Moms, dads, brothers and sisters flooded the campus this past weekend during Parents & Families Weekend. They joined their sons and daughters in the fairgrounds before the football game against Central Michigan and even found their way to some fraternity and sorority houses. Unfortunately, the weekend ended, and it left students feeling worse than they did when their families left at the beginning of the semester.
Upperclassmen have come to respect the cliché phrase, “You don’t know how important it is until it’s gone,” while many freshmen are learning for the first time how important family time is.
The initial goodbye at the beginning of the semester is different from the goodbye at the end of Parents & Families Weekend. At the beginning of the semester, students are filled with excitement and energy, but family members who have been in their shoes know what is to come—three or four weeks into the semester, the college hype fades and students start thinking about what they left behind. Suddenly, they add their moms on Facebook after months of letting her friend request sit idling. Or maybe they call their brothers or sisters with whom they haven’t had a conversation since what feels like the dawn of time. Parents & Families Weekend seemed to come at the perfect time—late enough in the semester for new students to see the effects of the time spent away, but not so late that students fell into depression before their arrival.
Never having looked forward to seeing our parents so much, students canceled plans on Friday night in favor of a family dinner—something many of us would have had a harder time doing during our senior years of high school. And the first sight of loved ones after time spent apart is like you’re seeing them as completely different people—somehow our families became cool in the past six weeks. Who would have thought grocery trips with mom could be enjoyable again or that sibling rivalries could disappear?
Unfortunately, all visits must come to an end and the post-families-weekend goodbye stings more than it did at the beginning of the semester. Freshmen feel the burn for the first time while upperclassmen absorb the impact of another tough goodbye.
Time apart has a funny way of doing this not only to relationships, but also to anything that has meaning in our lives. If we take something out of our lives and don’t replace it, we suddenly realize why that person or thing was important to us.
A first semester in college takes away a lot from our old lives and we have to be able to evaluate the important things. Sure, there are a lot of random material necessities that many of us miss while we are at school, but the intangible aspects are what mean the most. And it’s not easy trying to replace these either so don’t be in a rush. Parents & Family Weekend might have just given you a little help in the process because, suddenly, some of these intangible qualities were back for a weekend to reflect on what you’ve been missing.
Fortunately, with fall break around the corner, we don’t have to wait long to see our families again. Hopefully we took more from Parents and Families weekend than free food and a full tank of gas.
