TAKE A deep breath. Survive one more week of classes, get through finals, and we will be free of academic stress until next semester. Yes, we had a few days off, but Thanksgiving break surely was not long enough to do anything. A highly unscientific survey of University students reveals that the month-long Christmas holiday will send them on ski trips to Colorado, on visits to friends in Europe, and home to points all over the world humming "Songs About Texas." Okay, that last part probably applies only to me, but the point is that nearly all students will be leaving Grounds.
Most of us will be spending at least some time in the company of people who call themselves our families. They're the honorary aunts who make our favorite desserts, the brothers who cheer our chosen sports teams with us, the young nephews who refuse to let us stay in bed. They easily can become the background of our holidays as we recover from the awful rigors of the semester. While we are catching up on sleep, food and our favorite TV shows, we need to remember to catch up with the most important part of home: our families.
I have nothing to add here, except my own saccharine memories. I was always an early-riser, but I never woke the others. I always wanted to spend a few hours alone with my loot. That was the high point for me, being up at 4 a.m., watching the TV stations sign off as I raced my new Hot Wheels against each other.
Disconnection from family is both a necessary aspect of adjusting to college life and an unfortunate consequence of the American system of higher education. It is the unspoken component of the First-Year Experience. While new students are living in this Exciting New Place and meeting all these Exciting New People and doing Exciting New Things like getting fake IDs -- well, maybe not so new -- the warp of their lives has changed substantially. Instead of dodging their parents, they are dodging their RAs and deans. With all they gain, there is also a loss.
Any student living on-Grounds has to confront the alteration soon into his first year. No matter how often mom calls or grandma tries to e-mail, he will detach from the day-to-day life of his family. Hopefully, his fellow members of University will become a kind of second family, as he hears about his roommate's dating problems instead of his younger brother's, and has his meals with friends instead of dinner with his parents.
We say students who make the change without visible stress have transitioned successfully, and consider those who do not to be suffering from excessive homesickness. After all, this process helps to prepare students for adulthoods in which they probably will not live in the same area as their parents and siblings. They no longer spend much time at "home," and it becomes a place for holidays and vacations.
Yet we should not diminish our bonds with relatives and old friends even as we build new relationships. We may not be able to fit our families and our University community around the same table in Newcomb, but they can occupy our minds and hearts without crowding. Now that we are mature enough to live away from our parents -- most of the time, anyway -- they might enjoy being with us more than ever, and vice versa. They may exasperate us by lapsing into treating us like five year olds, but we get to surprise them, and make them proud, by showing that we in fact have profited from our time at the University, not just intellectually but emotionally. Our college experience can improve not only ourselves, but our interactions with family as well.
The key to improving interaction, though, lies in taking an active interest in our family members' individual lives, and the shared life of our family. Just being in the same geographic location as our families does not mean we are actually with them. A student can no more connect with her family by being in the same house than she can connect with the 367 other students in ENGL 383 by being in the same lecture hall.
We need to talk to our families, going beyond "pass the beans" to finding out the details and small stories that have composed their lives for the last several months. Our siblings' new friends, our parents' new interests -- yes, they too can change! -- should become as real and important in our minds as the particulars of our suitemates' crises.
Christmas break gives us a month in which to reestablish our bonds with our families. We don't have to gather 'round the tree and sing carols, but we don't want to be the last two verses of "Cat's in the Cradle" either. Speaking of music: "I swear I hear a steel guitar rising in the air / So sing me one more song / About old San Antone." And could you sing it before I get there? My family really hates that song.
(Pallavi Guniganti is a Cavalier Daily columnist.)
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