When you're a different person than your parents

I know I am probably going to get lit up for this but who cares, why do so many people want to live so close to their families? I love my family, but I always feel like if I stay to close I am not living my own life. I need to have some kind of independence and living further than a short drive away has always been kind of appealing to me.

 

I've done the living far away thing from them, and now I'm tired of it. Especially now that we're about to have our own kid. Childcare is expensive.

 

That's understandable. As parents age, though, it's only natural their kids would want to be closer to lend a hand with things they can't do so easily anymore or just see more of them while they're still alive.

The biggest difference in our family is my parents preferred to grow where they were planted. I, on the other hand, inherited grandma's wanderlust (which would explain the 10,000 miles or so between me and home). I imagine I'll want to be closer to them at some point, but I also know I can rest easy in my role as the black sheep with two well-adjusted siblings living closer to home.

 

Yeah, this would be why we moved back to my mom's hometown. It was probably for the best because I would have missed about a month of school that year because both of my mom's parents died within three weeks of each other.

Lord knows I don't get why 30-somethings would want to live in their parents' backyard. It's nice to visit and everything and sometimes, I wish I lived slightly closer to them so I could go to birthday parties and stuff...but what I don't miss? Having eight pairs of eyes always looking for me. Not having any privacy. Not being able to run into the grocery or liquor store without running into someone I know or someone who knows them. Being told all the time I look exactly like my mother when she was my age!

I know why my cousins do it - they're afraid of change and like living in the same town that all of my ancestors do, especially in case they need some help on something. Plus, there's the added bonus that if they need a babysitter, there's someone around to help.

Personally, I like dealing with my own problems without a bunch of people butting in and offering up their unwanted opinions.

 

Shit! That was what I was trying to say

 

No offense, but you guys must have significantly worse relationships with your family than I do.


And while I thought I had an incredible relationship with my parents and sister, my wife's blows it out of the water. That whole family is tight, and you should have seen the looks I got when I moved her away.

 

I'm not saying that I have a necessarily bad relationship with my family. In fact, my ex broke up with me because my family was so close and he really wasn't. He couldn't deal with it.

I just want different things and I'm different from what they are. Maybe it's because I lived apart from them for the first 11 years of my life, so I'm used to not living close to most of them, but I just could never grasp why they'd want to stay in BFE Kansas when there's so much out there in the world. (I mean, I get why my male cousin does - he took over the farm and runs the business with his dad and lives a whole 100 yards from the house. He's never lived farther away than a mile from the house he was born in, except the two years he went to vo-tech. But his sister could easily pick up and move away. She just doesn't want to.)

 

Sometimes, extreme circumstances force one's hand. Hope it never happens to you or anyone else, but they do happen. Just sayin'.

 

We plan to live reasonably close to our children. That will mean not living near our elders, and that's OK.