We’ve always told the kids you can live with us during college but if you’re not going to school, you need to work and pay some rent. And either way, you need to help around the house. My oldest is 20 this year and it would be in everyone’s best interest if he saved his money from his job and moved out, which he is putting a deposit down tomorrow the next town over. He’s excited for the move because he had this crazy belief the day he turned 18 that everything would magically appear overnight. Wrong…
He changed jobs twice and declared that he never intended to move out to the country with us and that he was a bona fide city boy. Hated working out on the yard and hated getting sweaty and dirty. So after much yelling and crying (on my part) it was best to figure out that he needed to tough it out and make his own way with his own responsibilities. (although as his mother I’m still scared that he will make bad choices, come home my little bear!!!) just kidding…
Maybe.
it is tough sometimes, specially the first time…umm…can I just call you redux? careful with that call back, it might be likely to happen. But it is much easier the next time.
I had the opposite experience. When I finished HS at 17 1/2 I found a lab job at the local university that allowed me to attend college part time as a commuter. My parents were happy with that arrangement. When, three years later, a friend of mine and I decided to get an apartment near the campus, my mother flew into orbit. “A child lives with his parents until they get married”. “Cousin Ruthie will think we don’t get along”. On and on she went in this vein. But I persisted and she eventually resigned herself to it. My friend had the opposite experience. But finishing first in his HS class, he won a full scholarship to the university and his father threw him out of the house because he didn’t go out to work. “College is for lazy bums”. A sympathetic dean of men allowed him to occupy an unrented dorm room free. For his second year and third year (my fourth and fifth) we had our shared apartment.
With my kids, once they went off to college, they came back for a couple summers, but immediately upon graduation set out on their very successful lives.
They sure as hell tried. My Mom first started thinking about kicking me out of the house when I was 15, she went to see a lawyer to see if she could legally throw me out and they pretty much laughed her out of the office. I was a straight-A student, law-abiding, church three times a week, kind of a goody-goody to be honest, but I talked back too much.
There were a couple of times I was thrown out for a couple of weeks but I lived with my grandparents so it wasn’t like I was homeless on the streets. I mean it was still shitty and disruptive because my grandparents had to drive me 45 minutes to school or whatever.
Then when I was like 16 my ‘‘parents’’ decided they wanted to move closer to their job, so they just left me in the old place on my own for most of the week with an occasional visit. I started working a lot after school and I had a chore schedule to keep and my mother’s expectations as usual were just unrealistic. So I finally lost my shit and left home. Just walked out the door in the middle of another one of her violent tirades.
I went to live with my grandparents for a couple of weeks and then my parents decided I could move in with my Aunt and they would pay for my living expenses. That lasted for a few months until my Mom got pissed at me again and she went into the school and cut up my driver’s license in front of the school counselor. I was like, ‘‘Mom, I need to get to school,’’ and she said, ‘‘I don’t care if you ever graduate.’’ I was Salutatorian with a 3.97 GPA.
So I legally emancipated and got a job to support myself when I was 17. I just needed to be able to drive to school because it was super inconvenient for everyone else in my family to go out of their way to take me. My Mom was outraged and offended that I legally emancipated when she’d been trying to throw me out of the house for years. I don’t get it. But at least the judge signed off on it.
Happy Mother’s Day!
This is pretty much why all my friends in high school were gay. I wasn’t gay but for whatever reason my ‘‘parents’’ couldn’t accept me for who I was. I was just this constant fucking problem that couldn’t be fixed. So me and all my gay friends were constantly getting thrown out of the house and threatened to get thrown out of the house and it was my first time having peers I could relate to on any level. Which is not intended to minimize all the bullshit LGBT folks have had to deal with that I never did. Just to say it’s the first place where I felt like I belonged and the main reason I froth at the mouth whenever parents even think about considering rejecting their children for their sexuality. I seriously want to kick all those parents in the fucking teeth and I’m not a particularly violent or vengeful person.
Shit, one of my friends even got thrown out for being gay and his homophobic fucking small-town Sheriff father was later busted and thrown in prison for child porn. :mad: The first thing Sheriff Pervert said to my friend after he met me (when I was 15ish) was ‘‘she’s doable.’’ :mad::mad: Fucking hypocrite homophobic pervert asshole.
Am I the only person who didn’t feel like he “moved out” upon going off to college? My parents’ address was on my driver’s license, voting registration, etc. I still considered myself to reside permanently at my parents’ house, with semesters at college a temporary thing. As far as I was concerned, I “moved out” for the first time at 24, the first time I signed a lease on an apartment I paid for myself. (I was paying my dad rent before that, and while he didn’t “kick me out,” he did passively-aggressively make it known that he resented still having his kids in his hair.) Doesn’t anyone else feel the same way?