Until my son moved into his College Park dorm room last month, I always made his bed before I turned in for the night.

Most parents probably think I’m crazy. “Coddle him, much?” Some might ask.

Maybe I tidied his covers each night because he didn’t always sleep well, and I wanted to give him a good start on a good night’s rest. Maybe I wanted to close out my day by affirming how deeply loved he is. Maybe the love my mother poured into me lives still — from her, to me, to him.

Young adults are supposed to separate, individuate and thrive. Evolution calls for it. So does common sense. But letting go is hard. Adjusting to an empty nest is even harder.

My wife says he kind of prepared us because he was so busy during his senior year — AP classes, JROTC, baseball, marching band, concert band — that we barely saw him.

Two days before his move-in date, she found me on the deck, staring at my coffee. “He still has a lot to pack,” she said.

A current of panicky nausea went through me.

I did not feel prepared.

I was 40 when we married and 41 when our son came along. Before he was born, I was unsure whether fatherhood was for me. For years, I’d protected my independence. Which of my solitary interests would have to go? Reading? Writing? Guitar? Exercise?

But as soon as he emerged, everything changed. A nurse in the delivery room handed the swaddled baby boy to me, and it was all love.

Suddenly, my piddling interests didn’t matter much. I guess I must not have known myself very well after all, because I have loved being a father.

And he’s made it easy. No homework battles. No scrapes with teachers. No problems with peers. His ambitions have been his fuel. (Of course, he’s had disappointments too, including ones he never shared, I’m sure.)

My wife and I weren’t like this as teens. Each of us in our own way were indifferent students who sometimes caused our parents headaches outside school.

So when our son stayed up half the night studying for tests, when he chose friends who reflected his principles, when he barked out commands to lead cadets in the JROTC color guard, when he spent Saturdays working the school-sponsored food pantry, we looked on with wonder and pride.

I miss all the ordinary unscripted moments that knit our days together. I can’t plop down on his bed on a Saturday morning to check in. I can’t high-five him when the Commanders score a touchdown. And after school I don’t get to hear about the baseball coach’s pep talk.

Because I’m a teacher, summers gave us extra time for adventures together, especially when he was little. We toured a Coast Guard cutter docked in the Inner Harbor and pinched our noses in the stinky elephant house at the zoo. We baked a coconut cake and watched YouTube tutorials on how to draw a house with gables. We had epic wrestling matches, inventing goofy names for certain moves: the back-chop, the turtle shell, the rhino bite. Well, this is time’s trick. Memories can feel realer than the truth of the calendar.

Days. Seasons. Years.

Then it was a Sunday in late summer and our SUV was packed. I stepped away from the living room as he sat with our two dogs and spoke to them. What he said, I don’t know.

Outside his dorm, we unloaded the car at the curb beside other parents doing the same. I carried up the mini-fridge and the Keurig and we put his dorm bed on risers. He hung clothes in the closet and set framed photos of friends and family on his desk. Plastic bins were unpacked, stacked inside one another and returned to the car. Up and down the elevator we went, until there was nothing left to carry, and his half of the dorm room was all set up — full really — like his new life here, away from us, had already begun.

Adam Schwartz’s (http://adamschwartzwriter.org) debut collection of stories, “The Rest of the World,” won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2020 prize for fiction. He is a literacy coach with Baltimore City Schools and has taught high school for 26 years.