If I had to describe what coming home from college for the summer means in one word, I would say that it means losing. Losing the chance to party until three in the morning every Friday, no questions asked. Losing the ability to stay at a boy’s overnight without your parents ever knowing. Losing the shirt you’ve been wearing with heels as a dress for months. Losing your Nutella. 

Nutella—the chocolaty hazelnut spread that’s a) heaven in a jar and b) a representation of the complete lack of adult surveillance I experience eight months of the year—is forbidden in my mother’s kitchen. I found this out over Thanksgiving when my mom hijacked the jar I’d brought home with me and told me that I would not be eating “liquid chocolate” as long as I lived under her roof. So now for breakfast I eat granola or some other food purchased from the organic section at Wegman’s and pretend that I don’t exist for more than two-thirds of the year on Nutella, Friday’s frozen quesadilla rolls, and garlic-herb Alouette. 

One of the biggest draws of going away to college is, clearly, the escape from prying parental eyes that it affords. And if you’re like me and go to a school that’s halfway across the country, practically every single thing you do goes unseen. This past year, between August and April, I think my parents saw me for a grand total of twenty-two days. It was awesome. I set my own rules for how I ate and what I wore and when I slept and what I spent and what I spent it on, and as long as I sounded happy and healthy during one twenty-minute phone call home each week, no further investigations into my personal life were made.            

Except for a few weeks ago, right after I moved back home for the summer. I’d cried my eyes out all day while my mother was at work, but had cleaned myself up and was happily watching TV by the time she got home. The first thing she did when she saw me was ask why there was a tissue box on the floor next to the chair I was sitting in. All of a sudden and without even meaning to, I started sobbing a semester’s worth of sobs about an awful breakup my mom didn’t know I’d had with a boy she didn’t even know I’d been dating. 

I think that going to college is a lot like stretching a rubber band. When you get to Michigan or Muhlenberg or Midwestern State or wherever it is that you go, you start to pull away from your family, and once you see how much you can actually get away with, you start to pull harder. Your parents may try to hold you back, but let’s face it: rubber bands can stretch pretty far. They can stretch to the not-so-healthy section of the grocery store, they can stretch to a friend who can provide a fake ID, they can stretch to the Delta Kappa Epsilon Tahitian party. But at some point, they hit a stretching limit, whether it’s a failed class or a sorority rush let-down or a broken heart. And then they snap and come flying back to the point at which they started.  

I adore college. I love the people and I love the ideas and I love the atmosphere and I love the freedom. But I also know that for every class I’ve skipped, for every jar of “liquid chocolate” I’ve consumed behind my mother’s back, there’s been a time I secretly wished I was nearer to the only person in the world who can see an innocent tissue box and immediately know it’s indicative of a much larger problem. Parents, whether your children are in college or high school or have just reached the “What did you do in school today?” “Nothing!” stage, know that they don’t want to be completely left alone—they just want to stretch. I, personally, would let them. I can almost guarantee that at some point, they’ll snap back.         

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  Posted by: Jessica Hoffman