Are you jealous that your child is in college and you’re stuck at home paying for it?
I feel that way sometimes and so do many of my friends. But when I get nostalgic about my own days at the University of Missouri, I realize that I have conveniently forgotten about a certain aspect of college life. At some point, most of us escaped the dorms and moved into crappy rental housing.
I’ve been thinking about the rundown, three-story house, which I shared with eight other girls in Columbia, MO, long ago. The reason for the nostalgia is because my son Ben and I have been spending a few days with my daughter Caitlin, who moved in a couple of weeks ago into her own rundown rental house.
Caitlin is excited about her house that’s in a prime location — less than a block from Juniata College, where she will be a senior. She seemed disappointed, however, when Ben and I weren’t as enthusiastic about her new place. What really got to me was the bathroom. I won’t get into the details about the condition of this bathroom, but I will share this: When I take a shower in the morning, I’ve been closing my eyes.
So parents next time you start wishing you were heading off to school, remember that college isn’t always as fun as we now remember it.
Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and an eBook, Shrinking the Cost of College: 152 Ways to Cut the Price of a Bachelor’s Degree.
Good post. This definitely brought back memories to my freshman year dorm. Although it wasn’t completely gross, the shower head was basically like a firehouse, in terms of water pressure. You literally couldn’t put your face directly under it. When you wanted to rinse the soap of your face, you would have to bank it off your hands. Ohhh college….