Parents Weekend is that long-standing college ritual in which parents, who dropped their freshmen off just weeks earlier, get to return to campus and see the kids in their new habitat and assure themselves that they are just fine.
Four years later, and this was a different kind of parent's weekend.
I went to visit my daughter Jessie at Penn State before the clock ticks down on her college years, and I discovered the young woman she is when she is outside my sphere of influence.
Her secrets are safe with me, but I spent a good part of my time with her observing her habitat -- she lives in a house now, not a closet-sized dorm room -- and trying to see what it would tell me about her.
"Consider it an anthropological study," a friend said before I left.
The common rooms of the house were decorated in a style you might call "Early Empty Liquor Bottle and Big Screen TV." No surprise. When I went to visit my son Joe last year at the house he shares with fellow military officers, it was the same milieu.
It was in their private spaces -- their bedrooms -- where my children revealed themselves to me in the ways only a nest can communicate.
Their rooms were impossibly neat, and it was a total shock.
When Jessie is home, her discarded clothing is ankle-deep on the floor of her room and the bathroom is crowded with bottles of every kind of hair and skin polish.
When Joe is home, he sleeps on the couch because he can't open the door of his bedroom for all the junk that is behind it.
I thought it was my fault that they were so messy.
My husband and I were the kind of parents who carried our children's forgotten lunches and forgotten homework to school, rather than let them go hungry or suffer a bad grade.
We cleaned and picked up after them because we believed that their schoolwork and their sports deserved their undivided attention. They never had to scramble for a clean uniform. They never fell, exhausted, into a messy bed.
Later, when they made these pig-sty visits home, we figured we had only ourselves to blame. Our maid and butler routine had produced careless, oblivious adults, we concluded.
What, then, is the explanation for their perfectly appointed bedrooms? For a color-coded, annotated calendar above the computer desk? For the thoughtfully arranged wardrobe closets? For the carefully lettered file folders?
A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Who are you, and what have you done with my kids?
The explanation is probably pretty simple. Once they realized mom and dad were no longer on hand to pick up after them, they had to do it themselves if they were going to create the kind of orderly environment to which they were accustomed.
That instinct must not travel well, because it never came home with them.
But it is more than the neatness that was startling to me.
Jessie painted her walls colors she never saw at home, and decorated with fabrics unlike anything I would have chosen. And I saw in those colors not a repudiation or a rebellion, but a kind of blossoming.
I saw the same unexpected metamorphosis in my son's refrigerator. Fruits? Vegetables? Who knew?
This is a time in our children's lives when they set up privacy screens beyond which parents are not supposed to see -- just as they did in adolescence with their cell phones and their IMs.
But this is a real world, with furniture and window treatments and color schemes. Organization, priorities. There are clues here, too, that go beyond wall paint and neat beds.
Observing my children in their new habitat, I saw a self-assurance about them as they moved in a world I hadn't created for them. A comfort in their own skin in a new place.
One more thing I noticed about these new spaces my children have created for themselves.
They have pictures of each other in them.
susan.reimer@baltsun.com