It pissed me off no-end when I got back home after my first semester in college, went to drop my suitcase in my bedroom… and my bedroom wasn’t there!
Mom had moved me from a 250sq ft, sunny room to a dark, 110sq ft one in punishment for going “too far away” (to go home every weekend and do the ironing, that is - literally, I’m not picking an example - and too far for her to stay on my shoulders the whole time).
What pissed me was
not being told before I got there (interrogation of my brothers, then 12 and 10, showed that she’d done it the week after I’d left)
the reason she did it
she actually told me that she would have put me in the walk-in storage closet if it had been large enough for a bed. Gee, thanks Mom. Your somewhat-claustrophobic daughter loves ya too.
Also note that she expects me, and always has, as her eldest child and only female, to be the one caring for her in her old age. That change was all about Control, not about “not needing that space any more.” So yeah, it pissed me.
Changing to a smaller space once we moved out would have meant giving us the freedom to have our own space… Mom now lives alone in the same big flat, and anybody who expects her to move out while still vertical is delusional. She’d love to have us all there. Under Control, of course
I wouldn’t have expected to have “my room unchanged” and forever frozen in my teenage years, as you sometimes see in movies. My reaction to those is always “creepy!” But since I am expected to be in that house occasionally (and not-so-occasionally when my help is needed), it would be nice to have a dang big room with beautiful views and the possibility to watch sunrise from the bed, rather than a small, dark, long room with a too-large-for-its-capacity closet and a view of a row of clotheslined balconies.
About a month into my first semester my parents told me they were moving to the other side of the country in a few weeks. My mom told me that she had called around some schools near their new house about how I could transfer down there. She also said they had picked their new house specifically because I could get a large “bachelor pad” bedroom on the third floor.
She was not pleased when I told her that I wasn’t transferring schools. (She was even less pleased when I told her I had found a job for that summer and wouldn’t be staying with them). Oh, and they moved halfway back to here 11 months later (she tried to get me to transfer to a school near their new home again). Their new house has 2 more bedrooms than they need even if all the kids are there at once.
I guess my parents are hoping for lots of grandkids…
When I, the youngest child of my dad’s (my mom has a younger daughter), graduated college, my dad and stepmom decided to move … into a bigger house. I didn’t get it, either.
Turned it into the “eating room”, it’s now the “small living room.”
Wen had a recent discussion about room size; it came up when I said I’d be using “my brothers’ room” from then on as it’s bigger, sunnier and already set up as a bedroom, Mom claimed the small room isn’t any smaller. They’re the same length, but there is a width difference slightly over one meter - as measured by Littlebro and myself, with solemn faces and making Mom write down the meter’s readings.
Madd Maxx, it can also say “I’m my parents’ primary caretaker” or “there is a better hospital in my town than where my parents live.”
Parents frequently do not talk to children about finances. It’s quite possible that they took this step specifically so that they would have the money to send the kids to college.
