Finding Yourself After College

The Star Tribune carried this advice column letter yesterday, and for some reason it really bugged me:

Dear Eric: After college, I moved to Chicago even though my parents wanted me to move back home. They live in a suburb outside of Indianapolis. It’s fine for them but I wanted better career prospects and a social life that was different from what I had growing up.

I’m really happy here. It’s been five years and I don’t see any reason to move back.

Recently, I joined my parents on vacation at the lake, and they had what felt like an intervention for me. They and my aunt and uncle basically ambushed me at dinner and pointed out all these things that had changed about me. Each one of these things was an indication I was “losing myself.” Some of them were so silly, like I was letting my facial hair grow out and I once talked about a friend of mine and used “they” to refer to them (because they are non-binary).

They ended the meal by saying I had a lot to think about. I don’t really know what to do with this.

– Changed for the Better

The columnist responded with a reasonable answer, I'm happy to report: It's not you, it's them, he said, but try to hear what may be underlying their dis-ease. Maybe they're asking for more connection with you. 

That's not bad advice. At the same time, there's clearly something wrong here.

My first reaction: Why aren't his parents happy that he's launched successfully, instead of moving home to live in their basement? What a couple of weirdos. The writer is now (probably) at least 27 years old. He's an adult!

My second reaction: He's been in Chicago for five years. If his parents were worried about his safety in "the big city," I would think they'd have gotten over it by now. 

The two examples he gave of their worries are not about safety: they're coded or not-so-coded culture war points.

I wondered — is he an only child? It seems like it. I asked Daughter Number Three-Point-One what she thought about this letter, and she said it might be an example of "when parents don't interact much with their adult kids, and they see their kids as an extension of themselves and then it has changed." She said she has other friends who've had things like this happen. 

My own two-generations-old experience in similar circumstances was very different. After a year post-college working near where I grew up in central New York, I moved to Washington, D.C. This was 1983, when the crime rate was a lot higher than it is now. 

There were no cell phones or other devices then, of course. I had no car and took public transit everywhere. The only thing my parents did was give me a small, battery-operated screech alarm that I could press in case of a mugging or other attack. (I soon forgot I had it and stopped carrying it.) And my political views continued to change over the next three years, as they had during college, and no one ran an intervention on me. 

I was one of four kids instead of an only, and times were not the same in terms of parenting in general, so I'm sure that made a difference. And I admit my mother may have tried to question two of my sisters as they drifted to the Right in later years. 

But I don't think she ever told them they "had a lot to think about" or pressured them to move home to be under her thumb.