Spring Break With My Mom

Published March 6, 2007

By Rob Booz

I think it’s important you understand this; I am going on spring break with my mother. No, this isn’t some new “yo’mama” joke, nor is it a preface to the hot new Girls Gone Wild: Bates Hotel. I, a twenty-one year old college senior, have opted out of a week of wet t-shirt contests, sandy joints, and Technicolor drinks with little umbrellas and fun names like Buttery Nipple, and Sex on The Beach. Instead, I will be spending my spring break wandering around the quiet halls of the Smithsonian Institute in D.C. with my mother.

We try so hard as college students to position ourselves as adults, and we equate this with separating ourselves from the family life we left behind. I admittedly was quick to move out and establish myself after I came to college, spending the summer after freshman year living in a festering five bedroom apartment, basically sparing for change.

The fact is though that we are in transition, and most of us still need our parents in fundamental ways we never relied on them for in high school. Sure this means things like tuition, grocery money, and, if you’re lucky, clothes, but it also means for support that we never previously needed. I’m going to graduate this spring and this is likely the last spring break I will ever have. And sure before I left home my parents and I never, never got along; and sure I’ll probably spend most of my time on break in arguments about the post-graduation job I don’t yet have. (Which I feel like has been a point of contention in my family since I was old enough to say the word college.) Hell, my favorite part will likely be having my last spring break bankrolled, museum gift shops and expensive restaurants here I come. My motives, however, are more than capitalistic.

I also will enjoy spending it with someone who is really an adult, someone who’s coming to the end of the course that I’m just starting on. Someone who will be able to instruct me on things that no beach in Cancun can even comment on: how to be able to deal with the responsibilities of the world outside of UVM. Even if that means I have to begrudgingly except advice from someone I spent most of my formative years trying to prove wrong in venomous shouting battles: my mother. Maybe that’s just growing up, and I think as long as Girls Gone Wild doesn’t go out on limb with some artsy GGW: Smithsonian Nymphets, it will be okay.

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