Living with my parents is dope, and I think I need to stop blaming them for all of my shit
Guys, I know that I predicted that living with my parents would like becoming institutionalized again — I know I predicted I would feel 16 years old and helpless-hopeless again.
But I gotta tell you, my parents have been super pleasant.
They work hard, are much better than they used to be at boundaries — to the point where I’d say they are actually good at boundaries. They are considerate, and they keep making me good food to eat. They are helping me take care of my dogs even though they’re not really into dogs. It is pretty idyllic stuff.
I’ll let you know if this takes a turn, but for now, I have decided that I am not the hero of this story. The hero is actually them, and I am their petulant child who has gotten everything in life because they have given me everything, and yet I am still always complaining and blaming them for stuff I should be taking responsibility for myself.
Like, I often track emotional constipation and rigidity in myself, and I’m always like, “Ugh! This is all my mom and dad’s fault! They didn’t hug me enough when I was a child!”
But right now, I’m living with them, and these motherfuckers are always making me uncomfortable by talking to me about how they feel about things. My dad is telling me about his regrets in life, and it’s so amazing and transparent and vulnerable and the dude is clearly trying to connect.
And I’m the one who is experiencing blockage and unable to reciprocate half the time. At this point, this is no longer on them. It’s a me thing.
I’ve been thinking about how it’s so interesting, the way our biases color the way we tell stories. I superficially talk about my parents a lot in my Insta stories. My intention with the stories is never mockery or like portraying a generation gap or even displaying my rightness and contrasting it with their wrongness. I honestly just get a kick out of all the hilarious badass cold shit that comes out of their faces, and I like to share it with the world.
You can’t control how people interpret your content, so every now and then someone will misunderstand the point of my words, and they will say something mildly offensive to me. Like, “I’m so sorry you are going through a hard time, right now.” And then I worry that a bunch of people think I’m in distressed (and I feel unexpectedly vulnerable about it) or that I’ve accidentally portrayed my parents as like, abusive — instead of as caring, productive, and hard-working — in all aspects of life, including in trying to better understand their kids.
I think sometimes people react that way with me due to their own context — maybe they are sensitive to the language I use, maybe it feels harsh? Or perhaps people respond that way because they live too far outside of our cultural norms, and our cultural norms might seem a bit harsh.
On my end, I use “harsh” language because I get sick of how we infantilize elders and how we infantilize people who have experienced great trauma (I’m avoiding using the word “victimized” here.) I think how the world sees people like my parents is the world sees them as pitiful people. Even when the world recognizes their productivity and talents, the world will still condescendingly talk about them like they are so cute and adorable for beating the odds and not succumbing to and being crushed under shit circumstances.
And that shit bothers me. How we tend to talk about refugee-immigrants is annoying.
I’ve been hanging out with these people on a daily basis, and all I ever see is just relentless badass shit all day. My mom spends hours each day unintentionally terrorizing people in customer service because she felt like she was overcharged on a bill. She is amazing at advocating for herself, and she taught all of her children this terrible skill.
When I was a kid, my parents were super protective and were super paranoid about sheltering us as they simultaneously made us constantly scared of being randomly raped at any moment, on any day.
They were controlling and authoritarian, which — I mean, for work, I’ve been reading stuff about early childhood development. And I’ve been reading that this is not great way to be parenting kids — and honestly, I feel judged by this assessment. And hilariously defensive about it. In many moments, I find myself feeling like a controlling and authoritarian upbringing was kind of awesome for me overall.
When we were kids, we were rarely able to go to our friends’ houses to play, and we rarely got to go on overnight school field trips because, remember, my parents were paranoid about sexual assault and rape from every direction. I grew up in the suburbs, so most of my friends and peers were like, suburban. To me, it seemed like everyone else’s parents were super permissive, and I was the only one with “crazy” parents. I feel like I spent so many years trying hide how strict and scary my parents were from my friends so that they didn’t think I was weird or getting abused at home.
I used to get in trouble for really minor things, like spilling stuff or not closing the refrigerator door fast enough or for the texture of my hair. I got in trouble a lot for stuff out of my control, so there was often no way to avoid punishment. Punishment felt inevitable and unfair all the time. I was the eldest kid, so a lot of the time, I had to take my sister and brother’s punishment along with them because I wasn’t watching them when they fucked up themselves.
