Are you a Dutchie going home (thuisthuis) for the holidays? In this Dutch article you will read 13 things you're guaranteed to experience.
For many students, going back home for the holidays, wherever home may be, is an interesting affair. You might have gotten used to the uni life and decided that you liked that better than being at home for whatever reason. Or it could be a normal, weekly thing for you if you live with your parents; now you just don’t have to leave again for uni. But regardless of how you feel about it, homecoming has its own rites of passage that everyone seems to experience – small, predictable, and absurdly specific moments that happen to every student. Perhaps you’ll recognise a few here.
1. A mismatch in body and space
The ceiling feels lower than usual – no, wait, is it higher? You can’t remember. You’re used to your student house, where your room is yours and the space is built for at least half a dozen people. And now every doorframe, step, and creaky floorboard that you used to know blind feel foreign. You also feel strange about waking up differently. Most students in uni have unpredictable sleeping schedules due to classes and activities, so waking up earlier or sleeping in later than the rest of your old house’s rhythm feels out of sync.
2. Your parents load you up with food
When your parents hear how you've been keeping yourself alive at uni, they'll be horror-struck. Prepare for a running list of restaurants and dishes your mum insists you need to try while you're back, and for her wandering into your room with a plate of cut fruit while you're deep in a laptop tab. And somehow, despite the fridge being fuller than it's been in months, you'll still find yourself opening it every hour out of pure reflex – as if it might have quietly restocked itself since the last time you checked.
3. The inevitable highschool hangout
With the holidays in season for everyone, including your friends, you think it’s a good idea to have a reunion at your ‘spot’: a park, perhaps, or an old food joint you guys used to frequent. The first hour feels great – no time has seemingly passed and everyone is at ease with each other. But as the hangout progresses you slowly realise that no one is truly ‘there’, emotionally or mentally. Your friends are telling stories and you don’t know a single person or a single place they mention. The rest of the conversation defaults back to the past, when the present runs dry, and someone brings up the inevitable “remember when,”, and you realise that’s the only shared language you have. You find yourself checking your phone more, not out of rudeness, but because the silence is too thick to bask in.
And afterwards, once you’re home, you check the old groupchat and realise how quiet it’s been – only the occasional birthday message or picture puncturing months of silence. Perhaps there’s the one friend that never left home and is still trying to organise something.
4. Domestic regression
You’re a legal adult now. You can drive and go out and you don’t have to order from the kid’s menu anymore. Yet you’re told to clean your room every day you’re home by someone who has zero legal authority over you now, and you clean it anyway. Your parents scold you for the exact same things you got scolded for at 15: your dad tells you to turn the lights off, your mom tells you to rinse your dishes, both of them tell you no phones at the table. And your parents still insist on driving you everywhere and you just… you let them, even though you’ve navigated an entire foreign city, perhaps multiple, for months, years at this point.
5. The paradox of rest
When you’re in the last weeks of the module, you’re craving the holiday like you’ve never craved anything before. And then when it comes, you’re relishing in all the rest you’re getting, the multiple ‘me days’ you have in a row, but as the days go by, and you fall into the pattern known colloquially as ‘bumming’, you start missing your independence. You feel restless or bored within days of arriving. You miss not being asked where you’re going, not having to explain your schedule. And you feel so, so guilty at the thought of wanting to leave early. You feel the ache of dreading the goodbye before you’ve even arrived.
6. The homecoming spiral
Before you leave, you pack like you’re going away for a year… and then you only wear like maximum three things the whole break because they were on top of your bag and you couldn’t be bothered to fully unpack. You also realise you left your charger and mentally curse yourself for being so clumsy.
7. Triggers for nostalgia
The smell of your mum’s cooking wafts through the air and you’re suddenly eight years old again, back from school and starving after a day away from your parents. You hear sounds at night: pipes, footsteps, a particular door hinge, stuff that you’d forgotten you knew, etched into your brain like forgotten tattoos. And when you finally taste your parents’ cooking, it tastes like home – almost exactly, except for the one spice measurement only muscle memory could get right, and muscle memory, it turns out, doesn't survive a semester away. You reach for a flavour that isn't quite there anymore, and realise the version you'd been craving all semester was never really the dish itself, but the person eight years old enough to believe it was perfect.
8. The terrible realisation of your parents growing older
You come home and hug your parents. For a moment, everything is exactly as it was – the same people who raised you, who you left behind before uni. But as the days pass, small things catch you off guard: your dad reaching for his reading glasses to check a receipt, your mum a little slower getting up from the couch, more grey woven through hair you could've sworn was darker last time. And every so often, you catch one of them looking at you a breath too long, like they're doing the same math you are.
Eventually, the rain lets out, or your bags are packed, or the holiday just runs its course. However it happens, leaving always comes faster than expected. And on that last morning, lying in the bed that’s still too soft, under the blanket that’s still too small, you notice that the ticking has quieted. Not because time has stopped rearranging everything you once knew, but because you've stopped straining to hear it. The posters are still outgrown, your parents are still greying, the group chat is still mostly silent; nothing about the mismatch has resolved itself. But for a moment, on that last morning, the room fits again. Not because it’s gone back to how it used to be – nothing will ever go back to how it used to be – but because you’ve finally stopped expecting it to.
Perhaps that's the last universal experience of going home: realising that home was never going to hold still and wait for you, and neither were you. And someday you’ll revisit your campus as an alumnus and realise that the place won’t feel like home anymore either. Life changes, people grow, your room will go to someone else, and still the rain keeps pouring. Whether it’s loud or quiet is up to you.
