Diaries from the Autumn Season, Vol. 1
Fellow former sheltered kids—I need y’all to come to the front. I’m calling for an impromptu meeting at the beginning of the year to address some concerns and check the temperature of the room to see if I’m not the only one feeling the cold. Pull up a chair, and let’s commiserate together about growing up sheltered.
I was recently triggered by something my mom said to me while we were out together. I mentioned moving down here to Florida—where she’s lived for over a decade—and she recalled when I wanted to leave the nest for the first time as a young adult when I got accepted to the University of Miami back in the 00’s—the golden days of my young adulthood. As an eldest daughter, first-generation college student, raised in the ‘burbs of Chicago within a single-parent household in my teens, it was a recipe for limitations.
Don’t get me wrong, I was able to go to school events and participate in extracurricular activities until I was double-booking myself in high school, but when it came to college, I simply wasn’t ready for that experience, at least the out of state, on-campus experience.
When “Sheltered” Was Really Survival Mode
Growing up “sheltered” was the survival mode enacted to ensure that my brother and I were safe and out of harm’s way, but mainly just physically. There was no time for emotional safety or checking in about our feelings because there were more pressing issues like getting to school on time and getting back home safely. I wasn’t as limited as many other formerly sheltered kids will testify, but I felt underestimated when it came to getting to live on campus for college.
It’s not always about affordability, as I would have had to take out student loans back then anyway, but it was about having the option to be free, live on my own terms. I appreciate my mom’s sentiment in wanting to keep me safe, but at my young adult age of 18, she could have elaborated more on WHY she felt I was not equipped to go away to college.
Like most people-pleasing overachievers, I took it in stride, chucking it up to “it’s gonna work out at the local university” that I had to commute over an hour to daily (by car the first semester and by three separate trains the rest of my college career). Surely nothing will happen to a quiet, meek, inexperienced suburban girl taking the Metra Electric train north to downtown Chicago, then transferring to the Red line and Blue line trains to get to the University of Illinois at Chicago campus near-west side of the city. And anyone who grew up remotely near Chicago in the 90s-00s knew about the West Side’s reputation.
Needless to say, I made it to school and back home, then to my part-time jobs, every day. For four years, I was kept safe from any hurt, harm, or danger that was lurking out there in those streets. Grandma’s prayers? Perhaps. God’s mercy? Absolutely. The same mercy that would have kept me at any campus I would have gone to, in-state or out. As I got older, I didn’t realize the resentment I had towards my mother specifically for sheltering me, as my younger siblings eventually all went to school and got to experience on-campus living.
As an eldest child and first-gen college student, there was both an expectation to be great and an uncertainty that I would make it out there in the wilderness on my own. But I still had that college commute, and I still had to work outside of home, amongst people my parents had never met, in neighborhoods we didn’t grow up in. Somehow, I survived and learned in those environments as well.
My fellow former sheltered friends, what I’m getting to is that while it may be in our parents’ best interests (whether for ours or their own if we’re keeping it real), we may not have had the experiences that other peers have had, but we had our own over time. We had to learn to grow thicker skin, to speak up for ourselves, to show up on time, to take up space and initiative, to come into our own. Again, none of this would be possible without God, who allowed us to go through certain seasons and storms, and also prevented a whole lot of hell from affecting us. There’s the nuance in all this that I can’t overlook or get too bitter about.
