When in crisis, I write. When the crisis is real, and when it's in my head.

Yesterday -- just after Hurricane Sandy began blowing through northern New Jersey, and just before a transformer blew up and caught fire down the block, and we lost power and phone service -- I was finishing up a long day of editing, and worrying about and missing my older son, a freshman meteorology student. So, I did what I always do -- wrote about it.

I wrote, in part, about the last time there was a hurricane in New Jersey, and we were on vacation in California, and how this time, he's not here either:

In one way, my son is missing it all again—he’s 220 miles to the west. Then again, he’s in the center of everything, watching events unfold on the 45 monitor wall in the Weather Room of his university’s meteorology department, where everyone from the lowliest freshman to graduate students and the department’s top professors are huddled.

“Stay safe,” I begged him. “Don’t wait too long to get back to your dorm.” 

He reminded me first that. as “someone who has watched the Weather Channel every day since the age of two,” he knew all about storm safety and, more important, the windows of that particular room were constructed to withstand a category F5 tornado.

Besides, they were ordering in pizza and chances were good they’d all spend the night there, storm tracking, making predictions. Classes are cancelled, after all.

Here’s where it gets particularly difficult to be the mother of a college student, something I’m just learning. What advice to pour into our cell phone texts and Facebook chats, what to keep to myself, how to bridge the distance between worried Mom and trusting parent, adviser and cheerleader.

You can read the entire essay here.