Spring break is almost upon us, which serves as a welcome relief after nonstop instruction since we arrived back from winter break since SDSU did not give us President’s Day off - but that’s another story. The closer I get to spring break, the more I realize it's becoming less like going home, and more like going to visit family.
My family is actually coming to San Diego for spring break. Initially, the plan was for everyone to meet me down here. I was put off when we first cemented our plans because I wasn’t actually going back home. Once I realized that almost everyone, save my brother, is coming down, I didn’t care anymore. Plans changed, as they usually do, and now I’m flying back home a couple days early and driving back down to San Diego with my family.
Surprisingly, I was a little bummed out by this development. I was confused why I didn't want to go home - but the reason is, I’m already home. As much as I want to deny it, San Diego and SDSU is my home for the time being. My family is coming to visit me at my home instead of vice versa.
I think it occurred to me that this was really home when I realized I know most of the people who work at the market closest to me. I notice when someone is missing. I interact with them on a deeper level than someone who just goes there once a week because I go there at least once a day, if not two or three or even four times. I know the landscape of SDSU, just like my hometown. I know the shortcuts to get places, even if I’m just walking instead of driving. I know where to avoid at what times to dodge the crowds.
Yet as much as it's nice to feel so comfortable SDSU, it's still hard to be away from home. My sister is growing up without me. I try to talk to her as much as I can, but it's obviously different than seeing her in person. I think my experience is a little different than most. I come from an untraditional house dynamic, considering I’m not fully related to any of my siblings and there is a six-year difference between my brother and me, and a ten-year difference between my sister and I.
Most families seem to spread their kids out with two or so years in between each one, and everyone grows up together and leaves the nest in shifts, one after the other. In our house, all the siblings went through vastly different life stages at vastly different times. I was dealing with puberty when my brother graduated from high school. My sister was finished first grade the same time I graduated high school. She is growing up without me - physically, mentally, and emotionally. She is growing into her own person, and I’m not there to be a part of it.
It has become abundantly clear that I wasn’t quite as ready to leave home as I thought I was. There are days when all I want is a hug from my mom - and unfortunately, there is nothing here that can replace that. Maybe I just didn’t fully grasp the implications of the situation. For a while, I think I viewed it as an extended vacation that I would one day return from.
My reasoning was that I used to spend time away from my mother when I went to Canada to visit my father. I spent three or more weeks without her and survived just fine. But this isn’t an extended vacation - this is my segue into adulthood. This is the first step in my transition away from my family life and into having a life of my own separate from my family.
Up until now, my role in life was to be a part of my family: I was my mother and stepfather’s daughter, my brother and sister’s sibling, my dog’s caretaker. Now, at college, I’m just me. I lack a direct association with someone else that can serve as an identity. If everything - whatever that is - goes according to society’s plan, I will never live at home again. I will move straight out of the dorms, into an on-campus apartment, to an off-campus apartment, to wherever I land after graduating from college.
I know the option for me to live at home will always be open to me - my parents would never turn me away if I desperately needed somewhere to stay - but there is also an expectation for me to not come home. Whether you conform to it or not, there is an expected path for American-born middle-class citizens to take. You go to school, get the grades to get into college, graduate with a degree, and enter the workforce. So far, I’m following that path more strictly than anyone in my household.
My mother and stepfather never lived in the dorms when they went to school - they either lived with family or moved into their own places. My brother lived in the dorms for about a year before deciding college wasn’t the place for him. At this rate, I’m heading down the path that’s expected of me.
There’s a slight pressure for me to succeed in the way that my brother didn’t, in the traditional sense. He is successful in his own way, by moving straight into the workforce without a degree - but that is not the way that society deems acceptable. Hopefully, now my younger sister is now able to see multiple avenues for success.
In the long run, when I return home now, it's less like going home and more like visiting my childhood home. I no longer have an active role in that household. I initially got mad when my sister took over my room after I left, but I’ve realized now that if I follow “the plan,” that room will never actually be mine again. Yes, it will be there for me to visit, but it's not my room anymore. I think that by insisting it's still my room, I’ve been leaving the door open for myself to go back, instead of permanently leaving the nest.
I’m slowing moving out of the limbo between feeling stuck between two worlds, but that means I’m almost out of one of them - my world back home, where my family is. Never in my life have I resonated more with the phrase "home is where the heart is." But at the same time, my heart seems to be stuck here almost as much as it is back with my family.
