The High Adventure of Leaving Home
by Herbert Anderson

Going to college is a time of high adventure. There is excitement about making new friends, experiencing new freedom, learning new ideas, living in new surroundings, trying out new ways of being what one is becoming. If we leave home for college, that high adventure is tinged with a little fear. Maybe we won't get along with a roommate. Maybe the courses will be too hard. Worst of all, we may not like the school that we picked or that picked us. Even if we do not leave home physically, going to college is also a significant and sometimes painful moment in the process of leaving home emotionally.

"Home is where we start from," T.S. Eliot has said. It is the womb out of which we were born. Because we are dependent on our families for a long time for nurture and care, we have strong attachments to home. It is where we belong even when we don't think we do. But we don't stay there. Home is only where we start from. We leave home in order to stand on our own. We leave home so that we can become a distinct and separate person with our own feelings and ideas. We leave home so that we can go home again. And we leave home so that we might make a home of our own.

Leaving home is a way of describing a process that takes a long time. It is another kind of birth. It is a severing of the emotional umbilical cord that sometimes keeps us very close to our parents. It usually means moving out from under the physical roof provided by our parents or primary caretakers. Most of all, it is a lifelong process of coming to be a separate person able to give and receive love. Leaving home means a readiness, willingness and ability to make one's own decisions, to make one's own way in the world without emotional dependence on the home one has come from.

Many of these ideas about leaving home have been developed in collaboration with my friend and colleague Kenneth Mitchell. He tells a wonderful story about his own leaving home to go to college. On that day, he says, his Uncle Bert gave him a great gift.

It happened on the station platform in Winton Place, as we waited for the Cincinnati Limited to take me to New Jersey for my first semester of college. My mother and father were there and so was Uncle Bert. My luggage was a high school graduation gift from him.

It was a chilly September day. In five minutes the train was scheduled to arrive. Suddenly, a stream of instructions came from mother, as if a dam had opened its gates high in the mountains and let a torrent of freshly thawed water flow irresistibly down. I am to do this, not forget that, avoid the other.

Bert's voice broke in to interrupt as only he could. "Louise! Stop that! If he hasn't learned it in l8 years, he isn't going to learn it in five minutes." High on the mountain the floodgates of the dam close. The stream dries up.

The train arrives. There are hugs and kisses and handshakes and then I'm aboard. The first, the very first word of freedom has been spoken. No great bell to proclaim liberty throughout the land. Just a few words by Uncle Bert to mark my leaving home. It is time for me to listen to my own voice more that the voice of my mother. It is time to start growing up.

Each of us could fill in different content to this story about leaving home. The torrent of advice we received may have been an admonition to eat well and get plenty of sleep; a lecture on money or sex or both; a warning about false teachings or at least a word of caution about liberal philosophies; a slightly manipulative bargain for spending money in exchange for letters home. For others, instead of torrents of advice, leaving home for college is a wonderfully complex moment in which the feelings of joy and sadness flow freely, undergirded by the conviction that even in families things change but life goes on. Leaving home to go to college is remarkably easy for some and extremely difficult for others. Some families make leaving seem like betrayal or an act of disloyalty. Some parents feel that it is all right to grow up and leave home as long as you don't get too big or go too far. Other families understand that loving always means letting go. Other families are able to bless their children so that they are free to take the high adventure in the confidence that there is always a way back home. Some of us may have wished we had an Uncle Bert to help the process. Others may not have needed an Uncle Bert because the process of leaving home has already been going on for some time.

Every person's leaving-home story is unique because every family is unique. Each of us has a unique relationship to the family we come from. Each individual journey is different than the one before. Men and women do not leave home in the same way. The nature of leaving home varies according to economic status and according to cultures. The patterns of successful leaving are not uniform or universal. And yet within the American context, it is possible to identify some marks of that process. Kenneth Mitchell has suggested the following visible results of the process of leaving home. The successful leaver:

• makes plans without considering whether parents will or would not approve. 

• may consult parents about decisions, but never has to do so.  

• does not respond to parental attempts to evoke guilt as a way of maintaining control  

• does not determine his/her behavior on the basis of the expectation of future rewards or punishments from the primary family.  

• might even be able to say that returning to college is 'going home" because home has become where one lives rather than where one is from.

• is able to retain rich and satisfying relationships with his or her family of birth. 

Sometimes home is an easy place to leave because it has not been safe or it has been too confining. Sometimes it is easy to leave home because there are very few positive bonds to keep us there. Growing up has been a continual lesson in self-survival. Sometimes going to college, work or the military is the beginning of a journey in search of a home we never had. In those instances, leaving home may be less significant than finding a home.

Parents may not be the only road block to leaving home. We may be reluctant to leave the warmth, comfort, familiarity, safety and free laundry service of home. We might rather stay home because the world seems to be a dark and forbidding place. We are reluctant to leave if we do not believe that we have the personal strengths to survive. We are reluctant to leave if we feel some responsibility to keep our parents from divorcing or protect our siblings from the sexual abuse we suffered. It is difficult to think about leaving if our family is so close and friendly that we cannot imagine finding any other people whose company we would rather keep or any other place where we would rather be.

If leaving home to go to college has been difficult and painful and perhaps not very successful, these few suggestions might help that process along.  Ask your parents about their own leaving home.  Allow yourself to grieve.  Practice making decisions without consulting your parents.  Acknowledge that your family will get along without you.  Be patient with yourself; leaving home does not happen overnight.  From time to time, it is useful to realize that your parents are probably as confused about your life as you are.  Remember your baptism: It is your first blessing.

From the moment you were baptized you belonged to God. It is God's intent that everyone discover and develop all their gifts in order to serve the world for Christ's sake. The discovery of all your gifts may lead you on surprising pathways your parents had not planned on. That is why the journey from home is always an adventure filled with sadness and excitement.

Herbert Anderson of Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Illinois.