The Incompatability of Home and School

After three football weekends in a row, the entirety of campus is looking forward to a break and time to catch up on homework. However, this weekend, my hall is hosting its annual Mom’s Weekend.  Parents visiting on gameday is one thing, as gamedays already exist outside the normal realm of a day of college.  On any other weekend, guests on campus shift the paradigm of the college experience.  Weekends cease to have any time that is actually free.  There’s a need to do classic Notre Dame tourist things. Parents want to see the grotto, the library, and the dining hall (if you’re my grandmother).  

Much like game day visitors, family members ask you questions that you’ve long forgotten the answers to, if you ever knew them.  How many students live on campus, how big the stadium is,  how the dorms work.  It seems even if you’ve told them these things while you were still new and learning them, they’ve forgotten.  But you’ve moved past the questions of fact and know the feel of campus.  I know things like which of my friends live on campus, that the stadium is large enough so that cheers are deafening, and the dorm system is how I found community on campus.  Facts and easily conveyable soundbites have long ceased to encapsulate my experience of Notre Dame, but soundbites can suffice at home when you have some distance.

Reconciling the two worlds of college and home is a bit impossible. My mom will meet my roommate of over a year for the first time, when I’ve grown so accustomed to her constant presence in my life.  Over that year, I’ve lived at Notre Dame with her for more time than I’ve lived at home with my family.  Since my mom was last here two years ago (excluding one game day), I’ve made different friends, changed my major, gotten involved in my hall, and written articles.  I am so very different thanks to these things, and when I last showed my mom campus, a month into my freshman year, I was very much the same person I was in high school.

At home, I can distance myself a bit from the person I am here.  Staying up until 2am to work on a paper, planning rehearsals, and even simply going to work after class seem very much like the things that ‘college me’ does.  Plenty of that is due to the independence that comes with living on your own, albeit with a rector, AR, and RA to watch out for you, and bringing parents into that space can be unsettling.  It isn’t a bad thing that your family gets to see how you are different, but it seems impossible to really be that person with the colliding worlds of home and school.  

So my solution is probably not great, but it is to put college life on hold for a weekend.  Homework and hanging with friends are relegated to after my family heads back to their hotel for the night, and explanations of how classes are going should stay simple and unquestionably positive.  I craft a slight fiction of the semester so far, keep home at a distance from school, and get to live like a visitor to Notre Dame.  

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Images 1, 2, 3(provided by author)

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