Coming home for the holidays is something that many students, myself included, really look forward to. If you are anything like me, there is almost invariably a home cooked meal waiting for you there, a break—no matter how brief—from classes, and the chance to really just unwind. All the same, going home is not always the best experience ever.
Now, before anyone gets the idea that this is going to be another article about how being at home sucks due to having parents tell you what to do, having to be back before a certain time at night, or anything else like that, let me tell you that it isn’t.
Though I understand the aggravation that can come with having your agency seemingly halved by your parents, this article is not about that. This article is about what it means to not be going home for the holidays or to be going home to a host of problems.
The students here at Wake Forest University, as our brochure and websites both tout, come from a range of different backgrounds. Though we, as students, see that every day as we walk around on campus hearing different languages, seeing different skin tones, and interacting with people who hold different political views from us, it is important to realize that our diversity also lies in the fact that many of our fellow classmates endure situations very different from the one I described at the beginning of this article.
For some students, the end of classes—particularly at the end of the semester—means having to figure out where they are going to sleep and how they are going to eat until the next semester starts.
Though I have never had to sleep on the street or beg on the corner for food, I have had to wonder where I was going to lay my head during a college break. My freshmen year, while hundreds of my classmates were talking about going on extended getaways to places I could only dream of affording, I was learning that my mother and I had to move out of our home-of-six-years because our landlord no longer felt like honoring our lease.
While hundreds of my classmates complained about going home to annoying siblings and parents, I was worried about how I was going to, with the help of a disabled parent, move all our belongings out of the apartment because one woman decided that she would rather disrupt our lives than take the rent on the date our lease detailed instead of the date she desired. While hundreds of my fellow Demon Deacons wondered how they would be able to party or drink while on break, I wondered whether the stress of the situation would put my mother—who lives with Sickle Cell Anemia—into the hospital.
Ultimately, my mother and I succeeded at clearing my apartment of most of our possessions (though we lost years of accumulated holiday decorations and memories) and, thanks to the fact that we have family in Winston Salem, we had somewhere to go during the holidays, but as I filled out my FAFSA application for the following semester, I had nowhere to put as my home address.
Flash forward to Thanksgiving break of 2017. My mom and I have been in our new home for almost a full year now, but I still have things assaulting my relaxation time as I sit at my computer writing this article. Now, instead of worrying about where I will lay my head, I worry about whether my parents will be around to see me graduate; I discovered that my dad was diagnosed with cancer the day before I left to go home for the holidays. I now have two sick parents to worry about—no matter how much they tell me not to worry.
When I get back on campus just two days from now, none of you—my fellow Deacons—will be able to see these worries on my face. I say this with confidence because none of you saw the difficulties I faced my freshman year and I am a year wiser and a year stronger than I was before. All the same, whether you see it or not, my realities have not changed. I have still experienced home insecurity and I am still staring the mortality of both my parents in the face.
My experience is not a unique one. There are people on this campus who wonder whether they themselves will live to see Wake’s campus again. There are people on this campus who—because of the current political climate—wonder if they will spend the rest of what would be their educational career on Wake’s campus earning their degrees, or in “detention centers” for people who came to the United States searching for opportunities they didn’t have in their own countries.
There are people on this campus who had to decide whether to eat themselves, or to feed their siblings while they were away on break. None of this will show on any of these individuals’ faces when they step foot back on our campus, but we—all of us—should keep these situations in mind when we come back from wherever we are this break and any break we have after this one.
Not everyone’s break was filled with food and laughter and not everyone who ate and laughed did so free of worries. Be thankful for what you did have this break, for there is definitely someone on this campus, in one of your classes, or sitting next to you right now, who had a hell of a holiday, and not necessarily in a good way.