The punishment was nearly always big and angry and shame-inducing, like sometimes it involved kneeling stock-still facing the wall or getting smacked with a neon feather duster. As we got older, the punishment centered around absorbing a lot of yelling, criticism, and blame. All of the time, the punishment taught us a lot of discipline and self-regulation — at the same time it made us all a little flinchy over non-mistakes.
As a kid, all of that stuff was pretty distressing. I mean, of course it was. And in my teens, that stuff became angering, because anger became a device that I used for self-protection and self-defense. In my twenties, it all became rage, and I vowed to not have a relationship with my dad when I got older to punish him.
But then I went to therapy and talked about it a lot to a person who was amazing helpful in teaching me how to process through it. I also got older and stopped taking myself so serious and realized I’m not the center of the universe. I also worked in news and was exposed to just terrible, tragic stories that helped put my shit in perspective. There were so many things my parents did right that they didn’t get as much credit for.
So now in my thirties, I’m living with my parents again, and it’s really pleasant and easy. That’s because so much of the stuff I was concerned about — like being triggered, being made to feel overly sensitive because I got triggered, like getting distracted because I was triggered and then being unable to do my job — has surprisingly not been issues at all.
I used to never think about how young my folks were when they became parents. My mom had me when she was about 24 years old. My dad was probably 30. They were both younger than I am right now, when they had me.
So I know people don’t like it when you compare child-rearing to keeping a dog alive, but it’s like, my only relevant reference point here. And I can tell you about all of the mistakes I’ve made with my dog. Like, when Charlie was dying — and before I realized he was dying — I got so pissed at him for not eating that I raged at him, scared the shit out of him, and smacked him, which definitely made him feel worse as he was already dying. I did that when I was like, 35 years old.
And because of all of my rigidity with Charlie and all of the ways I punished that dude for shit that wasn’t even his fault — now I have Maxi. Who eats her own shit. And about it, I’m like, “Whatever, it’s fine. As long as you’re happy and it doesn’t make you sick, I’m cool with it.”
I think my parents went through a similar journey. I think when they were 24 and 30 years old, they had literally just arrived in this racist-ass country with zero money, a shaky grasp of the language, a bunch of trauma in their brains, no knowledge of the culture or laws, no home or job — and then they had a kid (me).
Like, that is so wild when I think about it.
I think I got the youngest, most inexperienced version of them. And they probably had just incredible anxiety around safety about everything and couldn’t help but act out that anxiety in their lives.
Now, I see their authoritarian style of parenting as parenting out of abject fear. Fear of danger, pain, and especially death. Most of us have the luxury of only being able to imagine and speculate about tragic death — but my parents experienced death much more directly in their childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. They went through shit most people can’t even fathom. They lost their country and had to start over in a new place with zero money and zero familial support. Like, a very small percentage of people know what that feels like.
My folks still like to talk about the ways in which we could all die like, a lot. When I was younger, a lot of innocuous decisions or “mistakes” were swiftly corrected with a lot of severity. Like: If we don’t shut every door or turn off every light, a robber will come into the house and slit all out throats — so shut the fucking light off.
When I was younger, I used to get pissed and annoyed and intimidated by their heavy-handed criticism on this stuff. I would feel like they were talking to me like they think I was stupid or purposefully irresponsible and disrespectful, and I was sensitive to that. I used to hate how the criticism made me feel about myself.
Well, as you know, I still love leaving doors open overnight and just inviting murderers and rapists straight into the house. But the difference now is that my dad treats me like I’m Maxi, the shit-eater. Instead of freaking out and going straight to crazed-levels of rage, he is like, “Hey, you left the door open last night again. Can you remember to not do that?”
And on my end, instead of being so hurt that he thinks I’m a moron and purposefully irresponsible, I’m like, “Thanks for this really direct feedback. I have heard you. I will be more cognizant about all of these doors in your house. I understand you are not challenging my personhood right now. I understand you are concerned about our safety, and it would be irrational for me to get pissed that you want us to stay alive. Got it.”
I know people whose relationship with their parents is basically a lost cause. Like, the issues are insurmountable and maybe the toxicity is too much to overcome.
