Homesick

I am sitting in bed, watching an inflatable bat that is hanging from the ceiling spin slowly in circles, and this particular bat is making me very homesick.

My mother brought me my inflatable bat—along with some fake spider web and a skeleton that looks like he is spending all of his afterlife tripping on acid—this past weekend during their visit. My mom and dad, as well as an estimated four thousand six hundred other parents, descended upon the campus last weekend for Family Weekend.

“I thought you might like these—since you love to decorate so much,” she giggled with a wink, as she pulled the Halloween decorations out of the duffle bag of goodies my parents brought me. We spent the next hour oohing and awing over my loot, and turning my taupe colored dorm into a very, very small haunted house.

In many respects, my family’s first Family Weekend was a lot like Christmas. Not just because my dad looks eerily like Santa (I actually thought he was Santa when I was little because he had a workshop and wore lots of red around Christmas. He wears the red, I later found out, because so many children stop and ask him is he is the real Santa Clause.), but also because of all of the great presents, the wonderful food, and the company of family. It may have been the happiest day of my life when my parents told me that their goal was to treat me to all the food I normally couldn’t afford on a student budget.

It was wonderful to have my parents around again—even for a little bit. I have struggled to really talk to them over the phone when one or the other of us is always running off to deal with something. It is proving surprisingly tough to synch separate lives. So, l loved having them be a part of my life for a few days, and to be able to have complete, face-to-face, conversations with them. I missed them.

But, eventually we ran out of talks to attend and pictures to share, and the weekend drew to a close. After very long hugs, and three our four attempts to say goodbye, they loaded the car and drove away. And, perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the entire weekend was not how much I had missed my family, but was how I was ok when they left. Once they were gone, I simply walked back to my dorm, chatted with my roommate, and once again dove into the large pile of homework waiting for me at the foot of my bed.

They say you don’t realize how much you change until you revisit the places you came from. I would say the same holds true when those places visit you. It feels like I have been in college for a lot longer than a few months. I have gotten into the swing of my classes, I am starting to build lasting friendships, and I have even come to refer to the dorm as home (sometimes).

I would say I have begun to form a makeshift family at CU. My roommate has gone home this weekend, and I realized that I feel her absence most acutely of all. It is nice to have someone who will be there to ask you how your day went, and to listen to you rant about some impossible assignment or annoying kid in class. I miss having someone to say goodnight to. I believe my biggest change since arriving here has been that I no longer think I am here to “become my own person”, but instead to become a person who understands how we all support each other.