I’ll Be Home for Christmas

It’s been over seven years since I left home. I’m a different person. So is mom. So is my sister. Yet when I step through that door, jangling with those same hanging holiday bells, and I sleep way late in my same oversized-bed, and throw my dirty laundry all over my room, I regress. The bare walls of my room strip me of my sense of humor, the unchanged furniture my optimism, and the silence my love of community. The hallmarks of what it is to be me now, these qualities that I’ve nurtured and worked to make my own, they go limp. They don’t vanish; they’re still there, but they’re lame. And because I can’t feel their torpidity, because I feel just like I do right now and not how I remember feeling back then, I’m caught off guard by a comment or a question, and my pride and joys, my hard-earned humanities sit by as their responsibilities — to care, to love, to communicate — pass on to the rotting, malformed, amateur sensitivities that comprised my 18-year-old self.

It’s easy to conceptualize ourselves as ever-changing beings that, once changed, are ever-changed. Once we’ve successfully spoken in public, no presentation will ever scare us. Or once we’ve lost those extra pounds, they’ll never come back. That’s how I’ve conceptualized my growth as a human, and it’s exactly why so many visits home have been such a personal disappointment. When I stonewall my mom in an argument, it doesn’t fit this model. It feels like I’ve failed to become who I think I am. And if I’m not myself all the time, then who am I?

If I don’t get too angsty about it, the answer is easy: me. I’m me, in an environment so familiar to an old part of me and so foreign to the new that it’s really easy to fall into old habits, especially with relationships that are again, so familiar to the old part of me, and much less so to the new. When I left for school, I started talking to my mom on the phone about once a week. And I could actually hear her. Every visit, every break, we’d fall back into fights and pettiness, sometimes about politics, mostly about nothing. I’d return to school dejected, not understanding why in-person was so different than over-the-phone. After a few weeks of distance, we’d hear each other again, and I’d feel proud of our progress. When I graduated, and visited less frequently, we got closer. And I swear it’s because those same bare walls, that same furniture, that same silence, they can’t get to me over the phone.

This Christmas, I’m cleaning out my room, rearranging it, donating old things, maybe hanging something up on those walls. I’m going to bed early and waking up early, planning activities and deliberate conversations that are fun and meaningful. The new parts of me, those upgrades I’m so proud of, they aren’t compatible with my old habits and surroundings. But I’m hoping if I change a few things, my mom and sister will get to see the current me this Christmas.