I did not move out to spite you.

The older I started to get, the more my friends and I would talk about moving out of our parents’ houses so that we could “do whatever we want.” When you are in high school, you have that small taste of freedom and feel like you slowly can stop listening to what your parents tell you. Then you reach college, and that is when the “I’m an adult” attitude hits you. I remember myself and my friends sitting in my college dorm room talking about how it’s so amazing living at college and not having to listen to our parents telling us what to wear, and when to come home, and what we can and cannot do. We would come home from break and feel relieved to be able to go back to doing what we wanted. If a parent ever heard us say “I can’t wait to move out,” it would somehow turn into an all-out war about how ungrateful us kids were and how we won’t know what to do when we move out of the house. And to every single parent reading this…you were right. Like I said, we did not move out to spite you. We move out because we want to prove to ourselves that we are the adults we want to be in our minds. We move out so that we can leave our rooms dirty, and leave our clothes all over the house, leave our dishes in the sink, and not take out the trash for a week. We want to leave the house in an outfit you would not approve of and come home at five in the morning after a crazy night out with our friends without having to be quiet walking in the front door because we are scared to wake someone up - but it’s not all rainbows and butterflies like we all think.

Now that I moved out, I don’t want to disappoint you.

So now we moved out. We put our foot down, broke the news to our parents, and moved out on our own. Now we have bills, work, and grocery shopping to do all on our own. There are times when we lay in our beds and contemplate moving back home because it would be easier than struggling with all the bills we have. On the other hand, we lay in bed and think, “Well I can’t move home now.” Some of us feel like we will disappoint you after we moved out and realized we weren’t ready yet. Instead of accepting defeat, and bruising our egos by calling our parents and telling them “Hey, I wasn’t ready to move out, you were right,” we plow forward.

I miss being annoyed by you.

We may not want to admit it, but we all miss our mom running into our room yelling at us and telling us what she repeatedly told us to do but we still, for some odd reason, “forgot” to do it. We miss coming home and hearing mom rant about how she’s been running around busy all day and now must make dinner in a dirty house that no one has helped her clean. We miss being forced to give our parents a hug and kiss whenever they want one. We miss our siblings telling on us and torturing us. Most of all, we miss you barging into our bedroom door without a warning or a knock. We miss being taken care of when we are sick, and having someone to come comfort us in our bed when we can’t stop crying our eyes out. We miss coming home to a clean room and a hot dinner on the table. We miss it, but you will never hear us say it. 

I have no idea what I’m doing.

We all swear that once we move out, we are going to be these amazing adults that can take on anything thrown at us. Well…we were severely wrong. More often than not, we look at our calendars and dread thinking about what days our bills are due and how are we going to pay them. We are struggling trying to figure out how to manage our money and what we can buy that week, or if we can go out that weekend with our friends or not. We have to budget on how much we spend on groceries that week or if we can even afford to get groceries that week. We literally have no idea what cleaning products to buy, or what detergent will work for our clothes. How long do you boil an egg? When our gas tank finally goes on E, how many miles do we still have until our car will completely stop? If I leave food out overnight, is it okay to put it back in the refrigerator in the morning and eat it again? We have so many questions that most of us will laugh about when we have our own kids and go through the same exact thing. All this time, we thought we wanted to live on our own, we were so wrong.

I love and appreciate everything you did and still do for me.

We all know how hard you have worked for us, and how much you did to make sure that we had a life full of meaningful memories. We are sorry for all the bullshit we put you through in our school and teen years. We are sorry for keeping you up all hours of the night when we decide to stay out past curfew without letting you know where we are. We are sorry for complaining and saying that what you made that night for dinner was gross. We’re sorry for getting angry when you try to give us a hug or a kiss goodbye, and we are completely sorry for not saying I love you back every chance that we had. As we sit here, in our apartments, or homes that we moved to with our friends or roommates, we tend to reminisce more on all the things our parents did for us. It’s crazy to think that we could be loved by someone so much and yet be so selfish. If there is anything we can say, from the bottom of our hearts, it is that we love you, and thank you, and praise you for being so confident in us. We praise you for not going absolutely crazy throughout the years of the stress and heartache we repeatedly put you through. Most importantly, thank you for believing in us. 

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