SAN DIEGO • For weeks leading up to the big day, friends who had endured the ritual called with wellness checks. They asked how I was holding up. I’d say: “Fine for now. Check with me after it’s over.”

“It” was the emotionally packed experience of my wife and I moving our oldest child to college. My friends warned it was like dropping off your kid at preschool for their first day — multiplied by 10.

Our destination was Seattle, which is about 1,000 miles from our home in Southern California. Three people were booked on the two-hourand-15-minute flight to the Emerald City, but only two were confirmed to come back. What kind of parents visit a lovely place, then leave their kid behind?

As the pair of overworked and unpaid employees of the Mom & Dad Moving Company were busy hauling suitcases, emptying packages and tossing out empty boxes, a few phrases raced through my mind: “It’s normal. This is the natural way of things. It’s going to be OK.”

Of course, there was also the friend who recently reported that, after she dropped off her only child at college a few hundred miles from her home, she broke down and sobbed.

I wondered if that was how my wife and I would react when we said goodbye to our daughter.

I’ve been on the other side of this ordeal.

The voice in my head was right about one thing: Part of this is natural. It’s natural that children want to get away from home. I did it at 18. In the fall of 1985, I couldn’t wait to leave behind the small, dusty farm town in Central California where I grew up.

When I left for college, I headed east — as far as I could possibly go without getting my feet wet in the Atlantic Ocean.

Cards on the table. I have grown to love my hometown. I’m immensely grateful for the upbringing it gave me. But I also know where Bruce Springsteen was coming from when he wrote his classic anthem “Thunder Road.” The song ends with a nod to his hometown, Freehold, N.J.: “It’s a town full of losers/i’m pulling out of here to win.”

My grandmother Esperanza was not an easy sell. In a gesture steeped in Catholicism and superstition, my father sought her blessing for me to attend Harvard. She refused. “Why does mijo have to go far — tan lejos?” she asked. “There are good colleges here, in California, close to his family.”

My dad played the strongest card one can play in a Mexican American family. He told his mother that I wanted to go to “la escuela adónde fueron los Kennedys” — the school where the Kennedys went. Camelot casts a magic spell on Mexican grandmothers. I got the blessing.

In college, I traveled home to Central California and visited high schools to recruit other Mexican Americans to go to school in Cambridge. I often struck out with Mexican fathers who wouldn’t let their daughters go to college far from home — especially with good schools like Stanford or the University of California at Berkeley just a short drive up the highway.

Now I’m a father. In Seattle, as we had our last meal together for a while at a Thai restaurant a 6-minute walk from her dorm room, my wife told my daughter that we want our kids to go as far as their dreams and desires take them.

My wife, a vagabond, was born in Mexico, attended high school in the United States, went back to Mexico for college, then returned to the United States to obtain two master’s degrees.

But now that she’s a mom, despite what she told our daughter, she sees things differently.

On the drive to the airport after dropping off our little girl, she described what she was feeling as akin to the sensation one might feel “when someone rips off a piece of your heart and throws it in the wind, after which it lands in the street and it gets run over by a car.” That’s colorful.

Getting away from home is natural.

What is unnatural, it turns out, is leaving your child in a foreign environment, surrounded by strangers, and casually walking away — albeit with tears in your eyes.