I don’t do well with change. I like things to stay exactly the way they are. Every time I go home for Fall, Winter, or Spring Break, everything around me changes.
When I went home for Fall Break freshman year, my parents had completely renovated our kitchen from its original farmhouse design to a sleek, modern, white cabinet/marble countertop kitchen. I knew it was coming because I helped them pack up the kitchen before I left for school, but the place I had been making sweet potato casserole, apple pie, and cinnamon ice cream for every Thanksgiving since I was 6, was gutted.
When I went home for Fall Break this past year, my 13-year-old sister had taken over my bedroom. All of my furniture and clothes were moved from the upstairs jack-and-jill room I had been sharing with my 17-year-old sister into our first floor guest bedroom. I knew that they were moving my bedroom because we briefly talked about it when I packed my things to go back to school, but I didn't think that things would change so soon, and without me knowing.
When I left for college, my mom said something to me that I will always remember, “You won’t miss what you left behind nearly as much as the people you leave behind will miss you.” She reassured me that things at home will stay nearly the same while I am off in what feels like a completely different world. Yet, when I come home for breaks, it feels the opposite. I feel like
I am the one left behind, and the world around me is changing. Every time I am home, I am the one who feels out of the loop with their lives. I don’t know the morning routine or after-school activity schedule. I can't help to decide what is going to be made for dinner that night. I don’t know what tv shows and music they are listening to, or who my sisters’ friend groups are. My mom always said that a family is a functioning unit, and all of a sudden I wasn’t a part of the unit.
But everytime I go home, even as things change, I find myself in the same place. I am sitting at the kitchen table with my 17 year old sister, catching up on homework. Even though the table is new, I am doing the exact same thing I have been doing my whole life.
I am sitting on my sister’s bedroom floor gossiping in the late hours of the night about dance class and theater drama that has remained the same since I was in middle school.
I am forging my parents' signature on pick-up notes for my two elementary school sisters so that I can pick them up when 3:30pm rolls around, rather than having them take the bus home. The same bus that I had once dreaded taking at their age. And I am driving them to elementary school at 8:15 am. The same elementary school that I went to, which has the same staff and teachers that I once had.
I am going through my mom’s closet and borrowing her clothes. I am binge watching Cobra Kai with my dad on Saturday nights. I am attending Sunday mass at the same church with the same smiling greeters at the doors when you walk in. I am laying on the couch with my two dogs on either side of me, petting them as I watch “When Harry Met Sally” for the 100th time. I am in my basement in the late hours of the night hunched over my sewing machine as I make a creation that I probably won’t ever wear. And per the request of my sisters, I am putting ice cubes in the toilets, a spoon under my pillow, and wearing my pajamas inside out and backwards in the slim chance that they will have a snow day the next day.
So yes, things change - but funny enough, they also don’t. The feeling you get when you go home does not change. Under all of the new materiality that is change, there is so much that stays exactly the way it is, even if it is not obvious.
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