I read an article recently that said more adult children are moving back home to live with their parents than at any time since the 1930’s. They referred to these men and women as the “boomerang generation.” Well, I must live in Australia because I got boomeranged. Hard.
Now, many of you may think this is a good thing. You might believe that adult offspring living at home would be of great benefit to their aging and overworked mothers and fathers. They could help out financially by covering some of the bills, including food, power, and other necessities. They might lend a hand with the chores, taking on yardwork and housework so their rapidly deteriorating elders don’t wear out quite so quickly. They could even fix meals and run necessary errands.
You might think that.
And you would be terribly wrong.
I have two adult children living with me these days. EM1 is 23 years old and firmly entrenched in my home. She treats her bedroom like an apartment and has even changed the locks without providing her landlords a key. Landlords she doesn’t pay rent to.
A few weeks ago, I asked EM1 to pick one night during the week to plan a meal and cook dinner for the family. Instead of actually doing what I asked, she did nothing all week, then on Friday suddenly said, “Oh, I guess it’s my night to do dinner.”
She then told me to pick a restaurant, go online to order what I wanted and pay for it, then schedule a pickup. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t consider this to be “fixing dinner.” It’s more like Uber Eats, only with a shittier attitude.
And when she went out to pick up the food, EM1 decided to stop for coffee on the way home just to make sure everything was good and cold when it got to us.
This is her idea of “helping.”
But I have actually sort of gotten used to EM1’s particular brand of B.S. It is the younger kid that suddenly presented us with a whole new set of challenges this year. EM2 will be 21 in a few months. She is attending college, but her school has gone completely virtual. EM2 moved out of the dorms and back home with us so she could save money and try to shorten my life.
Although classes are online, she still drives to school on most days so she can hang out with her college friends while she studies. I am not sure of her reasoning for this other than perhaps some strange desire to cost us gas money and put wear and tear on the car. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand why, instead of staying in her room and opening up her laptop to attend class, she feels the need to get in the car and drive for 45 minutes to a friend’s apartment so she can open up her laptop to attend class.
But I have never understood how this kid’s mind works. This is the same child that wandered into our bedroom at 10 o’clock at night while my wife and I were trying to sleep and started singing a song from her favorite cartoon. Despite harsh words and a few thrown objects, she didn’t stop singing until the entire song was done.
To clarify, this wasn’t several years ago. This was just last week. (And the cartoon was We Bare Bears, just in case you were wondering. I have no idea what the name of the damned song was.)
This is my life with adult children in the home. No extra help with chores or running errands, just nonstop tests to see if I can keep my sanity or if I’ll finally break and fire up the chainsaw I keep in the garage and try to bring the house down around our ears. At the moment, the odds are about two to one in favor of the chainsaw in case you wanted to get your bets in.
Just the other day, I was in the kitchen washing dishes and loading up the dish washer. I probably spent twenty minutes boiling my hands in hot soapy water before I finished the stack of plates and silverware that had accumulated in the sink over the past few hours. I turned off the water, grabbed the bag out of the kitchen garbage can and took it outside.
When I returned, I found a dirty dish and a fork sitting in the sink.
EM1 was sitting on the couch watching the latest installment of some Korean soap opera. I asked her in a very pleasant voice, “What the f—k is this?”
She turned and asked what I was referring to. I asked her why there was a dirty dish in the sink, and with a look that suggested she couldn’t believe I was bothering her for something so trivial, she told me it was from her lunch.
I took a deep breath then clarified that I wasn’t really asking where it came from, but rather why didn’t she bother to wash it. She told me, “I’ll get it later.”
I asked, again very politely, “If you didn’t want to wash it, why the hell didn’t you at least hand it to me thirty seconds ago while I was washing all the other dishes?”
She shushed me, then turned the volume up on the television set.
For anyone who is wondering, EM1 is still alive and breathing. I’ll admit however, that it was touch and go for a moment.
But maybe we should up those odds to three to one in favor of the chainsaw.
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