She’s Ready for College. Her Country Is Coming Apart.
College applications shouldn’t require a safety map of where her body is still protected.
by Dana DuBois, Director of Editorial and Booking
My firstborn daughter nearly died at 15 months old.
Or so it seemed.
One moment she was warm and nursing in my arms; the next, she went slack and blueish, her body unresponsive. I remember the terrible stillness of her, the way time warped as I cried out her name, tapping her cheeks and dialing 911 with shaking hands while the world narrowed to her tiny, inert body.
In the eternity of those few seconds, I saw the forever of my life ahead without her.
And then she startled awake. Breath returned, color returned — and life returned. Hers and mine. Doctors ruled it an afebrile seizure: frightening, but harmless, they said. Babies do this sometimes, they said. Sure they do, I thought.
She recovered in minutes. I never entirely did.
Back then, the fear was medical — sudden, acute, and contained. Now she’s newly eighteen, preparing to leave home in the normal, expected, even joyous way — and the fear feels different. It’s not her body betraying her.
It’s her country.
What does it mean as a mother to launch a daughter into adulthood in a nation where reproductive rights are being dismantled in real time? Where women in red states are prosecuted for miscarriages? Where teenagers are forced into motherhood because legislators believe their bodies are public property?
Have I prepared her enough for this world?
I’ve been so consumed with helping her get ready — the college tours, the portfolios, the paperwork — that I forgot to notice I’m still standing on the ground, watching her rise.
And only now, as everything begins lining up, do I realize I haven’t tracked the part where she leaves me, leaves our home. She’ll also leave the blue bubble of our city and the fragile sense of safety I’ve tried to build around her — a safety I’ve felt eroding every single day of the past year under Trump 2.0, when every news cycle forces recalibration. Every week, the map of where she can safely exist gets redrawn.
I’m wildly proud of her. But under the pride sits something still and heavy. It’s a grief and a fear I haven’t had space—or stability—to process yet.
Because the space has been filled. Packed, actually.
With applications and deadlines and a thousand small tasks I convinced myself were “the important part.” And they are. But they also became a place to pour my energy so I didn’t have to acknowledge what preparing her for adulthood actually means in 2026.
Her high school counselor advised parents not to help. “It’s on them,” he said, as if teenagers naturally understand FAFSA leverage or how student loans can shadow them into middle age—as if choosing a college is just about dorm size and dining halls, not about whether the state criminalizes reproductive healthcare.
Respectfully, absolutely not.
This is the last major decision her father and I will help shape. After this, she’s free to consult us only if she chooses to. College is the final act of parenting a child.
And in America right now, it’s also a political survival exercise.
For months, I’ve been in motion: researching colleges, booking tours, nagging her about portfolio deadlines, driving her to National Portfolio Day, comparing programs and scholarship formulas. I’ve overseen SAT prep, art lessons, and the endless FAFSA forms.
I’ve also been teaching her how to drive, how to cook something other than noodles, how to budget, how credit scores work, and how to book doctor’s appointments, as well as managing milestones and paperwork and politics and excitement and dread.
And because we’re living under Trump 2.0, I’ve had to teach her so much more. She’s had to learn how to recognize a safe state versus one that wants control of her womb—which campuses truly offer access to reproductive care, and which ones would criminalize her for needing it. I never imagined that part of launching my daughter would involve reading state-by-state analyses of bodily autonomy.
Then there are her queer friends, the ones who would be legally erased in half the states she’s considering. She has to assess not just academic fit but whether she’ll live in a place that doesn’t see her friends as fully human.
Then this week, we watched in horror as federal enforcement turned fatal even for U.S. citizens, with Renee Good’s recent murder by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. When raw force can touch anyone it begs the question: is any state safe, anymore?
I used to worry about alcohol and campus parties.
Now it’s different. I fear for whether a doctor will treat her if she’s miscarrying. Or whether some “your body, my choice” boy—the kind increasingly common among her Gen Z male peers—will feel entitled to harm her and face no consequences.
The statistics were brutal even when I was her age, with about one in four women experiencing sexual assault before graduation. Today the numbers aren’t better, but the political landscape is worse. Way, way worse. In many red states, laws protect perpetrators and punish victims. Universities bury reports. Men walk away. Women don’t.
And then there’s the question of distance. Yes, it’s always hard for parents to let their babies fly far away from home. But I’m not thinking about homesickness.
I’m thinking: if the U.S. ends up at war, how quickly can I reach her? How quickly can she reach me? It all feels surreal, even as I know the concern isn’t hypothetical.
She’s applied to schools in Ireland and Canada too, because stability and affordability seems easier to locate across borders than within our own. These countries offer abortion access, universal healthcare, and political sanity. Both offer something America currently cannot: the promise that a young woman’s body won’t be used as a political bargaining chip.
Part of me wonders: is it safer for her to put down roots abroad?
To build a life in a country that could eventually grow to feel like home?
Or is the distance itself dangerous — a fault line that could widen if the U.S. fractures further? What happens if our family ends up on literal opposite sides of a war? What does it mean to “launch” one’s child into adulthood when the geopolitical ground is shifting under all of us?
It’s one thing to let your child go.
It’s another to let them go in a country that feels like it’s unraveling.
“Go work on your drawing.”
