Parents Just Don’t Understand

I don’t care if you’re five or 55, everyone has some fear of their parent(s).  I think it is good to have a healthy fear of those people who created you but everyone has a different perspective.  As Cal Naughton Jr. says, “I like to imagine Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt because it says I want to be formal, but I’m here to party,” we all have a way we like to picture our maker. I imagine a much angrier omnipresence and so too do I envision my parents when I have gone against their wishes.

I am not friends with my parents; I don’t think you should be.  I do however find that I am having a hard time transitioning from being a child of theirs to being the grown up offspring they now have in their presence.  I’m not sure who is at fault for this.  Am I just too eager to be treated like a baby, or is my mother desperate to keep me, her youngest, still under her protection/control.

The one way your parents can control you throughout your 20s is with money.  When you’re in college you are dependent on them.  When you’re out of college, making crap money doing a job you’re over qualified for on paper, but under qualified for in terms of experience, you are willing to take anything they offer.  I actually hate taking money from my parents because I feel like I am too old for it, but it doesn’t stop being from needing some here or there.  It’s like I have student loans and parent loans.  They don’t expect me to pay them back but I guess the payback is me succeeding…which is taking longer than my teenage expectations.  Those prospects formed in my 16-year-old mind when I thought that by 26 I would be married to a rock star/poet and writing for a magazine, that I also publish, have not come to fruition.

Woe is me that my fate took a different turn.  Instead I work at a job I like very much but do not make a lot of money at.  I have little pleasures that keep me going but I occasionally get confused and act out like I am living in that imagined life.  I get tattoos in Vegas and spend $100 on champagne and then barf it into a new Kate Spade purse (note: trashing a hotel room you don’t own as a rock star is way cooler than cleaning vomit off a dust ruffle in your own apartment).  I make-out on rooftops with strangers and generally act like a less dramatic version of a bi-polar housewife on a made for t.v. movie. Regardless of how you might view those things, they make me happy, some for the long term and some in the short term.  This brings me back to the point at hand…tattoos.

I got my first tattoo on my 18^th birthday.  I went with some friends and when I came home and showed my mom, she cried.  Well there you go.  I think it is like if someone took your favorite blouse and then branded it with permanent marker.  I mean like a reallllllly expensive blouse that you have a long term relationship with (I’m assuming that’s what a child is like?)  I believe parents reactions to things like this are out of fear of you asserting yourself in this world and making mistakes, but we all have to make them.  She is lucky I didn’t get a tramp stamp of the *NSYNC  members  faces on my butt. I mean it was 2002.

I didn’t get another until last year.  For someone who sometimes makes hasty decisions, I am decisive and sure in certain parts of my life including “branding” myself because I am vain and analytical and I needed to make sure of what I wanted.  So after much thought, and then no thought at all, I went at midnight to Hart and Huntington Tattoo in Las Vegas, in a cocktail dress, and got the back of my neck tattooed with something that I have wanted for a while.  Oh and then I went to a club…with the bandage on…cuz I’m bad ass.

As we we’ve discussed before:

 http://1001bostoniannights.blogspot.com/2011/05/party-in-usa-yall.html

Fast forward 13 months later.  I never told my mother that I got the tattoo because I didn’t want a lecture or to make her mad at me.  Other family members knew and all of my friends as well.  It didn’t shock them because one afternoon in college while deciding what to do it came down to two choices: drinking a bunch of wine or getting a tattoo…that day turned into a wino afternoon.  At this point though, it is kind of ridiculous that she didn’t know.  So this beastly hot weekend  I wasn’t thinking about it and threw my hair up into a high bun when running errands for her (she was throwing a BBQ) and well she saw it when I returned.

It didn’t go well.

It didn’t go as badly as I had feared it would, but let’s say I’m glad I won’t be around there much in the next few weeks.  Frankly, I’m just happy I can wear my hair up this summer and not sweat my balls off like last year.  I think she thinks she’s a lot cooler than she is.  I think she is surprised at the things that shock her when it comes to her own kids.  I also think she was sad that I’d had it a year and she had not noticed.  I did have my hair down mostly, but not always. I mean she could have seen it if she was looking.  Parents assuredly have a claim on your skin.  I think this ownership should change, and maybe even dissolve in some aspects, as you get older but it is hard to change how one feels.  I want the best of both worlds.  I want a parent who believes that I can make the informed decisions that are the right ones for me.  But I also want a parent that worried about me and reminds me of things that I forget about, like excise tax.

Thanks to freedom of choice and a plethora of options, the process of figuring out who we are, is taking a lot longer than is has in past generations.  As this process continues on we will continue to do things that our parents will dislike and react to.  I don’t do things to get a rise out of her.  She has enough on her plate.  I do wish she wouldn’t react like I was still that 18 year old living in her house.  I guess the Fresh Prince had it right, “Parents just don’t understand.”