College makes us long for good ole’ mom and pop

Most NDSU students left home at 18, freshly graduated from high school, desperate to get as far away from their parents’ clutches as possible. A childhood filled with “no’s” and “you can’t do that’s” and “please don’t egg the neighbor’s house’s” and most students are practically running into their freshman dorm room. 

However, a few months at college can make even the most stubborn kid start to miss their parents. All those years of petty fights and slamming doors receive a rose-colored hue and suddenly home seems like a paradise and your parents feel like the coolest people you can spend time with. 

It’s really no wonder so many of us are ready to leave home. In childhood, parents are our punishers and enforcers. They’re the reasons we had to eat broccoli, couldn’t watch that PG-13 movie, and couldn’t go stay with that one friend after prom. Every great and amazing thing we wished to do was blocked by our parent’s exalting hand.

Most childhoods were spent in perpetual fear of upsetting our parents. Every kid has at least once experienced that unbearable sense of dread when we’ve done something wrong and we know it’s only a matter of time before our parents find out. 

There were a few times there where my seven-year-old self had to accept a life on the road as I was surely going to be kicked out due to a bowl of spilled Spaghetti-O’s on my mom’s favorite carpet. Honestly, as a kid, hitchhiking might have been a better fate than a scolding from my mom.

Most of the freedom that comes with college is due to the absence of having your parents around. Those first few weeks without a curfew, rules about overnight guests or someone checking to make sure you went to class seem exhilarating. However, those feelings of relief only last so long.

Soon, all those little things your parents did for you begin to add up and you realize how much you don’t know how to do. Your dad can’t get out that one stain from your laundry, or just do your laundry for you in the first place. You don’t get to come home to a warm meal unless you count a microwaved Marie Calander plate of sadness.

Don’t even get me started on making your own appointments. Suddenly that toothache isn’t so miserable when you have to go through the trouble of making that dentist appointment, because talking to some stranger on the phone is much more painful. 

Your closet slowly thins out when you don’t have your mom there to take you back to school shopping. You let your car putter out because no one reminded you to go change your oil. Forgot to do your taxes? Yeah, me too.

We are all so ready to grow up, we forget how great it is to be a kid.

Worst of all, no longer can you use the excuse, “Sorry I can’t, my parents won’t let me.” Suddenly, that gross house party or that one friend of a friend’s birthday party is an event you can’t get out of.

Every 18-year-old feels like an adult until they realize the only adult thing about them is that they can be charged as one in a court. When it comes to taking care of ourselves and our lives, most of us are clueless without good old mom and dad.

It’s easy to miss the things our parents do for us, but more than anything, we just miss our parents in general. Sometimes, we just need a hug from our dad before bed or a chat with mom after a long day. We are all so ready to grow up, we forget how great it is to be a kid. If college students had a dollar for every time they wished their parents could carry them home and they could wake up in their bed the next morning, well then, we’d probably be able to afford college.

Parents may have pushed us and challenged us in childhood, but as adults, we want nothing more than to go back to those spinach-eating, bedtime-having days of young.