Ah, family weekend. The weekend of glorious reunions, smiling faces, free dinners, and hiding elicit substances from family members. Every year, colleges across the country invite student’s family members for a few brief days. Activities are laid out; the student bands break out their instruments, and the smiling faces are planted on people’s faces. While family weekend tends to be a joyous event, not every student is so lucky.
Not all of us students have our parents with us anymore. Many families don’t have the financial means to fly out to visit, some have poor home situations that don’t lead to visitations, and we have many international students that must say goodbye to their families for much longer periods of time. To those less lucky individuals, every smiling face you see is bittersweet. It is so fun to see the resemblances of parents and children. Some faces just “make sense” when you see them next to their elder counterparts, but when everyone else is out shopping or hanging out with their parents it's hard not to miss your own.
The ones without parents, myself included, tend to brush of the questions, “Are your parents coming this weekend?” Usually with a smile, I brush it off: “No, not this year.” I don’t resent the students with families, rather I just miss mine. I lost my dad my senior year of high school, and while walking towards the pool for practice this weekend I found myself tearing up. I walked on, hoping no one would see the redness in my eyes.
I wished that he could walk across campus as I showed him a tour like the girl I saw across the street from me. I wanted to post a picture on Instagram with me as we explored the Colorado Springs area. I wanted to SnapChat him struggling on the incline. I wanted to introduce him to my friends. I thought about how excited he would have been to see me compete for CC, how proud he would have been of my studies; and of course he most likely would have liked to gotten a chance to embarrass me and light up the room with his with his signature chuckle.
Parents weekend does come with a few benefits though: the food gets better, there’s a couple free picnics, and you can usually coerce a friend into bringing you out for a nice dinner. The students without visiting families (usually the people that aren’t freshmen) stick together and ignore much of the surrounding festivities. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate family weekend, in fact, I think CC does an incredible job of welcoming in families from all across the country. They do a great job of keeping people entertained, and the free food is always a welcome benefit.
After surviving two years of family weekends alone I can honestly say that it’s not the end of the world. Overall, it’s fairly easy to just avoid the big reminders, and I know that my mom and siblings would have loved to come; it’s just so hard to get all the way out to Colorado. It’s not even a huge deal, just an unfortunate reminder for myself and I’m sure a few others.
While I may be family-less through these weekends I am so unbelievably lucky to have friends at CC that I can fall back on. Though my biological family is not here, I know that my CC family is always here to back me up, so in a way every weekend is family weekend with them by my side.
