Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)
PART I
Breaking Away
3
Getting Your Own Place
Dear God, you’ve got to get out of your parents’ house.
Yes, I know it’s easier than finding and paying for your own place. Yes, in many places, the rent seems too darn high.
Yes, living at home with Mom and Dad can often include perks like laundry service and the freedom to raid the fridge and a cable package you probably couldn’t afford if you were living on your own.
But you’ve got to get out of there. I want you to imagine my voice as one of the supporting characters calling the protagonist in a horror movie, informing him that the condemned old chainsaw factory that they’re wandering around was built upon a Native American graveyard, then used by the government for secret bioweapon mind control experiments before a UFO crashed into it and made it the nesting ground for cursed gypsy werewolves. You’ve got to get out of there, do you hear me? Get out of there now!
Living at home, in the same circumstances you did as a teenager, inhibits growth, even under the best of circumstances and with parents with the best of intentions.
Behold the one critical tale of my parents I’m willing to share publicly:
After freshman year, I needed a summer job, and got one working the late shift in a warehouse for Baxter Healthcare Supply. My job was to stock shipping pallets from 4 p.m. to whenever the work was done, which was midnight on a good night and 4 a.m. on the much more frequent bad nights. The rest of the staff was not college kids working for a few months. Sweaty, grunt-inducing warehouse work wasn’t a summer job to these guys; this was their job, and you can probably imagine the warm welcome they gave the college kid. (In their defense, “insufferably smug” came pretty naturally to me then … and some would probably say I never lost it.) But the upside was that I was working fifty-five to sixty hours a week, and making lots of overtime money. I calculated that in about eight weeks, I’d have all the spending money I needed for the coming year in college, and plenty extra for the rest of the summer, too.
As you can probably imagine, working the night shift is hellacious for your body clock. I remember trying, and failing, to fall asleep as the sun came up and my room got brighter and brighter even with the shades drawn. It was a brutal schedule: clock in at 4 p.m. Monday, work until 3 a.m. or so Tuesday, come home and collapse in bed, sleep until early afternoon, eat, go back, and do it again for another four days. The weekends were my lone respite.
At the end of each night/morning, I’d dump my clothes on the floor. Finally, after a few weekends, my parents observed the obvious: if my room looked like any more of a disaster area, it would qualify for FEMA relief funds. My parents told me I wouldn’t be allowed to go out Saturday night if my room wasn’t cleaned. Brimming with the unearned confidence that comes from living for an entire eight months away from home, I refused. They told me I was grounded.
My contention that I was too old to be grounded was probably deeply undermined by my response, which was the most spectacularly childish tantrum you’ve ever seen from an eighteen-year-old. Yelling, screaming, stomping, pounding the walls with my fists. I am embarrassed just writing this. Later I made the more mature observation that had there been a military draft, my parents would have told the Pentagon that I couldn’t go because my eighteen-year-old butt was grounded.
It’s hard for parents to accept that their child, even if over eighteen, is a grown adult, capable of making his or her own decisions. Don’t blame them; they can remember the day they brought you home from the hospital like it was yesterday—and some part of them is always going to perceive a sense of supreme vulnerability around you that cannot be explained rationally. No matter how big you get, you are their baby.
My parents expected that their child would have a clean room (although I seem to recall this rule getting less strictly enforced for my younger brother). I expected that as I had been living away at college for a year, and was working long hours now, that I was entitled to leniency from such rules.
That was the last summer I lived at home. I love my parents, but I greatly prefer living under my own roof, setting my own rules.*
This is not to say that the conscious or subconscious battles over household supremacy will end in later adulthood. When you get your own place, and your parents visit, you will find that little objects—potholders, corkscrews, spatulas, etc.—tend to get put back where your parents think the objects should go, not where you keep them.
Don’t Kid Yourself, Your Parents Want You to Grow Up
The freedom and responsibility of making your own rules under your own roof—or even negotiating the rules with a roommate(s) or housemates is an increasingly rare one for young men. The Census Bureau calculated in 2012 that 59 percent of guys ages eighteen to twenty-four and 19 percent of twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds live at home.**
Sandy Hingston, “The Sorry Lives and Confusing Times of Today’s Young Men,” Philadelphia, February 20, 2012, http://www.phillymag.com/articles/the-sorry-lives-and-confusing-times-of-today-s-young-men/#bihq9fHB4JivFVU1.99.
The good news is that steep drop from twenty-four to twenty-five. The bad news is the length of that latter period, meaning some significant portion of grown men in their early thirties are still saying “goodnight, mom” before bed.