She rolls her eyes—the Billie Eilish half-lidded stare, but with more depth than attitude. I don’t blame her. I’m the mother who put the artist in a rigorous STEM magnet school. “For the opportunities,” I told myself. “For the foundation,” I told her. Both were true. And also: it was hard.
Physics nearly broke her junior year. Her friends breezed through it. She didn’t. She hated that she didn’t.
She comes by it honestly. I nearly failed physics too — doodling rockets and Bowie lyrics in the margins, hoping creativity counted for something. She fought harder than I ever did. She earned that B-minus point by point. It’s the grade I’m proudest of — because it cost her something.
Physics isn’t her language. Art is.
But my daughter is practical. She loves expensive skincare and UGG boots and financial stability. She doesn’t want the starving artist life. She thinks a business degree might be safer. And maybe it is. But when I remind her that creative business jobs exist — like design management, user experience, branding — she softens, just a little.
I give her options. Exposure. Encouragement.
And then step back enough for her to hear her own voice.
I want to embolden her enough that she can still decide what’s right for her, even through the political chaos.
She’s close.
Not fully decided, not fully ready — but close in a way that’s unmistakable.
Sometimes I think she was always ready.
When she was eighteen months old, her nanny handed me a piece of paper like treasure. “Have you seen this?” she asked.
I glanced at the page: a circle.
Our house was full of kiddo scribbles, so I shrugged. “The circle?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a perfect circle. I’ve never seen a child her age draw one like this.”
I looked again. Really looked. There it was — that steadiness, that precision, that quiet concentration she carried even then. A signal flare of who she was becoming.
She’s always known how to draw her own boundaries. Her own lines. Her own future.
And yet I think about the broader circles that have shaped my own life. Roe v. Wade came into law just as I did, a boundary drawn to protect women. A line around autonomy. By the time my daughters were running across school playgrounds, that line was already being erased. They’re coming of age just as the country slides backwards, state by state, dismantling protections my generation assumed were permanent.
Her perfect toddler circle was a symbol of steadiness — but the circles shaping women’s rights in this country are anything but.
It’s a circle, but not the kind my daughter drew back then. Not whole. Not steady. It’s a perfectly awful one — progress and regression looping in on itself.
By the time we see real progress again, my daughters will likely be in late middle-age, as I am now. They’ll be past their reproductive years, past the point where those rights could have protected them.
And still, my daughter has always known how to draw her future. I just wish her country would stop trying to erase it.
My child has received large scholarships to two top design schools. Not a free ride—these places cost a small fortune — but enough to put them into feasible range. And there’s the confidence boost: it’s not just me or her friends telling her she’s talented. These schools are willing to put real money behind it.
I’m elated. I’m relieved. I’m thrilled for her.
She’s still not sure what to do.
So I congratulate her. I tell her how proud I am. And then, because humor is our glue, I add, “You really do need to get at least one rejection or you’re going to turn into a complete asshole.”
She laughs. But I can see the weight of the decision sitting behind her eyes. I hope she knows I see it too — and that in sharing it, I’m trying to lighten it.
For now, I’m building the spreadsheet. We’ll compare financial-aid packages, calculate realistic numbers, and wait for the last few decisions. Then we’ll weigh the political circumstances, as every week brings new horrors. By the time we need to make a final decision in March, who knows where we’ll be as a country.
There’s no commitment yet, no orientation schedule, no dorm shopping list, no physical evidence of her leaving. Which means the grief hasn’t arrived.
Right now we’re in the liminal space where everything is possible and nothing is final. It feels like standing in an airport staring at a departures board: her flight is up there somewhere, but the gate number hasn’t posted.
Until it does, we’re here — laughing, waiting, arguing about shoes and majors and UGG boots and life.
I’m eager for her decision.
But the moment she feels lighter, I know the mama grief will know where to find me.
My fear for our country already has.
I sometimes think about that moment when she turned blue in my arms, when the universe tilted and I thought I was losing my daughter for real, the kind of loss that swallows everything.
Now nearly 17 years after that moment, I know I’m about to lose her. But this is the loss I signed up for as a mom.
This isn’t the grief I imagined then. It’s not devastation. It’s pride. It’s delight. It’s watching her step into herself.
Eventually, she’ll choose a school. She’ll pack a car or a suitcase or a few too many cardboard boxes. She’ll leave behind the room with the messy desk and the half-finished sketches and the closet she always meant to organize. And for the first time in eighteen years, her daily orbit will shift beyond the walls of this house.
I’ll pretend to rearrange furniture or sort laundry, but really I’ll just be standing in the doorway, adjusting to the echo.
This isn’t the catastrophic grief of losing a child.
This is the quieter grief of launching a daughter into a country where her rights are not guaranteed.
She’ll still be mine in all the ways that matter. She just won’t be down the hall.
I can only hope she’ll land somewhere her body is still hers.
Greetings!
I’m Dana DuBois, a GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest with a whole lot of little words to share. I’m the co-host of The Daily Whatever Show and Editorial & Booking Director here at Blue Amp Media. I write across a variety of topics but parenting, music and pop culture, relationships, and feminism are my favorites. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.
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(Paying for college is expensive!)
My daughter is an OBGYN. She suggests parents encourage their daughters to have an IUD installed before attending college, especially, if they are in a red state with a ban on reproductive rights. It protects them so they have choices. Either that or attend college in a state where there are protective laws for reproductive health choices.
Consider sending her overseas. Give her the future she deserves. America is finished