When adult children come to visit ...
Despite everything, it was a melancholy sight, this vacated youth room of my daughter Lea. After graduating from high school, she had "chilled" for a year, did a few internships and was much less worried than her petty mother, who could "relax" so badly about the annoying "future" issue. So I was glad that she went to an economics school in Munich. Never again did I want to experience a still sleepy daughter in the afternoons, who had a "Did you wash my jeans, mummy?" Muesli trickled into a bowl and spilled half of it. Never again did I want to be angry with the garbage dump that was behind her bedroom door. Although I had "Sauberfreak" (Lea about me) tedious to remove only glued plates, moldy yogurt cups and full ashtrays at irregular intervals, but bothered me alone the idea of what is there for a mischief, just a wall of my study separated, fermented. I also never wanted to come home again at midnight and look forward to my bed, only to hear in the stairwell that Lea got into the mood for nocturnal adventures with her friends and a bottle of vodka.
That's why I was sad on the one hand, that despite all the very nice phase with the children was over, on the other hand I enjoyed it with all the senses - visually and acoustically - that my apartment belonged to me again. My girlfriends felt the same way.
Sure, there were those dull moments when the apartment seemed too big, too empty, sometimes too quiet for us, missing out on this wild, youthful energy and experiencing the fledgling of our children like an unwanted aging spell. No conversations at the kitchen table about new bands, annoying teachers, lovesickness or intimal waxing anymore, instead about prostate problems, exposed tooth necks and hot flashes.
When Lea came home from Munich for the first time, I was so happy. That she threw her half-burst suitcase into her room, which mutated in a matter of seconds from tidy to messie, not an issue. And that she called after a short greeting her friends, after three minutes with a "Goodbye, Mommy, love you" out the door and came home only at dawn, not too bad. Although - a little hurt I was already. On this first weekend we spent a maximum of one hour together, and I realized what my friend Petra with her sentence "For my children, I'm just a gas station!" said. My American friend Susan calls herself "walking wallet", her wallet on two legs.
You do not mean it bad
Yes, unfortunately that's the case: our children are coming home, and today they are doing it more often than ever, and are refueling. Money, fresh linen, home-baked apple pie.
You do not mean it bad and do not even come up with the idea that we could eventually be annoyed and exhausted. But we are, because nowadays she can stretch endlessly, the period between high school graduation and financial independence. We are unfortunately the parents of the "Generation Internship", and if we are late parents, we will eventually get pension and child allowance at the same time.
"We no longer feel like living in a shared flat where we have all the duties and our children have all the rights"
And that is exhausting, because beyond the 50 or even the 60 we have no more desire to live in a shared flat where we have all the duties and our children all rights. "How do I experience my 28-year-old child when it's at home?" Says my friend, 64. "With laundry mountains, with an empty refrigerator, with sleepless nights, because the 50th application has burst."
Therefore, much faster than our children, we have the need, with all parental love, to "emancipate" ourselves from them, to take on the role of provider, financially and emotionally. But they come back like a boomerang, between internships or one-year contracts, after a broken-off education or because they can not find a job. They would be deeply offended if we had used their children's rooms elsewhere or dared move into a smaller apartment.
It is not your fault, it is the time, it is the crisis, but in retrospect we envy our parents, because those who lived in our generation of over 20 at home were laughed at. Good old times! In my circle of friends, we have rewritten the Ikea slogan: "Do you deserve it or are you still tasting it?" My daughter will move in with us "temporarily" in autumn, after her bachelor's degree. I'll buy earplugs.
