University is many people's first experience of freedom, especially for those who come from small towns or people like me, who come from a country so small it might as well be one. You're suddenly not surrounded by your family or any of the other people you've known your whole life. For some people that's scary, but for me it was a welcome breath of fresh air: no more family drama, no drama carried over from high school, and most importantly, living on my own.

It was a new experience for most of us. Not having a parent there meant no one particularly cared what time we got home or when the laundry got done. There could be a couple dishes in the sink; they didn't have to be done immediately. We could run across to the convenience store (one of the great things about this country: stores that are open 24 hours a day!) and get anything we liked at any time of night. We could get tattoos and piercings and dye our hair and drink ourselves silly as we liked and no one said boo.

Needless to say, we stayed out til ridiculous times of the morning, the laundry didn't get done regularly, and there were more than a few dishes in the sink sometimes. I got a lip piercing to go with my blue hair (that I had gotten permission for a week before I left home), several of my friends got tattoos, and it was a rare weekend if someone wasn't absolutely hammered 8 out of the 48 hours.

No, this way of living was not sustainable. Of course it wasn't. You can't white-knuckle your way through school and expect to get good grades for one thing, and for another, it's a little tricky to concentrate when you have a huge pile of laundry in front of your desk. We calmed down a bit, but we still revelled in the freedom, still considering our parents' rules to be stifling and over controlling. I remember that calling my mother and listening to her attempt to keep me following her rules from afar felt like one of the most exhausting hours of the day. Things like "don't give yourself bangs" and "go to sleep before 3 AM" were silly to me: how exactly did those things have any effect on her whatsoever?

I was honestly curious about this, so I gave her a ring, and it turns out I had the wrong idea about rules and about parenting in general (big surprise). In my mind, a child has always represented complete creative freedom: a person you can build from the ground up. Something to be careful with, for sure, but something like a living, breathing work of art. Any parents reading this are probably giggling at my naiveté right about now. I then realized I had absolutely no experience with this at all and I should probably someone who did, namely my mother. I had a couple of big questions:

1. Is having a child a creative endeavour?

2. When did you realize your parents weren't actually infallible, and what was your impression of my reaction (when I was about fifteen) when I came to that realization?

3. Is there a certain feeling of possessiveness that comes with having a child in terms of them being an extension of you?

I've never really wanted children and as such have always had a pretty abstract idea of what they would entail: my big problem with them is that they tend to be screaming excrement machines for the first couple years of their lives, which is not something that I've ever wanted to experience from an outside perspective. In my less judgmental moments however, I've always thought of it as something like the world's ultimate art project. My mother assured me vehemently that this was not the case: “Well I suppose it might have been, if I had had any idea as to what I was doing. I look at it as sort of like being responsible for creating a nuclear bomb." Apparently the stress starts before the child is even born: there are the obvious things, like not smoking, but my mother picked up a book called "What To Expect When You're Expecting" which gave her a whole host of other things: play Mozart to the developing baby, don't eat yoghurt, don't walk on busy streets because it's too risky. At one point she called her aunt Betsy in hysterics because I wasn't looking at my hands when the book said I was meant to be. Betsy told her to throw the book in the back of the closet and never look at it again because it was "utter crap". The stress didn't stop there either. In fact, apparently, it still hasn't stopped: she has always and will always feel entirely responsible for how my life turns out.

Which meant that when I became "revolting", as she put it, she was terrified. She thought, having never had a teenager before, that this was how I was going to be for the rest of my life: a stroppy, sullen creature who lost her temper at the merest mention of not having access to the internet. "You started being just revolting probably about 15. I guess I was confused and I was very worried because I thought 'Oh my god, your life has been destroyed and you're going to be like this forever, because of circumstances*', and I didn't just put it down to revolting teenagers. I was very upset and feeling very guilty and um, sort of frantic, because I didn't know how to fix it because I couldn't."

When I asked her when she had figured out her parents weren't infallible, it took her a while to answer. "I think I was pretty old before I realized that adults weren't perfect. I was at university before I realized that teachers didn't know everything. I know, it's a bit scary isn't it? I never even thought about it; my parents have always been my parents." I had to explain that I wasn't talking about disowning your parents; I was talking about the moment when you realize that they're not always right. Before that, you tell your parents no, but it never crosses your mind that they're not actually right, you just don't want them to be right. Mum responded with her usual "Well that's still the case isn't it? Because I am always right."

"In all seriousness though, I didn't get along with my mum very well, but I would listen to her and my dad. I would still think that what they said, probably up until the last ten years, was the wisest thing." This is fascinating to me. When I turned 15 and started being "revolting", as mum puts it, it was because of two things: one, that my parents had just started getting properly divorced and it was getting very messy, and two, I had realized that both of them had made mistakes. I hadn't really thought of that as even a possibility before, and it ticked me off: I felt a bit cheated. These people, who were, in the end, only human, had been calling the shots on my entire life up until that point and if they were fallible, then there was a seriously good chance that they had made some wrong calls. At which point I became utterly determined to call all the shots in my own life. The fact that my mother didn’t seem to have made the same determination at my age was interesting and probably had a lot to do with the way she was brought up: her father is very old fashioned, a British upholsterer who, at one point, burned a pair of jeans that she tried to walk out of the house in because jeans weren’t, in his opinion, something that well brought up young ladies wore in public. I suppose in that environment, and without access to the huge amount of information provided by easy access to the internet, it would be a little more difficult to come to the realization that your parents are not, in fact, omnipotent beings who know everything.

There was still something I didn’t quite understand, however, and that was those little rules that seemed to me so controlling: things like not being allowed to have bangs and not being allowed to wear black until I got a job that required me to do so. In some ways, I had more freedom than other people my age: I was never told I wasn’t allowed to date, for one, a rule that I noticed a lot of my friends had. As I have never been a parent, my immediate assumption for the reasoning behind these rules was that Mum saw me as an extension of herself and therefore felt that I belonged to her in some sense. You can imagine the teenage angst this inspired. Your parents always tell you that their rules are ‘for your own good’ but whenever you ask why, the answer is generally “because I said so”: not really an answer that inspires understanding. It occurred to me that I’d never really tried to understand either: I’d simply chafed against them. I asked her about those specific rules (mostly because they were the most specific ones that I can remember): “I never let you get bangs because I knew they would get in your eyes but more importantly because the oil from your hair would get onto your forehead and then you’d have breakouts and then your self-esteem would be damaged and then you would be more self-conscious than you already are.” As that reasoning is fairly convoluted, I can be forgiven for not working that out the first time. That said, I wasn't even close: I was reading maliciousness into something that was actually meant to be protective.

So while we see university as our first breath of fresh air and freedom, there's another side of it that we don't see at first: that we're not as safe as we were. The thousand little rules that we celebrate being free of are actually a safety net that we've just cut (whether or not they're actually effective). They're the strings that our parents used to keep us under control, yes, but under control is also (in the majority of cases) safe, and while we spread our wings, our parents are left fretting around their empty nests, terrified that they didn't prepare us enough to fly.

*The circumstances she’s referring to are my parents’ divorce and the mess that it created, which will be covered in another article.