Dad’s view of college: fiscal aches, physical pains

If I have learned anything in the last six years, during which I have had one or both of my daughters in college, it is this: If the tuition bills won’t give you a heart attack, moving your kids into and out of their dorm rooms will.

That is why I am lucky I have lived long enough to say, with severe shortness of breath and quite a bit of chest pain, that I have just moved my younger daughter out of college for the last time.

For a parent, this is the equivalent of winning a gold medal in the Olympics. In fact, college moving should be an Olympic sport. (“The judges have all given Jerry Zezima perfect scores of 6.0 for lugging that massive suitcase from the car all the way up to his daughter’s room. Unfortunately, he has collapsed at the finish line.”)

As I said to my wife the first time we took our older daughter, Katie, to college: “By the time both kids are out, we should have this down to a science.” I might have flunked science in college, but I was absolutely right about moving.

The mistake parents make when their children are freshmen is overdoing it. Before Katie went to school, my wife took her shopping and bought enough stuff to clothe, feed and pamper quintuplets. (Imagine five kids in college!) Then we rented a vehicle the size of a condominium to accommodate everything.

By the time our younger daughter, Lauren, was in college, we simply used our own cars -- my wife’s and mine and, after she got her driver’s license, Lauren’s. That means we used three vehicles. Sometimes it still wasn’t enough.

Over the years, my wife and I learned the following Rules of College Moving.

Rule No. 1: Choose a parking space that is actually closer to your house than it is to your child’s dormitory or apartment.

Rule No. 2: Choose an elevator that is not working. After waiting for half an hour, you must fight other parents to cram into the building’s only working elevator, which is required by federal law to smell like a can of sardines.

Rule No. 3: If you are a father, you must lug the heaviest stuff up to your child’s room, dump it there and go back for more. After you have brought everything up, you should seek medical attention while your wife makes the bed, decorates the room and puts everything where she thinks it should go. After you leave, your child will put everything where it really should go -- on the floor.

Rule No. 4: If it is the end of the school year, see Rule No. 3 and do the opposite.

Rule No. 5: Drive back home. This trip should be made in silence. The only communication between spouses should involve cursing.

In six years, my wife and I made 16 trips to and from college, eight for each daughter. On the last one, as I was lugging one of Lauren’s suitcases out to the car, I passed another father who was going back up to his daughter’s room. “This is it,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “She’s a senior. Thank God.” I nodded knowingly and said, “We survived.”

Now all that’s left is to pay off those tuition bills. I don’t know if my heart can take it.