Home
Today I would like to talk about a place. This place is a mythical place. They sing songs, make movies and write poems about it. We dream about it when we’re not there and longing for it has even been known to cause illness…
The place I am speaking of, of course, is called “home.” More specifically, your parent’s home. The place you grew up. Even more specifically, my parent’s home.
It seems like its a part of the coming of age to ask the question, “Where is home?” “Where do I belong?” What I say to the individuals asking those questions is, “You don’t want to know, trust me.”
I sit here today, on this bitter, bitter cold day in my parent’s house, at my parents dining room table. I sleep upstairs in my childhood bedroom. I know exactly where home is. I’m here and for the record, its not all its cracked up to be. I’m not here because I “failed to launch” or because I have a “helicopter mom” or any other dumb pop culture explanation for a phenomenon happening all over the country. I am here because I graduated from college in the midst of an economic crisis… and I have student debt… oh yeah, and because I seem to have an affinity to professions that don’t make very much money..that too.
I’ll admit, I play it down. When talking to people who don’t know me very well I conveniently leave out that detail of my life. I pretend like I have crazy roommates, I just leave out the fact that they are my parents. No big deal. Except I’m not very good at lying, so the charade is usually up pretty fast. But the fact remains, it hurts my pride a little to say it: “I live at home.”
It should make me feel better that I am not alone. Many of my friends live with their parents. Some of them have good jobs, others have been in the grind of the job search for years. Some pay their parents rent and some don’t. Some are doing everything in their power to move out and others have grown comfortable where they are at. But the fact remains that scores of young adults across the country are packing up their dorm rooms to move back to their childhood rooms. The benefits vary according to your family-life, but there are often undeniable advantages. For me they are:
1) Obtaining my daily news from the hours my father spent listening to NPR/on NPR.org at the dinner table
2) All my shit is in one place
3) My parents are pretty cool
4) The kegerator
5) Living with dogs whose poop I dont have to pick up
6) Somebody else does the grocery shopping
7) The magic bottle of Jack Daniels in the cabinet that never goes empty
I know, its hard to imagine why anyone would want to leave such a utopia, right???
Maybe its just me, but I think its good to remember why these kids (me and my friends) ended up here in the first place. We’re not lazy. We’re not having a hard time navigating the world you grew up in. Its a different world out there. You don’t get unemployment benefits with a college degree and there is a good chance you will be at least under-employed if not unemployed for a substantial amount of time post-college. Hard to navigate, to say the least.
But what about that ancient coming-of-age question, “Where is home?” What do those of us who are at home ask? Is it stunting our capabilities to come-of-age? How do we develop our own sense of home, going beyond the one of our childhood? I don’t know, but if I end up here when I am 40, feel free to smack me across the face and send me on my way to answer those questions…
