I remember clearly the bundle of emotion I was when my first daughter left home two years ago. She was going to college in a neighboring town and could have easily lived at home while attending. But she was ready for independence.

So she embraced the responsibilities that come with adulthood and moved out to be on her own. I cried — a lot — and still tear up from time to time for no explicable reason when I think about it.

Recently, I moved my second daughter (Emily) into her dorm room at the University of Maine at Farmington, about an hour and 15 minutes from our home. Even though she still keeps her room at home and promises she may come home on weekends and will certainly spend her school vacations with us, I still cried when I hugged her goodbye and left her to her own devices, ready to start her new life chapter.

Emily realized at a young age that growing up was overrated. Throughout her life, she has met each milestone with trepidation and resistance and this only worsened as she approached adulthood. While her older sister could hardly wait to be a grown-up, Emily was content with childhood and dug her heals into life in a feeble attempt to halt time.

In fact, my favorite childhood Emily story to tell is exactly about her trying to come to terms with the passage of time. The summer after she completed kindergarten, she busied her five-year-old self with collecting. She carried a small box with her everywhere, slowly filling it with odd items — a screw she might have found in the driveway, a wire she snagged from her father’s workbench, a roll of duct tape she stole from the junk drawer. Eventually, curiosity made us ask her what she planned to do with the items, to which she replied, “I’m building a time machine so I can go back to kindergarten.”

Kicking and screaming — it’s how she came into this life, and it’s apparently how she plans to travel through it.

So, as summer progressed and we bought all of the things you think your child needs for college — towels, a microwave and a year’s supply of ramen noodles — Emily’s rising anxiety level had her becoming less and less pleasant. The week before the big move-in day, she was nearly unbearable. As we finalized paperwork and selectively packed her room, she let everyone in the house know in one way or another that all was far from right in her world.

What does growing up really mean, anyway? I’m sure Emily has considered this many times through the years. Does it have to be the disaster she built it up in her head to be? I mean, is having responsibilities such as going to classes or working or paying bills really all that bad? I suppose it can be.

There’s this pressure teens feel to make these big life choices at her age, and the implication of how important decisions like what you want to be when you grow up can be daunting. I have always told my kids to make sure they do something with their lives that will make them happy.

Happiness trumps a big income, in my opinion. When I was 18, though, I had no idea what would make me happy. Emily, who loves the stage, is majoring in theater because, thus far in her young life, that is what she has found that makes her happy. And that will probably change a few times as she discovers herself.

I hope Emily learns in college that she can stop fighting with Father Time. It’s a useless battle, after all. Time will pass, and things will change, and there is little we can do to stop that. I hope she learns to welcome change in her life. I hope she makes friends who will be with her through some of this change and who will help her adjust into her fresh life.

The thing about Emily, though, is that she always does adjust. As much as she resists change, she’s quick to adapt once she’s forced to confront the change.

Saturday morning we arrived at the University of Maine in Farmington with hundreds of other students and parents. The campus was alive with activity. Cars lined the sides of the streets with police directing traffic. Dozens of student workers donning green shirts lifted laundry baskets and mini-fridges out of opened car trunks to carry up to rooms in imposing brick buildings.

In her dorm, we deposited the personal items Emily had chosen to bring with her — a guitar, a ukulele, a record player, some of her massive collection of vinyls, a dozen or so posters and her clothes. The walls were stark, and an old cast iron heater register took up an entire corner of the room that was about half the size of the room she has all to herself at home.

Her dad tried to move the furniture around to make the best use of the space. There were two of everything. Two twin beds, two dressers, two bookshelves, and two desks. Ultimately, Emily and her roommate decided to bunk the beds and to slide the dressers into their closets. We helped her unpack a little, but soon it was time to go.

I hugged her, kissed her cheek and cried just a little. We knew she had a busy orientation schedule and so we left, hoping for the best. Her father and I drove home, knowing the house would feel a little more empty and understanding, but avoiding saying, that maybe we, too, had been resisting this change.

At about midnight, Emily texted me in the first communication I’d received from her all day. I had wanted her to ask me to stay, or at least to call me as I was driving away. But here it was, well more than 12 hours after I said goodbye, and she texted me to say she was doing fine. A boy in the room next door was really nice. She and her roommate were watching movies with him, and a girl who sat next to her at the dorm meeting had told her she was “really pretty.” I cried again while my husband snored in the bed beside me, but this time it was because I knew she was going to be OK.

Monica Pettengill Jerkins is a staff writer in the Sun Journal’s Norway bureau.