivan, to find the student from Romania and take her mattress to offsite storage. It didn’t take D2, a Turkish girl from Dubai, and me long to bring it down from their dorm. Once we flattened all the seats and filled the cabin, we faced the problem of how we would transport Romania and Turkey. I drew on my seatbelt-and-rules-free ’80s childhood and let them ride lying on the bed. After driving 15 minutes or so off campus, we arrived at the storage and stowed our cargo.

Back to campus we went, noticing that dinner service was nearly over. We stopped at the Center for Jewish Life for a quick meal. After dinner D2 broke the news — she still hadn’t packed. And she had promised additional moving services.

At least I wasn’t dodging rocket fire.

We sent D2 back to her dorm to start packing, and headed to our next stop, Romania’s boyfriend’s place, for a futon couch. FYI, he’s from Long Island. Driveable. Fine. He was on his way to a final, so he dropped it nearby and Romania and I got it into the back. But we weren’t done yet. We now headed to pick up yet another mattress (these kids and their sleeping!) from somewhere very far off campus. Perhaps only a 10-minute ride, but I had now been there more than two hours and not so much as a single sock of my daughter’s had been loaded up.

Finally we arrived at Bed #3, buried deep in the extremely unfinished basement of an extremely tiny, crowded, old, dirty flop house for lacrosse players. Remember “Animal House”? It was the Ritz Carlton compared to this place. The stairs’ treads looked to be hewn by George Washington, who crossed the Delaware not far from here. We three ladies could barely move the mattress from the corner of the cellar. Ever resourceful, Romania texted the team. We had to wait a bit, but three athletes straight from practice showed up and through sheer force got that sucker up the stairs and into the car. A neighbor’s dog, off leash, barked raucously as they shoved it in, causing a panic attack in my adopted daughters.

Unfortunately, there was not even air space left above the cargo, so the girls played rock-paper-scissors to see who got safely transported and who got to ride on the center console. I prayed hard on the way back to the storage facility. And heard a lot about life after communism, including the residual Brutalist buildings (I wondered if they came with storage rooms…).

We arrived after dark, as some very loud wild animal howled at the moon. Naturally one of the half-dozen friends who shared the storage locker had broken the old lock and now had to be reached to get the combo to the new one. More waiting. Eventually, we stored the futon, the mattress, and the rest of our good cheer and headed back toward my daughter’s dorm. On the way, Dubai had the nerve to ask if she could go home. Not so fast! Luckily Romania stepped in to remind her that we were all in this together until D2’s detritus was packed and ready to go.

We found a convenient parking spot on the grass just outside D2’s dorm and rolled our little dolly all the way down the side of the long building to the door. Up the very slow elevator, down another very long hallway, and we arrived at her room to see her finishing up, packing a dead plant, a textbook, and a bottle of strawberry lemonade into a Wawa bag. Waaay too many little bags with random assemblages of once-useful items. This was clearly going to take half of eternity to take back along the hallway, down the very slow elevator, and out to the car. I sent Romania to look for a better cart that I had noticed other folks using, back when the sun was shining. Another half dozen Wawa bags made it down by the time she returned with no cart.

She did, however, find three sprinters from the track team! Oh joy! Now we were cooking with gas. In another 20 minutes, our seven-person crew had emptied the heck out of that dorm room.

While they were probably thinking of their summer plans or final grades, I was reflecting on my solidarity with those who had schlepped or served my kid so many times, hoping I had somehow honored their generosity as we drove home into the night.

Laura Fein of Teaneck is a litigator at Eckert Seamans LLC. She is the daughter of the greatest mom ever, who she hopes is reading this, and the mom to five daughters who probably never will. Her podcast Mommash: The Oy and Joy of Family is available on all platforms, and she can be reached at mommash.podcast@gmail.com.

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