After travelling for 4 and a half months, I really missed my parents beyond words. Whilst this took a while to fade, it has kind of faded. Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents and I actually do love spending time with them. They are fun people to hang out without. However there are some challenges in living with them again. Since my mum doesn’t work anymore and my dad only works part time and has decided to take a large proportion of the holidays he has accumulated over the last say, 10 years now, it means we are spending quite a lot of time living together. More then ever before. At this particular moment my older brother and his girlfriend are visiting from Perth and living here too. Lets just say, its taken some adjusting for all of us. Whilst I have other friends whom are in a similar, if not much worse situation and talking to them has made me see how good I really have it. However these are my tips for living with your parents at 22 when your not so use to it anymore.
1.) Pick your battles – You don’t need to argue over little things, sometimes its easier to put on a smile, say ‘yes mum’ and just do it. This in my family usually means helping mum or dad with some kind of computer problem which in reality, I have less of an idea than they do and when I try to fix it, they usually end up telling me I am doing it wrong.
2.) Stay out of it as much as possible – When my parents disagree, I disappear. I don’t need to be the person to settle the pointless argument of which movie was better or which T.V show character is more evil.
3.) Keep your bedroom door closed – Yes I am messy and you think at 22, my parents might just leave it be. But no. However they can only make annoying comments, if they see it. As they say, out of sight, out of mind. Don’t bring it to their mind.
4.) Get out of the house as much as possible – My parents aren’t ones to go out very often, meaning that very often, I am the one to leave for some space.
5.) Write a pointless blog post about it, to let out some stem – Best to vent my frustrations here, then to their faces.
I do love them and I’m not a spoilt brat. I am grateful they are so good to me and invested in my life. Just sometimes a little bit to invested, to the point of downright nosy.
Though I love my parents… I don’t think I could ever live with them again. I moved out for college at 18 and never looked back. Now… Occasional weekend visits are all I can really handle lol
In Oz, we dont usually move out to go to University like you american’s do to go to college. Only if you need to move out will you do it, our parents don’t really support us or pay for it for us, its not really the common thing or part of our culture. So this means we tend to make ourselves pretty comfortable at our parents house for a pretty long time. We have a bad reputation for never leaving the nests lol. However i am really starting to see the appeal. mum and dad are hitting the senile and menopausal stage earlier then anticipated. lol.