The weird thing is my Mom did something kind of similar in her own teen years. She got pregnant (by her account, rape) at 18, was sent off on her own, and somehow got a Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, in the 80s, as a single parent. I grew up sitting underneath a classroom desk coloring while the professor lectured. That strength I witnessed in her, for all the problems we had, also drove me to get through my own dark times. How did I survive my mother? Because I am my mother’s daughter.
The whole ordeal was also the breaking point of my parents marriage. My father was not religious and was not comfortable with exiling his own child, he went along with it at the time though. After the damage was done, they ended up divorcing anyway. I was able to rebuild a relationship with my father before he passed away. I run his/my grandfathers business now. My mother is still alive, we are barely on speaking terms I’ll call or text on holidays, there is no in depth conversations between us.
I started working when I was thirteen. I had a full time job from when I was seventeen. So I guess if my parents had kicked me out (which I can’t imagine happening) I would have found a cheap apartment and moved into it. Which is what I did do when I was twenty.
When I turned 18 I was at University, living in halls, and paying for that myself out of a combination scholarship and my part time job. So I would have just gone on doing that.
Later, when we moved to Scotland, I lost my self-supporting status because my visa wouldn’t let me work (and possibly also because menial entry level jobs pay much better in Australia). My parents were paying me an amount of money equal to what I would have got if I’d been an actual UK citizen getting a student grant. If they’d cut me off then, I guess I would have been on the next plane back to Australia. But one of my good friends was indeed in the OPs situation (she was a Northern Ireland Protestent who’d had the temerity to be seeing a Catholic guy) and she just worked her way through Uni.
Hitchhiked around, slept on the floor at friend’s houses, worked crappy jobs, spent time in a commune, spent time in jail, shared old houses with strangers, went to college (18 hour semester at UT Austin back in the day was total cost of 350.00) working 2 jobs. And partied my ass off the whole time, wouldn’t change a thing…
I…did not have a good relationship with my parents after their separation/divorce. At the age of 16, I very nearly ran away from home to join up with a bunch of hippies. I later tried to short-circuit some of the dysfunctional behavior in my family by telling my parents that they could kick me out if they wanted, and I’d drop out of high school, or they could trust me to set reasonable behavioral limits for myself (I was a straightedge pacifist who mostly got As), and I’d stay in high school, but either way I was done taking discipline from them.
In retrospect, it was a dick move on my part. But I was kind of desperate and freaking out and furious at various things going on that I’m not gonna go into here, and I was doing the best I could.
Anyway, by the time I graduated high school just before my 18th birthday, I had a job lined up, and I moved out of the house that week and didn’t talk to my parents for a couple of months until tensions had simmered down.
I was going into my 2nd year of college. I’d have had a talk with the financial aid office to see if I could get loans or more work study. Live with friends off-campus to save money?
I was out of HS at 18. I was also a mess mentally/emotionally. Probably I would have been hospitalized (which could easily have happened in real life).
I was hospitalized, at 19. That entire fantastic year of emancipation I spent most of the days fantasizing about hanging myself. I think college was when the walls came down and I just stopped functioning. Fortunately, I had found my husband by then. He sat with me in psych ER for 7 hours before I was admitted.
In Belgium you automatically get unemployment benefits if you aren’t working or studying x number months after high school. Emergency housing can be gotten from the welfare office. That’s what I would have done.
Having a January birthday, I was still in high school when I turned 18. Can you legally kick out your “adult child” if they are still enrolled in public high school?
If they had done son, I had a couple of friends whose family would have taken me until my parents came to their sense. Alternatively, my grandmother in another town would have taken me in and I could have transferred to a school there, I guess. I lived with her part of the time I was in college, so I’m sure she would have taken me in sooner if needed.
You know, it wouldn’t have been that tough. I did get a job right after high school graduation, in construction. And some non-college-bound friends and I got a place. We got a deal to live in a house for a year while we renovated it. I knew it was only for a year – I was going to college. But had I decided differently, I had a pretty good start. The guys I knew from back then who weren’t going to college worked in construction, got into training programs for skilled trades, got into the relevant unions, and were doing pretty well, pretty fast.
I moved to student digs then into another joint then met my (soon to be) husband and we moved in together. No great drama back in the 1970’s in Aus. Rents were cheap, student allowances were somewhat generous, and then combined with a part-time job, I was richer then than almost any other time in my life.
Even though I had (and still have) loving parents I probably should have been hospitalized then. That’s when I became convinced no girl\woman would ever love me; I didn’t really become convinced that wasn’t true until Ms. P set me straight at 31.
I’m glad you found her. Everyone deserves an epic love story. And I can’t blame all my problems on my parents, there’s clearly a genetic component to my depression. You can have everything good in life except a broken brain. It doesn’t make you unlovable. Fortunately, you know that now.
I was 19, but this happened to me. No money is a slight exaggeration (social welfare), but I had no job. I wish I had gone to University, which at that point was still free, but instead I struggled to find a career. I ended up doing lots of small one-off jobs, especially in local repertory theatre, but it was a constant struggle.
And frankly, my life has not improved all that much since.
