Anonymous raged 1 month ago ——
Alright, first thing's first: I'm not the proverbial angry 17 year old who wants his parents to treat him like an adult because legal adulthood is only a few months away, nor am I the eternal college student who is going to school part time on his parents dime, partying and refusing to get a job. I'm 21, almost 22, paying my own way through college, and living at home because my parents, as long as I can remember, have told me that I would be welcome at home as long as I was either going to school full time (in which case I would not have to pay rent, although my college tuition was another story), or fresh out of college and trying to earn enough money to put a deposit on an apartment (in which case I would have to pay a minimal amount of rent.) The problem is, because I am not completely financially independent (apparently going to school full time isn't enough for them -- although it wasn't in my Sophomore year, either, when I was going full time /and/ working a job for 10-20 hours a week depending on how many hours my boss had assigned me and how many other employees' shifts I was able to cover for when they had to take a day off for whatever reason), they are incapable of seeing me as an adult.
What's more, my mother is incapable of accepting that sometimes I have a different opinion than her. She has taken to slapping me when I yell back after she escalates into a screaming match what was a peaceful conversation until I started talking about ideas that she disagrees with. This in a family that was very much devoted to the ideals of the first amendment throughout my childhood -- and when the ideas that I disagree with her on are things like professional codes of ethics prohibiting word getting out that said professionals are actually human, and while they may be held to a higher standard than most people, that standard can no longer be so high that the only way anybody can reach it is to live a dual life, impossibly perfect in public, surprisingly human (though not necessarily /bad/ -- just human) in private. The internet alone would have been enough to kill that paradigm; social networking sites have dug up the corpse, brought it back as a zombie, and put it down a second time. Yet the official line from the people in charge of teaching about and working with those codes of ethics is "if you can do it, don't have any social networking accounts. If you can't, lock 'em down and then sanitize both your posts and your own friends list to avoid getting fired." And she gets mad when I start talking about just how demonstrably /wrong/ this is. Yeah, that makes sense.
At any rate, I was able to begrudgingly accept this while I still had yet to move out of the house. My first couple of years of college weren't exactly pleasant -- I took on as many hours as possible at work just so I could get out of the house, and I made every effort I could to stay on campus for school, because I had friends there who didn't get angry at me for wanting to spend time enjoying myself instead of spending every spare minute cleaning a house that somehow never gets clean -- but I only knew what it was like not to have controlling parents from what I had observed of my friends. It was when I finished my associate's degree, and moved on to university that I realized how wonderful it was to live in a place where yes, I may have had some responsibilities, but I also had a lot of freedom, and, importantly, I was the equal of the people sharing my living space, rather than their subordinate. When I came back home for my final internship, which is supposed to be the last part of my degree before I actually go out and get a job, the trouble really began. While I don't expect my parents to treat me as their absolute equal when I'm eating their food rent free, I can't believe it would kill them not to see every little bit of resistance to their absolute authoritarian control as me being a rebellious teenager, or worse, a petulant child.
My mother loves to go on guilt trips about how when she was my age, she had already been married for several years, and how I don't even have a job. When I reply with the (valid) point that I'm in a catch 22 situation where I have no car because I have no job, and no job because I have no car (rural area, the bus line doesn't run out this far, and I was only able to hold down the job I had my sophomore year because it was at the college I was attending), she and dad both get angry at me for what they see as always finding a way to pin the blame for my problems on them. Mom is the one who get's pissed at me at the drop of a hat. Dad is generally reasonable, but he always backs her up, never me, and it really makes him angry if I do anything that either one of them see as "disrespecting" the mother who refuses to respect me enough to let me have my own bloody opinions. It is so frustrating to be in this situation, and to not even have anyone I can vent to about it -- because, you see, if I'm home long enough for this to be an issue, it mean's I'm actually at home, where my primary means of communication with my friends is Facebook. My mom and sister are both on my Facebook friends list, and even if I were to block them from seeing it, I'd have to block pretty much anyone who might have a chance of bringing it back to them. Get the idea? That's why I'm typing this here, instead of telling someone I trust. There is literally nobody I can tell this to. They're either too far away for me to tell them in person, or family from an older generation where it was possible to move out at 18 and make a better living (in real dollars) than I'm likely to make after getting my freakin' bachelor's degree, and that's in a field where the degree actually leads to a job, instead of just another degree or two.
