Skepticism

Afternoon Inquisition 4.21

If you follow my Twitter stream at all, you’ll know that my parents are visiting San Diego for 10 days.  I have said before on this blog that I love my folks:  my mom is the bomb, yo’.  And my stepdad is really the Fairy Stepfather.  I’m a grateful grown up.  That said, 10 days of being the child in a family-of-origin scenario is enough to make a (real) girl a little crazy.

It’s that I’m a grown woman; that’s the problem.  I have no need to be parented when I’m doing mundane things I do everyday. I don’t want to be a kid again, I’m very happy as the adult I am.

So, help a sister out, won’t you?

Please to share distracting and/or embarassing stories of when you finally understood the saying “you can never go home again.”

A.real.girl

A B Kovacs is the Director of Døøm at Empty Set Entertainment, a publishing company she co-founded with critical thinker and fiction author Scott Sigler. She considers herself a “Creative Adjacent” — helping creative people be more productive and prolific by managing the logistics of Making for the masses. She's a science nerd, a rabid movie geek, and an unrepentantly voracious reader. She doesn't like chocolate all that much.

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22 Comments

  1. My mother was looking in the recycle bin, counting the number of wine bottles.

    If she wants to count my dad’s beer bottles (two a day, every day, for 40+ years), that’s their business, but stay out of my garbage!

  2. When I finished getting my Masters in London, I moved back home to Connecticut for a bit while looking for an apartment in Boston.

    I had a very, very hard time finding a place to live, and ended up staying at home for longer than I intended. I was depressed, tired of looking for a place, and ALMOST thought about just getting a job and working at home.

    That is, until my stepmother told me that, when I’d been back for just over a week, she’d gone to the doctor and gotten herself antidepressants. Just from my BEING THERE, mind you. Not from anything I’d done.

    Remember: I’d been home JUST OVER A WEEK!

    Clearly, there’s no home for me there!

  3. @geek goddess: My mom drinks more wine that I do and always brings a good bottle when she comes over for dinner so no issues with the recycling there.

    Now I like my mom just fine but when she moved to the same city I live it actually made her visits much more enjoyable. After dinner she now goes home instead of the guest room. Much better arrangement!

  4. Stepping back into my tiny home town is always surreal, now that I’ve lived in the city for 8+ years.

    When my otherwise fairly open-minded father talked badly about a transgendered friend we grew up with, I knew I could never go back. I love my dad, but it makes me sad that he doesn’t understand certain things, you know?

  5. I had lived in the city for a year, and got a job for the summer up north, and decided that to save money, I would live with my parents that summer. I barely made it. I was so happy when that summer was over, and I moved back to the city where I study. After that summer my room was made over, my stuff packed away and now I’m sleeping in the guestroom whenever I’m there.

    Now, a few years have gone by, and for the first time since I didn’t get a summerjob in the city. So I’m moving back home to my parents at the end of May, to work there for the summer again. I’m dreading it. I can’t say why on earth I promised to do that, other than a desperate need for money.

  6. After my first 1.5 years of totally thriving away from home as a college student, I realized that I needed to transfer to a different school that a) wasn’t religious and b) had a stronger science program. I moved back home to finish up some GE requirements (needed for transfer) at the local community college and apply to the big state science schools. I was home much longer than I wanted to be because (perhaps not surprisingly) the courses I had taken at the religious university didn’t satisfy the transfer requirements of the big public research institution of my dreams. Living at home meant playing by the ‘rents rules and going to church. It nearly killed me. After having a taste of independence and freedom to think and act as I chose, I felt incredibly stifled being at home again. It was sad, but also really satisfying to know that I was able to grow and thrive so quickly living on my own and on my own terms!

    One (VERY) good thing that came of that time at home was that I met my now husband. We had a lot of fun sneaking out of church early to go fool around (***wink***) while the parents were distracted with the religious nonsense!

  7. @Amesthe149: “””We had a lot of fun sneaking out of church early to go fool around (***wink***) while the parents were distracted with the religious nonsense!””” People comfortably burn in hell for that kind of things. Therefore, hell must be full of happy married couples who go to church on a daily basis :-D

    As for this AI, I’m an empiricist, so I’m still collecting data, waiting for someone to slam the relevant door on my face. I keep conducting controlled experiments to elicit the response; I’m still missing causation, but I got lots of correlation :-D

    I agree with the widespread opinion that, once you’ve tasted freedom, there’s no turning back. My parents have always been supportive and stimulating, so there has not really been any conflict with them. My argument was with the lack of square feet and the resulting lack of privacy (versus dualism, incidentally: mind and personality are clearly empirical and can be measured in square feet :-D

  8. I grew up in what I refer to as the “redneck suburburbs” of Pittsburgh. Close enough to the city that you could easily go there if you wanted to but far enough away that you don’t bother thinking about why anyone would. Well, my freshman year of college I went to the city and never really came back.

