A week and a half ago I moved out of my bedroom at my parents’ house for probably the last time. It sounds funny now to say that---“my parents’ house.” It’s no longer really mine. Now when I say “my house” I mean a different one, one in a quaint little neighborhood about 20 minutes west, occupied by myself and 3 other girls. Of course, this house doesn’t quite feel like home either yet. It feels more like being back in college.
The bedroom at my parents’ looks strange now that I’ve removed most of my things. All that made it homey and mine has been transported or packed away, leaving behind barren shelves and stretches of blank carpet. The blue walls are conspicuously bare and cold, studded with nails that hold no picture frames or posters. If I were my parents, I’d keep that bedroom door closed. It’s empty yet not totally clean, its existence speaking loudly of an absence.
Adult children are really not meant to live with their parents. This is what I’ve decided over the last 15 months, even though my experience at home was largely positive. It happens and sometimes it’s the right decision but only because other plans fall through or things don’t work out quite as we’d like them to. The return to the high school bedroom is rarely Option A. And yet so many of my peers are in this situation, happy or not happy, trying or not trying, to make the best of it. We lack money. We possess debt. We haven’t a clue where or when the next job will appear. We grit our teeth and bare it.
In this situation, parents and children who under normal circumstance get along fine often find themselves unable to connect. Possibly they fight. Not infrequently they live in an undercurrent of passive aggressive tension. Nobody is quite sure how this is supposed to work, how they’re supposed to act.
What role does the adult child play in the machine of the family? How entitled is she to her own schedule? Completely entitled, the parent might say. And yet the mother’s feelings are hurt when her daughter rarely comes home for dinner. Can the child freely make his own life choices? Of course, everyone agrees, and yet the son feels a latent guilt living under his father’s watchful eye. This guilt may later grow to resentment, though no one is at fault.
It’s not that we children don’t appreciate the free rent, the food, the minimal expenses, and I apologize that we often act as though we don’t. It’s that we regret that we need them. It’s that we are ashamed we cannot provide these things for ourselves. Or perhaps we can provide them, but then we feel ashamed that we can but still are not. We do not like having to tell people, “Yeah, I live with my parents.” There is usually a slight embarrassed silence after this statement, which we hurry to fill with some justification. “I’m just trying to save money to pay off loans,” or “I’m hoping to move within 6 months so I didn’t want to sign a lease,” or “I’m looking for a job.” The recipients of these statements nod respectfully. We hate this as well.
We acutely feel our lack of independence and so we compensate, asserting independence in whatever other way we can. Absenting the house for long periods of time. Spending time with friends in other apartments, other cities. Withholding information, perhaps not consciously, to keep some illusion of privacy and a separate life. Rebellion, thought to have run its course in high school, may return with an immature, embarrassed edge. We are not proud of ourselves.
It is difficult to move from the autonomy of college life back to the psuedo-autonomy of life at home. It is difficult to return to a state that has not been our reality since we were 17 or 18 and know how to incorporate 4+ years of independence into that routine. Cut us a little slack if it seems that our maturity level has dropped a few notches. We struggle to adjust. Restless, straining, and off-kilter, we feel at odds with our circumstances in some fundamental way.
Of course, despite all this, despite the fact that I know I am meant to grow up and grow out, despite my readiness to have a place of my own, it’s still a little hard to make that final break. That’s the paradox of this strange time of life. There cannot be a moving forward without a leaving behind.
My departure marks the first time my parents have less than three kids living at home since their third child was born in 1994. Two seems so empty, so quiet, compared to the chaos of five. It’s sad to realize that all the members of my family will never live under the same roof again. The nucleus is breaking up, the bedrooms emptying out. It’s a good thing---I enjoy seeing the different directions my siblings lives are taking---but it’s also a kind of loss.
“But you’ll have a bathroom all to yourself now!” I told my 13-year-old sister when she expressed some dismay that I would be leaving her to the unbuffered mercy of her older brother.
“Yeah,” she admitted, not looking me in the eye, “but you were the one who cleaned it.” This is as close as she’ll come to saying she’ll miss me. I’ll take what I can get. I’ll miss her too.
Today after cross country practice I returned to my parents’ house to welcome my younger brother home from a summer in California. While there, I sent a text to my older brother: “I’m at home.” “Which home?” he texted back. It’s a fair question; home is an ambiguous word now.
I guess this is just one more step into the real world, that harsh and exhilarating place that beckons us to partake of its tragedy and adventure. I’ve been living there already, of course. It just feels more official now.
I do that a lot in life, I think. Wait for the inspiration, the motivation, the right opportunity, to find me. I tend to put off decisions with the assumption that the right choice will somehow just creep into my mind when I’m not paying attention. A lot of the time, this works out ok for me. I’m good at being patient when it means not interrupting the status quo.