For many of us, Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the holiday season. Trips home during this time can be awkward and uncomfortable for the college student who is begging to grow up.
We realize that we’ve started to lead separate lives for ourselves and while we’re grateful for our families during the holidays, it can be challenging to find where our individual and familial identities converge.
In college, we begin to build our network of families with friends we recruit and new experiences in which we choose to engage. Going home can be bittersweet, as we see the cutting juxtaposition between the familiar and what we now experience in our day-to-day lives — the old bedroom that our parents maintain, preserving memories from decaying until we return home, against the small space that houses the furniture we bought and the roommate we chose. Whenever we return home from college, whether it be for a four-day holiday weekend or the summer after graduation, we can feel like strangers — visitors — in our own homes.
It’s a paradoxical situation to be in, as the definition of “home” relies less on where we are, but where we are not: When we’re in school, home feels like where Mom and Dad live. When we’re with Mom and Dad, home feels like where our campus life is. Maintaining the delicate balance between the lives we built with our families years before we entered college and the lives we maintain independent of them can be challenging. What is one supposed to do with the overreaching, but well intentioned, mother who orders for her daughter at restaurants? Or, the parent who insists on washing, drying and folding his or her son’s laundry? While their actions stem from the kindness of their hearts and perhaps even out of a longing to have us back at home, they remind us of the children we no longer are and the lives we no longer lead.
If we haven’t already, we realize at some point in college that we’re a little different from our parents. Our values are a little different and our politics can differ slightly from those of our parents. We’ve acquired a different intelligence, a different framework through which to understand the world. Our former kid-selves seem foreign to our adult-selves whenever we visit our families for the holidays. And yet we recoil whenever we see new pieces of furniture replace the worn-in pieces we loved and the kitchen appliances Mom has stored away. The paradox continues when we realize that our parents’ lives — the lives of our brothers and sisters — haven’t stopped progressing after we’ve moved away.
That certainly doesn’t make us appreciate our families less, though — the green chili stew Dad makes every Thanksgiving or the sugar butter cookies Mom makes without reservation. The trickiest part of growing up is finding the balance between cherishing the lives with our families and continuing to build our own lives. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
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