Living On The Edge (Er... Loveseat)

I'm twenty years old and I still live with my mother.

I don't have a job, and to be frank, I never have. My whole life I've been going to school and doing little volunteer jobs here and there. Oh, and babysitting. Lord, have I done a lot of babysitting in my time. (Two dollars per hour per kid, and I come an hour early for free! Wanna hire me?)

I really, really hate it.

It isn't that I hate my mother. Far from it, I love the woman. But I have no space. I sleep on the loveseat downstairs in the living room while she sleeps across the room on the big couch. This has been the arrangement since I was seventeen years old. At the time, it didn't seem like such a bad deal. I mean, I was going to be moving out soon.

But the stars in my eyes went out when the market kept crashing, and there just were no jobs. You'd have to beg, borrow, or steal a position even at the Taco Hell down the street from me. And trust me, this is not the Taco Hell that's GOOD in my town, this is the one that you only go to at one o clock in the morning when you're too drunk or too high to remember that you probably shouldn't go there.

They run out of lettuce on a regular basis.

So now I'm living on the couch, and the grand total of four square feet around it is all mine, containing my computer desk and chair, along with a couple crates and boxes of books and school papers that I'm saving.

What I'm really finding interesting is that--most of my friends are in the same predicament I am. Not the sleeping on a loveseat bit, but the living with their parents bit. The simple fact is that no one can afford to live on their own right now.

I remember it wasn't always this way. I remember a lot of kids moving out right after they finished high school. They got an apartment with a couple friends, started up at the local community college, and when they weren't studying or flipping burgers, they were partying. It was what we were all living for in middle school.

And no, nope. There's just no way it can happen. Even if you could scare up the rent, you wouldn't be able to go to school and work at the same time. Not unless you developed some kind of cloning machine, and even then you probably would be less worried about money because somebody would buy it from you. Or you'd be a mad scientist and you'd already be living in your mother's basement.

I digress.

It is just plain AWKWARD to live with our parents at this point. We're legally and, for the most part, emotionally adults. And yet we're still living under the rules of our parents (which is fair. We reside in their homes). I've seen some kids paying rent and still having to do a multitude of chores, still argue about tattoos and piercings and going out late.

It's the point where it's hard for our parents to consider us adults because we're not acting like adults, and it's hard for us to act like adults, because we're not being treated like adults. Now, I will say that you can still act like an adult while being treated like a child, and that'll get you far, blah blah blah, but there is a limit.

I know that even if I did have a job right now, I'd still be living at home. And you know what? It sucks.