August 17 - 24, 2000
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I am an adult. All my friends are adults. Many have children. We all have interesting, responsible jobs. We are thoughtful. We buy adult things like furniture and new tires, and we refill the ice-cube tray when it is empty. We send thank-you cards to people who have done something nice for us. We take vacations to exotic locations. We clean up after ourselves when we are visiting our many adult friends. We help them make dinner. We take out the trash. We are adults, and that is how adults behave. The boss of me
Why do we all turn into 15-year-olds around our parents?
by Kris Frieswick
When we adults go home to visit our parents, something inexplicable happens. In the time it takes to drive up the driveway to the family home, we morph into the petulant, ennui-filled, self-centered, uncooperative teenagers we once were. We sulk. We tsk and roll our eyes. We shuffle our feet. We say things like "I'll do it later." We get annoyed if we have to lift our feet when Mom is vacuuming under the couch, and we get positively pissy if she insists on vacuuming the rug between us and the television set.
If I had to identify the actual age to which we revert, I would guess that it's about 15 -- the age at which you are old enough to know what you want to do and too young to do it. Mom and Dad have the car keys, and they're not telling you where they are.
A friend of mine has the worst case of "You're Not the Boss of Me"-itis that I have ever seen. Away from parents, he is a fairly mature adult, capable of running a household, making appropriate clothing selections, returning videos, and having lengthy and involved telephone conversations.But the minute he gets within earshot of either parent, he is reduced to a slumpy-shouldered slacker-boy who answers his mother in monosyllabic grunts and wouldn't remove a plate from the dining-room table if it were on fire. At 35, he still brings home his laundry whenever he visits. He drops the bag in the living room, kisses his mom on the top of the head, and then heads back out to visit friends. She does the laundry while he is out. When he comes back, he drinks the milk right out of the carton, eats the last bit of ice cream and puts the empty container back in the freezer, and, needless to say, does not refill the empty ice tray before putting that, too, back in the freezer. When his mom complains that she doesn't see enough of him on these jaunts home, he says, with complete sincerity, "You never want me to have any fun."
In the interest of fair play, I must confess my own sins. My father, who grew up on a farm, does not believe in heating. He believes in sweaters. And ever since I can remember, my siblings and I have been begging him to please turn on the heat because it is very difficult to use a knife and fork while wearing mittens. One morning, I awoke to find a thin layer of ice on the water in the toilet. We took to turning up the heat surreptitiously when he wasn't around, then turning it down before he got home. But he always knew we had done it. (Perhaps we were betrayed by the healthy pink glow that had returned to our faces and hands, clear indication that blood flow had, at least temporarily, been restored.) He would explode in a tirade, first against us personally for walking around in T-shirts and bare feet and having the audacity to complain about being cold (which is exactly what we were doing), then against the oil company to which he would not be sending one more goddamn penny of his hard-earned salary, then finally against the moral corruption in this country that had bred an entire generation of people who were so undisciplined and weak that they needed to live in a house the temperature of a goddamn greenhouse in order to survive.
I still walk around in T-shirts and bare feet and turn up the heat. He still tirades. This battle has raged on across three decades. There is no indication that either side is prepared to compromise, let alone give in.
This phenomenon is ridiculous. It's immature. It is embarrassing to see. It is even more embarrassing to participate in. And yet, all my friends and I are powerless to stop it. It is, I believe, one of the traits that define the human species.If I were a psychologist, I might speculate that this strange occurrence is the result of years of ingrained behavior patterns. No matter how old we get, we simply lack the strength, introspection, or desire to renegotiate the delicate, unspoken contract that each of us has with our parents. We don't want an adult relationship with them. They are not our friends, they are our parents, and we want them to act parental. Therefore, we subconsciously perpetuate the dynamics that were in effect at the . . . yadda, yadda, ibbidy, ibbidy, blah, blah.
Understanding the underlying causes of this and doing something about it are very different things. All the psychological mumbo-jumbo in the world isn't going to make it go away. The only thing that is going to make it go away is for each of us individually to realize that we are now old enough to take control of our immature urges. We must pull ourselves out of the old ways of relating to our parents and start behaving like the fine upstanding adults we are when they're not around. I, for one, plan to do just that, as soon as my dad stops being such a big poopyhead.
Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.
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