As a good Nigerian girl in her late twenties who is unmarried and not dating anyone, who happens to live and work in the same city as her parents, it is no surprise that I still live at home. I went to school in the same city we have lived in for almost 18 years so I have always lived with my parents and siblings, which might be strange to some.

There are many perks to living at home: low or no rent, home-cooked meals, not having to pay for services such as laundry, not having to be responsible for anything except personal bills (a cell phone bill, credit cards), access to a car without having to pay the servicing fees. There are also downsides to living at home. Some that I know well are having to coordinate plans to entertain with others living at home (to make sure they aren’t having people over and require the same rooms you might need); entertaining in general due to having to control the times your guests are over and/or the rowdiness of the plans; being asked by family members where you’re going and when you will be back (even when it’s out of concern), being told “Again?” or “Why do you always go out?” (or some other variation) when you reply to the question of where you are going; not knowing if something you leave somewhere will be there when you return home.

I’ve always liked doing my own thing when I’m at home, so most evenings I’m in my bedroom reading, sleeping on the computer. My family loves watching sports (and I don’t), so when a game is on (football or hockey mostly) you will not find me out there watching with the others. I’m dependently independent, I’ve discovered: I like to do my own thing, and when I’m home for too many hours in a row I get cabin fever, but I like knowing that my family is there if I need them: knowing that they’re only a (literal) holler away is comforting in a way that I hadn’t really considered much until I started to think seriously about moving out a couple of years ago.

My parents have had health scares in the past and I am often the one who tries to be in control of the situation, if it involves driving a parent to the emergency room, or calling the required professionals, taking notes and doing the necessary research. I can’t help but worry about how my sister would step into that role when I move out. There are other little things that I do that my siblings don’t think about (such as keep us stocked in general house supplies—which admittedly I’d probably still continue to do as it would give me an excuse to buy doubles and triples (at least) of things when they are on sale—and mid-week cleaning of the bathroom) and I wonder what would happen to those things. I guess they’d only have to run out of toilet paper once to remember to keep it stocked! At the risk of sounding conceited, I feel like I play an important role in the family and like being (avail)able to do those little things that make their lives easier.

Despite the fact that we’re all different, we share a closeness that I will miss terribly. It bothers me that the minute I’m on the telephone, siblings will show up out of the woodwork, needing to talk to me right that instant and my gestures to the telephone that I’m clearly speaking on are ignored. I’m irritated beyond belief with siblings who don’t know how to throw away anything, from candy wrappers to empty toilet paper tubes, to empty shampoo bottles or toothpaste tubes, to small slivers of soap that wouldn’t lather up the hands of a baby ant. I wake up every morning and see crimes that make me want to beat perpetrators into compliance.

But then there are the moments when I love my role in the family: when I’m trying to write a blog entry and my baby brother rushes in with a madcap scheme and an undeveloped plan of how he’s going to reach these lofty goals and I’m the first person he wants to share it with, or when my sister comes to my room and starts passionately recounting a hockey game that I could not care less about but her frustration with the game leads to me trying to come up with ways for her to get over it. Sometimes it’s the other brother, the cocky one, who storms in and begs me to check out something on Karmaloop that he’s got to have and would I please order it for him with my credit card because he doesn’t have one and I know he’ll pay me the moment the garment comes in. Or my mom comes into my room and wants to talk about her horrendous day with her evil coworkers and I want to cry but I instead offer her suggestions of how to deal with the situation and a hug, pretending what she’s recounting is so normal when I really want to cry for how poorly she’s being treated. And then there’s my dad, who doesn’t often come to me often but when he does, I am usually happy to drop what I’m doing and help out.

I like feeling needed and I’m afraid that when I move out, what I’ll gain (my own space with things exactly the way I want them) won’t make up for the loneliness I will feel, even though I don’t spend that much time hanging out with my family when I am home. Will I find myself driving to my parents’ house and crawling into my old bed once a week? Will the silence of the house be more upsetting than the pleasure of not having someone bursting into my room? Will I miss being asked where I’m going and when I’ll be back?

A lot of my friends can’t wait for me to move out, because they see it as a step towards independence. I am personally looking forward to being able to offer up my place as a location for events, but I’ve noticed as more of my friends have bought homes, they’ve really enjoyed entertaining in their own home and people are tending to be more into staying at home as we’re growing older. Also, all my female friends who were really excited about becoming homeowners did it with someone: a husband, a boyfriend, a fiancé (and in one case, a sibling), so they don’t actually know what it would be like to buy a home as a single woman. Although they assure me they’d do the same thing if they were in my position, I have no proof that that is really the case.

So, do I still want to move out? Definitely. But my reasons are perhaps not the best: I want to be able to entertain friends before they have too many children that they can’t afford (babysitting isn’t cheap!) to hang out with friends, I want to prove (to whom?) that I can be a responsible adult and juggle a mortgage with all those house-related and other expenses, I don’t want to ever have to say the sentence “I’m 30 and I live at home”. There is definitely some superficiality to my reasons I think. I’m excited at the prospect of setting up my home, but also afraid that the whole process will highlight my loneliness to me: there will be nobody else’s opinion to give serious consideration to but my own.

And although I scoff at the idea when my sister mentions it for herself, there is a part of me that truly thought I would move out of the house when I was moving into my own home with my husband. I know it’s old fashioned but that’s how I really thought things would play out. And I feel a little like a failure because it isn’t the case.

Filed under: Family, Introspective by jummy