It has been a funny old year in terms of both the kids and music (not so much the wife).
Both my son and daughter are now back at home. Having one of them back is not so bad but the two of them together is not a situation I wanted and it has met my ( low) expectations of being quite difficult. It’s difficult because neither me nor my wife is quite sure how to treat them. They are both adults and have lived independently but they are both still our children and the natural tendency is to parent them. These attempts to advise and guide them in their life choices (ha!) is classed as interference and any questions and suggestions are met with sullen and hostile answers and an air of why are they asking me this. Funnily enough this is how they reacted as teenagers to our attempts to parent them and thus perpetuates, at least in our eyes, the feeling that they are still children and need to be parented. In addition to this they don’t really get on with each other, which again is a continuation of how it was when they were growing up, so we end up intervening when they argue. See its complicated isn’t it.
We have a cooking rota and cleaning rota so in another sense it’s like a house share. Neither the parent approach nor the house share approach is satisfactory for me or my wife. I love both my son and daughter to bits but me and the wife had a nice quiet easy routine which has been turned on its head by them moving back and if I’m honest we wish they would both leave.
We don’t understand why they want to live at home anyway after being away at Uni. We didn’t go back home and lived in shit expensive rented accommodation rather than go back home. All we get is we can’t afford it it’s different now not like your day when it was easy to get jobs and places to live. Our retort is there were 3 million people unemployed when we graduated and we lived in cockroach and mice infested council and private rented shitholes and still survived.
Have we made it too easy for them?
My relationship with music has shifted this year. I passed up the opportunity to go and see two of my favourite bands this year and I’m not sure why. It wasn’t as if I would have had to travel to get to the gigs. They were both in my town in easily accessible venues. I even had tickets for one of the gigs but on the night I just couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm to go.
I’ve been thinking about it because although it is a cliché , music was my first love and has meant so much to me over the years and the bands I love have influenced and defined me as a person for such a long time, this change is a big deal in my life.
Perhaps I’ve finally grown up? I don’t know.