What’s fascinating is that some of these guys are convinced that this arrangement is good for them and good for their parents, as a Philadelphia magazine interview depicts:
Now, life with his parents is wearing on him. “If you want to watch TV, there’s just the den,” he says. “And they’re in there.” I ask whether he thinks his parents might have imagined themselves doing something at this point in their lives other than sharing their home with him. “They’re not really doing anything,” he says, sounding a little surprised. “They enjoy me being there.”
James is 31. He always figured he’d be married at 31. He certainly thought he’d have a place of his own. He doesn’t have a plan for the future: “Plans change, and the plan has to change really quick.”*
Ibid.
Don’t be so certain that your folks are enjoying you sitting in the den with them every night, James. Most parents are quick to say to their children that they’re always welcome, and that they would never turn their kids away. But most parents also want to see their adult children thriving, successful, happy—and that includes some elements of independence, financial and psychological. A big part of being a parent is teaching a child to become an adult capable of taking care of himself—and, someday, raising his own children. A guy who has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into a life that no longer resembles adolescence is announcing to the world that his parents didn’t do something right.
When should a young man get out of the house? As soon as he can—and it’s okay if he stumbles a bit on that road away from home. Yes, by leaving the nest he’s facing all kinds of risks and things that could go wrong: a bad roommate experience, a bad housemate experience, insufficient hot water, clogged toilets and drains, the need to fumigate, a broken air conditioning unit in the middle of summer, and so on. But leaving the nest is necessary to create your own nest.
(Separately, there is nothing quite like the feeling of confronting one of those minor household crises and managing to fix it by yourself.)
A guy who puts off leaving his parents’ house is putting off the rest of his life, and trying to dodge a date with destiny.
We hope your parents are wonderful. They are irreplaceable. They are your safety net. They will always love you and always forgive you. But they are also not representative of life.
Landlords, with their immovable deadlines, skeptical glares, and unforgiving demeanor are much more representative of what the “real world” holds. And eventually, everyone needs to learn how to deal with the real world.
What Would Ward Cleaver Do?
Ward Cleaver was a Seabee in World War II and got married not long after college to his high school sweetheart. He knew how to take care of himself. He didn’t stay at home, he made a home.
Don’t Buy a “Tiny House”
Don’t be tempted by fashionable “tiny houses” just so you can say you’re a “homeowner.” In case you haven’t heard of them, “tiny houses” are portable tiny homes you can tow around (or plonk down on a tiny patch of land to live in tiny style).
NPR had a segment in 2015 on tiny houses in the course of which the host of the show, Tom Ashbrook, interviewed a caller from Nashville named Kevin.* He was a recent college grad and a freelance cellist and loved the idea of a “tiny house.”
“Big Potential for Tiny Houses,” On Point with Tom Ashbrook, March 4, 2015, http://onpoint.wbur.org/2015/03/04/tiny-houses-micro-apartments.
“I just love how perfect it is for my age and for enterprising young people that don’t want to get lost in that culture …”
“When you say ‘that culture,’” Ashbrook interjected, “you mean sort of that McMansion suburbia?”
“I think I mean more generally when you get through college you realize I gotta get a job to make money that I’m not necessarily going to be keeping or putting towards something, I guess really investing in something that makes you happy, I guess. I mean, you get a job to go straight to a car payment, or you get a job to go straight to a house payment… .”
What Kevin was saying in fact was “I have no interest in being an adult by the traditional definition of the word, and you need to respect my desire to be a ManChild.” But the fact is, adulthood, unlike a tiny house, actually IS awesome. Even with car payments. Even with a mortgage. Even with unexpected bills. And you can’t become a serious cellist/brewmaster/IT professional/professional of any kind, especially with a wife and kids, if you live in a tiny house. Tiny houses only have enough room for you and your baggage.
Tiny houses tell the world, “Stay Away!” Are you going to invite some friends over for a tiny barbeque? A cozy night of playing games? (“Steve, we’re gonna need you to sit on the toilet. Sorry, but we ran out of chair space.”)
Tiny houses have always been with us. They used to be called hovels or shacks. Then we figured out how to market them to people concerned about their environmental footprint. Yes, sure, tiny houses may appeal to other demographics (agoraphobics, perhaps), but many people who purchase a tiny home are looking to discard their worldly possessions and to live more simply, more honestly, without all of the trappings of our materialistic postmodern society. Most of the time they’re fooling themselves—you notice they prefer a $60,000 tiny house to a $34,000 double-wide trailer or a used RV. One is way cooler than the other. So much for being post-material.
And it seems that many owners of tiny houses don’t limit themselves to a couple hundred square feet. They store some of their stuff at grandma’s house or build more tiny houses for teenage children or guests. When you’ve got multiple tiny houses, you’re kind of defeating the purpose.
Don’t get a tiny house. Get an apartment—or rent a real house—with some friends.