    That first Christmas, I came home for the holiday break and got sick. My parents both smoke and being in the non-smoking environment of college taught me that it was being sick all winter long was not normal. I was sick and miserable for two weeks. Even today, if I spend more than a few hours at my parent’s, I’m likely to get myself a cold the next week.

    I only go back when I have to.

  9. The first time my Mother visited and cleaned my fridge, did my laundry and mopped my floors while I was at work. Not that they were dirty mind you, just that she wanted to prove something.

    I’m more interested in how to get my back-at-home-again son to come to this conclusion and get out. I want to treat the situation like roommates and he wants me to Mother him (and his 2-year-old) and do everything I used to do. Ever seen Failure to Launch?

  10. When my mom told me that she found a copy of the Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion at her boyfriends house and she began to cry.

    It was at this point I decided it might be wrong to tell her I loved that book.

    My visit to see her right after TAM7 in Phoenix just might be disaster when she asks “So how was it?”

  11. My mother lived with me for the last 5 years of her life, half the time, the other half she spent living with my siblings. She needed someone nearby because of her health.
    It was almost like having a roommate. She was too busy enjoying her life to do any parenting.

  12. I tried to move home in the second semester of college. I spent one night at home. I found that it was much easier to rack out with various young women I knew from school. Much less hassel. I actually get along with my parents much better now, 19 years down the road. We do drink a lot when we get together but it is a nice social lubricant and they are so very helpful with the kids. Being a single father would have been 100 times worse without their help.

  13. When I moved out at age 17, my mom said to me, “If something happens, you can never come back.”
    Of course, I never had any intention of coming back, so it wasn’t a problem.

  14. I think it was when they told me how much better it would be if I was a homosexual instead of atheist, because God forgives homosexuals.

  15. I live with my parents right at the moment, and every time my mother tells me to go to bed, it’s late, or get up, it’s late, or why don’t you have a driver’s license yet, or clean your room, or come back home from Tristan’s earlier, or you’ve had enough wine tonight, it gets a little more annoying.

  16. Oh lord, I knew that before I *really* left the house. College summers were excruciating for me.

    I’m the youngest and that odd-man out in the family. Not radically weird or anything, but my older sister and brother have always kind of been a unit, and my parents were always on my butt a bit to make sure I didn’t repeat my sister’s various mistakes – both the academic and interpersonal. (Kind of unnecessary – we’re as unlike as sisters can be and if I idolized her, I grew out of it long before I can remember idolizing her…coveting her huge room, yes, idolizing, no.)

    Going to college, and having the space to just be my pretty responsible self without the criticism and constant check-ins was bliss. (It was nice, too, to engage in my sartorial style – my mother hated my Doc Martens and really had a fit when I wore them with miniskirts.) I was kind of like Harry Potter, crossing off the days of summer hols, because I couldn’t freakin’ wait to get back to my friends, my professors, and my much-loved campus.

    Oddly enough, when I had to move in with them for a multi-year spell in my 20’s (a medical issue ate most of my small paycheck, even with good insurance), they were much cooler. I think we all understood I was not back under the roof willingly and that I was gonna be out as soon as I could get back on my feet physically and financially.

  17. I took my boyfriend to visit my father in rural Maine and neglected to inform him that Pop keeps a loaded handgun in each of the four doors of his vehicle and his gun permit taped to the window. Ensuing conversation was slightly hilarious.

  18. We have a generational running joke in our family that when you turn 18 you get a gift, a set of luggage. Good bye job done. Of course reality is never quite like that, but we still joke with my nieces and nephews, as my Mom did with me and her Dad did with her.

  19. I’m the youngest kind and I find when I am back with my family, I tend to fall into the same ‘baby’ role. If the interaction goes for too long, I get bored with it.

    Last Christmas, my parents came to stay with me for 3 weeks. We had a great time but it amused me because my mom, who was in a cooking frenzy, kept asking if I had basic cooking utensils. “Do you have a strainer?” “Do you have measuring cups?”

    It was like she had forgotten that I’ve been living in a house for nearly 10 years and thought I was still a college student.

  20. When, as I was unsuccessfully looking for long term, permanent work back in the early nineties, my stepfather called me a sponge. (And, variously, that my brains were up my ass, that I was lazy, that I was– Well, you get the idea.)

    It took me a few more months, but I finally nailed a position in Taiwan, on the other side of the planet.

    I just lurve family.

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