I am lucky in that that’s not my case. It was a little dicey in my 20s, but now, it’s totally fine and good. And the credit for this actually goes to my dad, not really me. Like, I didn’t do much. He did a lot.
Over the years, my dad has put incredible effort toward managing his anger. His anger was immense when we were kids, but now, his anger is better contained. And obviously he put in the work for our sake, because no one ever works on their anger for themselves. (Trust me. I know.)
There’s a cliche I hear a lot. It’s about our parents and how they don’t change because they are too old. I internally roll my eyes whenever I hear that cliche, because I have witness really inhuman change over the course of like, 30 years. It’s hard to hold grudges when you see a lot of effort in someone.
I think when I tell Insta stories about my dad giving me attitude and telling me how to do my life better — when it’s obvious I’m nailing this shit pretty hard on my best days — the stories are actually funny and poignant to me, because I know the context. Like, first off, he could be WAY WORSE, and he has been. This version of him is a fucking breeze through palm fronds. Like, oh my God, his criticism is like Classical music. It’s is so relaxing to be around now.
Secondly, it’s poignant because it must be hard to kick a life-long habit. It must be hard to try and stop parenting all the time when that’s all you know how to do with a person. It must be especially hard and complicated to find a way to provide value to the life of this adult that you made, who doesn’t need guidance anymore. So you find minor things to pick on.
Like, I get it. Bugging me about the most minor-ass shit is like, sometimes how my parents feel like they can maintain their connection to me. I appreciate that. I appreciate the feeling behind the effort. So I take it in with a lot of humor.
I honestly expected my mom and dad to be all up in my shit after I started living with them again. I expected my mom to go into my room and make my bed everyday because she has a compulsion, and one of our ongoing mother-daughter disagreements is that she thinks everything should be super neat and orderly, and I rebel by being chaotic and messy. In the past, she’s cleaned up after me and bitches a lot about how messy I am and tells me to do better in that regard. In the past, I’ve suggested to her that she should chill out and that her rigidity and discipline is not as great as she thinks it is.
Dude, my mom has not cleaned up after me at all. My room had clothes strewn all over the floor for a few weeks, and she didn’t even touch it. She’s not washing my clothes for me. She’s not making the bed. She’s sweeping the floor once a month, but that is about it. She knows I don’t want her to be doing that stuff for me — so she isn’t doing it.
I expected my dad to be more mercurial than he has been. I expected to hear him rage and hear him snap in anger a lot. So far, he has done very little of that — which has been shocking and requires a shit ton of effort — I know it does. So that’s been huge. I also expected my dad to be tracking my whereabouts constantly and keeping major tabs on my every move. I also expected him to start dictating a bunch of terms now that I live with them.
But he has been really chill and doesn’t ask where I’m going all the time. He kind of dictates a number of things, but they are small. Like there’s a way he wants me to close doors. There’s a way he wants me to treat the floors. There’s a way he wants me to use lights. He wants me to always take my garage opener out of my car every time I get home because he doesn’t want a robber to break into my car, take the garage door opener, open the door, and then murder us all violently — and I get that. I don’t agree with it — but I get it. It’s their house, and I live here. So I will do this stuff.
I’ve also changed. I’m like, going out to get this garage door opener that I don’t believe in, for instance. I’m also walking around hand-sweeping my hair from the floor all the time. Yesterday, I put my clothes away in the closet so my mom doesn’t have to look at mess.
It doesn’t feel like it costs me anything to be a good housemate to people who are letting me live in their house rent-free and are making me food all the time. Like, when I look at this situation from their point of view, and it basically a story about how their adult daughter intruded and disrupted their life without a lot of warning. I was basically like, “Surprise! I need to move back home, motherfuckers!” with them. And they were really chill about it. And then they went about adjusted their home, their routine, and generally their lives in so many ways because of this situation. I’m typing this from the home office right now, from a desk that is usually my dad’s desk — but now the kitchen island is his desk because my ass took over his actual space.
It would be ridic if, on top of that, I was also like, “Fuck you, I’m going to spill shit all over on your fragile floors. I’m going to leave the key to the house in my car because I don’t feel like bringing the remote inside the house. I’m going to not lock doors as a protest to this weird style of lock you have. I’m going to turn off all your lights because I don’t buy into your narrative about how much these lights cost to replace.”