Parents continued
I’ll consider this a continuation of this post.
Cindy mentioned that the culture here is to leave your family — go away to school, go away for a job, go away in general. I don’t want to do that, obviously (neither does she). And it does make it hard. How can you be expected to want to live somewhere just for your parents? Maybe, if they’re sick, if you need to take care of them, but if they’re healthy? (My grandparents are all still healthy, even.)
I speak to my mother almost daily. I don’t speak as often to my father, because he & I don’t converse well on the phone. But we meet halfway a few times a year, just the two of us, to spend time together. We go out for meals now and then just the two of us . . . when I move back home (unless the political situation there explodes, but I plan to live there permanently, linguist or not) I’m sure that I will have dinner with them (and my grandparents) regularly. My mother is not my best friend; she’s not my friend at all.[1] She’s my *mother* (I find the new thing of “my mother is my best friend” incredibly icky, somehow, though it’s nice that people are close). But I love her and I talk to her about things and I tell her things and when I win that holiday to the beach (I plan for things like winning lotteries and contests) I will go with my family. I like my family.
A friend of mine (26) and his sister (24) both still live at home and plan to for the foreseeable future. Their parents are happy about it. My mother admits to not really ever wanting any of us to leave, and, as part of my plan to live back in Canada City as of my fifth year, I plan to live back home. My sister will only be 13 then,[2] anyhow; I won’t be moving in with just my parents. (This is a financial issue, since I may or may not get funded in my last year: I am unwilling to teach basic essay writing to freshman for the honour of living under the poverty line here. Yes, it’s something good to teach. No, I don’t want to be the one to do it.)
I don’t understand why it’s considered so strange to want to be with your family. It’s a middle-class kind of thing, based on my fairly unrepresentative sample. The poorest people can’t afford to go off, the richest can, but they come back to work in the family business. Sure, you can like your family, but isn’t it time to grow up and live on your own? No.
I want to live on my own, yes; but near them. I want to be part of their daily lives, and vice versa. I want to get all the time I can with them, and with my grandparents,[3] because these are the people I love, and you never know what might happen.[4]
[1] I do have friends; I try not to talk about them much here. But I am often surprised at how lucky I am, in them.
[2] Maybe I shouldn’t. Living with a teenaged girl? On the other hand, it will probably give me incentive to finish my dissertation and get out.
[3] Who are all, as I mentioned, healthy. But my grandmother’s siblings and parents all died young, and my grandfather’s older brother has Alzheimer’s, and his older sister is not well, and they’re all in their 80s (my grandmothers both turn 80 this year; I’m rounding). I admit to being not particularly close to my paternal grandparents, who I see a few times a year. I *was* close to them until I was 11 or 12, when they stopped wanting to spend as much time with me. Since I was just at the age to be very hurt by this, I was. There are other issues, like the fact that they’re miserable to spend time with. My other grandparents aren’t.
[4] I’ve been morbid recently. It’s probably because I’m so unhappy.