Living with Your Parents When You’re 22+

Kids, I hate to break it to you, but when you graduate from college you’re going to move back in with your parents.

It doesn’t matter how talented/employable/desperate you are: you will move back with your parents. You might not be there for long—maybe you’ll only be there for a month because the lease on your awesome new penthouse starts in July and your shitty undergrad apartment kicked you out in May. But no matter how long you actually live with your parents, it will be too long.

Moving back in with your parents often brings on a multitude of confusing and paradoxical feelings, the likes of which you probably haven’t felt since you struck puberty in the seventh grade. On one hand, you don’t have to pay rent, worry about food being in the fridge, or wonder if the electricity will suddenly shut off because goddamn Ryan didn’t pay the bill on time again. But with this sense of comfort comes an abject and abiding sense of shame. You go to bed each night beneath all the memorabilia you thought was cool in high school when you last redecorated your room and wonder where things went so horribly wrong that you ended up back in the place where you started?

Guess which one is you.

If it makes you feel any better, your parents probably aren’t very excited to have you move back in with them either. My mom got a puppy the weekend I graduated from college, a placeholder for her soon to be empty nest. Unfortunately for me, the dog is cuter, and has a better personality than me. 

 The undeniable evidence.

Unfortunately for my mom, neither myself nor my 19 year old brother have yet moved out of the house. It’s like being in high school again, except there’s a lot more booze. My parents have really been pretty great about the whole thing so far, though they have mentioned that when I finally do leave the nest, they’re going to throw me a Moving Out Party.

That’s right, a Moving Out Party, not to be confused with a Going Away Party. It’s a small, but significant departure.

So how does one cope with the moving back with the parents? Well the best thing to do really is make the most of it, because you’ll probably be eating Velveeta on crackers the moment you walk out of their door. My parents live a life of unparallel luxury compared to my standards of living. I still remember my stunned awe when I returned from Florence and realized that my parents have separate paper products for different things: toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, and tissues. In my apartment, we had one paper product for all of these things. And sometimes not even that.

So what’s the moral of this tale exactly? Namely, the real world is a scary, fucked up place. And if moving back home is the most pressing of your problems, just remember that things are probably going to get much worse before they get any better. Enjoy the luxury of having both tissues AND toilet paper while it lasts, friends.  

College Grads Ahead: Proceed with Caution

Maybe in hindsight, this blog should have been called “How to Eat Your Feelings,” or “Cooking with your Parents’ Cash,” or even better yet, “How I Avoid Accepting Adulthood.” I’m kind of fond of the last one for its heartfelt truth and distracting alliteration. But I've settled on "What the hell do you do with a B.A in English" because it seemed so much more appropriate.

Graduating is kind of like trying to win a prize at a really cool fair, except once you get the prize, you realize it’s actually not that great, but now you’re stuck with it and you can’t get rid of it no matter what, because you spent all the time and money trying to get the stupid prize in the first place, and there’s no return policy at the fair. 

The prize would be my degree, but it’s actually more like a dead fish- something useless and sad.

It’s not like I didn’t know English degrees are useless. I went to college and majored in English despite the fact that they were useless. But I was naive and young then. I did know the meaning loans, or how much my ham and brie panini habit actually costs to maintain. Reality set in-- like a giant boulder crashing into my body and pinning me to the ground, unable to do anything.

 

But now it’s time to do something, you see, judging by all the people who keep asking me what I’m doing after I graduate. But English degrees, like dead fish, don’t do a whole lot for you. My conversations with these well-meaning questioners usually go something like this.

Them: “Hey, so what are you up to after you graduate?”

Me: “… I have no idea.”

Them: “Wait, what? I didn’t catch that.”

Me: “I’m not doing anything.”

Them: “What about grad schools, weren’t you looking at those?”

Me: “Applying to grad school is a complicated process. Also, you don’t do it unless you know it’s what you want.”

What I really mean: “Grad school scares the shit out of me, and I really don’t want to study math for the GRE because the GRE is stupid just like math, and I have more secret grey hairs than I’m willing to tell you about because I only very nearly escaped my undergraduate career with my sanity and soul intact, but there still might be some lasting damage and going to grad school right now may be the end of me.”

Them: “Oh, okay. Are you going to move back in with your parents and see what happens?”

Me: “Um, I already live with my parents…”

Them: “Oh.”

The Awkward Silence falls, and I try desperately to restore the conversation, lest the other person walks away thinking I’m going to be another sap collecting unemployment from their paycheck in the very near future. 

Me: “But I might move to Madison!”

Them: “Oh! That’s nice. Why Madison?”

Me: “Because the unemployment rate there is really low. And my boyfriend is going to school there. But mostly the unemployment.”

Depending who I’m talking to, this is the slightly redeeming end to the conversation that I hoped for, but this is not always the case. Sometimes, I realize that I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake, and I should have just let the other person assume that I would sit despairing in my parents’ basement for all my days. But how was I know that moving + boyfriend in the same sentence would be the equation of doom?

Them: “OMG that is SO romantic! So when are you getting married?”

Me: “Um, I’m not. It's not like that.”

This is about the point where I start feeling itchy and hot, like I’m a pie baking in the oven and no one’s going take me out anytime soon and I can’t escape because I don’t have any legs.

Them: “Is he a nice guy? Men are such slobs these days. If you’re thinking of having children do that soon because-”

Me: “OH HEY LOOK AT THE TIME I HAVE AN IMPORTANT AND SUDDEN MEETING RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND NICE TALKING TO YOU BYE!”

But it’s too late. The damage has been done. It’ll be another night of despairing in my parents’ basement reading the self-guidance books I bought from Barnes and Noble that I have to return in two days because I can’t actually afford to buy them- just buy and return them (it’s like a library with higher stakes. Instead of being charged twenty five cents if you’re overdue a day, you’re out twenty bucks and get a new book).

So what’s the lesson learned here? Don’t ask a recent college grad what they’re up to unless you know what they’re up to, and it happens to be something laudatory. If you don’t know what they’re up to, or if it’s not laudatory, please, just give them some cookies or something.

We really like cookies.