And I mentioned cleaning earlier. For my entire life, the only time I've ever been allowed to sleep past 10:00 in the morning was if I was sick or if my parents had just randomly decided that they were going to let me sleep in -- which happened about two or three times a year. More often than not, they start screaming at me to get out of bed somewhere between 8:30 and 9:30 (this is all on days when I had no school or work, either during the Summer, on a holiday, or during the weekends/my day off from work (when I was working on Saturdays during the Summer between my Sophomore and Junior year of college.) Why did they make me do this? To clean the house. You see, we have a house that was reasonably sized when it was built almost 30 years ago, during a time when people had less stuff cluttering up the place. By today's standards, it's actually sonewhat small. As a result, it never stays clean for more than an hour or two; there's just more of everything than there is a place for it, so everything is rarely in its place. So we spend every waking moment trying to get this place clean, or if it is clean, embarking on some home improvement task that may need doing, but not at the expense of ever having free time that isn't associated with an away-from-the-home vacation, like a trip to the beach or a camping trip (which is a brief, once a year affair; vacations are nice, but knowing how to relax when you can't physically get away is a lot more important to avoiding a stress triggered stroke or heart attack than taking the occasional vacation is.). It got even worse after coming home from College. Because my internship proper starts a week after everyone else had gone back to school or work, my parents actually told me that they expect me to put in as many hours cleaning the house as the rest of the family does outside of the house. Nevermind the fact that two hours or so a day is all it needs, and those two hours have no reason to be first thing in the morning aside from my parents not wanting to see it when they get home (odd thing about cleaning the house: it may not stay clean, but one person can get all of the communal space in the house clean in about two hours, if he isn't spending so much time being nagged that he can't actually work. Four people can do it even more quickly, but good luck ever getting all four of us to actually do housework at the same time.)
And you know what the worst part of all of this is? My parents think I'm an absolute lazy bum, just because I make worse grades in college as a student who actually has friends and enjoys spending time with them, let alone doing anything for fun on my own, than my mother, who as a non traditional student spent literally all of the time that she wasn't driving one of her children someplace studying,, and made straight A's as a result. She actually started making fun of me when I made my first /B/, let alone when I failed a class that I knew from the second week I couldn't handle that term, but was stuck with because the State legislature changed my main scholarship so that I had to pay back the tuition on any class I dropped after the first week, and I didn't realize until it was too late that I needed to drop it. And yes, I have a problem with procrastination. It's a result of a guilt complex I'm going to eventually have to go to therapy for, because as a small child I learned that I got punished less if I avoided doing something I didn't want to by doing essentially nothing than I did if I got caught doing something I actually wanted to, like playing a videogame or watching Tv. Even though I recognize this is what's going on, I've internalized it to the point that I can't just stop doing it, and as a result, I waste a lot of my time, doing neither what I have to do nor what I want to do, just aimlessly surfing the web or puttering around the house.
Getting back on topic, the go-to threat from my mother is (and has been since I was 16, her selective memory to the contrary) to kick me out of the house, which at 16 would have involved moving in with my Grandma (who lives on social security and for a good chunk of my life hasn't even had a car), and today would leave me homeless (because, you see, that's the situation I'm in right now. Grandma moved to another state a while back, although she wants to come back sometime soon, so If they kick me out, I get to be homeless and not only work my way up from being penniless and carless in a rural area, I'll actually be starting with less than nothing, because of my student loan debt, which is minimal compared to most students [I've only taken out loans for room and board, with the possibility of using my loans from this term to buy a junker so I can finally get some freedom], but still makes it impossible for me to support myself if I get kicked out of the house before I finish my degree.) I feel completely trapped, with the only light at the end of the tunnel being the hope that I get a job upon graduation, and manage to get an apartment, and I don't even care if it's a shithole at this point; I seriously doubt having a place to myself can be worse than what I've got right now, no matter how rough the neighborhood is. And I have to say, writing this has been the most therapeutic thing I've ever done. It just makes me sad that I can't say any of this to my parents' faces until after I'm on my own and able to support myself, for fear of making them mad enough to wind up with me homeless. Even posting it here, completely anonymous, is a risk. But I had to write it, and I couldn't just delete something I'd poured my heart into like this. I can't keep a copy on my computer (again, because I'm afraid of what would happen if they ever found this), but I hope others in my situation see this and realize they aren't alone, because I know I sure as hell feel like it sometimes, especially when the advice I see for others in a similar situation pretty much boils down to "man up, get a job, and quit mooching off your parents." If this is mooching, especially in this economy, I'd hate to hear what people like that call people who live on welfare, instead of, you know, going to college and trying to get a job that allows them to be independent of their parents.