I Think I've Become My Parents
In the nearly a week that I've been in my house, I fear I've become much like my parents. Something I've always promised myself I wouldn't do before turning at least 50 years old. Things they used to say and do are making much more sense to me now that I'm a homeowner. It's very, very frightening. I can come to grips with being a responsible adult now. But thinking like my parents? I am NOT ready for that.

It's amazing how different apartment life is from house life, and the things that come back to me from when I was a kid living with my parents in our house. There are relatively few things to do to keep an apartment. I had a lot of down time in an apartment. You eat meals, take out trash when it overflows, vacuum occassionally, and iron clothes every couple of weeks. No big deal. Low maintenance, low expense. I don't worry much about things in an apartment because they are relatively problem and hassle free.

In my house, I now find myself constantly retracing my steps around the house, turning off lights and fans in rooms that I am not using at the moment. I watch the thermostat like a hawk, waiting for the temperature in the house to be pleasant enough so I can turn the temperature up on the thermostat to allow it to stop running for awhile. Electricity is expensive, and now I hear my parents' voices in my memory, always reminding me to turn off the light in the kitchen, or the bathroom, or my bedroom when I'm not in there. It's haunting.

I turn off the water in the faucet now while I brush my teeth. Water is expensive, so I'm now very wary of how much water I'm using and when, and I'm very careful to take quicker showers and not water the yard too long. I'm definitely thinking twice about washing the Jeep in the driveway this weekend. Clean Jeep versus green lawn. I think the lawn will win.

I now understand why it makes sense to mow the lawn first thing in the morning, rather than whenever I feel like it, as I tried to do when I was younger. My dad would always have me out in the yard mowing on Saturday mornings before I was allowed to watch TV, or play with my friends, or do whatever I wanted to do. If I do fun stuff first, I'll never get around to the yard. And it's cooler in the mornings than in the afternoon, when I would prefer to mow after sleeping in and watching cartoons.

I have to take the trash out twice a week, and make sure to get all of the trash in the house, not just the kitchen. Trash was my main inside duty when I was under my parents' roof, and I hated it. Going from room to room, picking up all the trash cans from rooms that weren't even mine, and trying to dump them in plastic grocery bags without getting anything on the floor. If stuff hit the floor, that meant I had to touch it and get it off the floor, into the bag. Then I had to carry all the trash outside to the big garbage can and roll it out to the sidewalk by the street. It's a little simpler than that now. But still, I have to remember the night before trash pick-up that it is my job to gather all of the trash in the house and get it out to the alley behind the house for pick-up. Otherwise, I have to live with my trash til the next pick-up day.

I sat in the room designated as my office last night, and paid bills. I remember my dad doing this routinely during the week. Where's Dad? He's in the office, paying bills. That was me last night. Hunched over the computer, writing checks, keeping track of my new realm of bills.

The porch light has become quite a fixation of mine. I didn't have a porch light that I could control at the apartment. It just came on automatically by a timer. Now I have to wait til the right moment to turn on the porch light in the evenings, so as to brighten my front porch and ward off troublemakers. If I turn it on too early, I'm wasting electricity. If I turn it on too late, after it's already dark, that sort of defeats the purpose of turning it on at all. When I leave home for the evening, but it's still light outside, do I turn it on anyway? So that the light is on when I get back home after dark? Or does that send a signal to everyone in the neighborhood that the light is on while it is still light, and I am therefore obviously not going to be at home for a few hours, and please come help yourself to the stuff in my house? And I can't forget to turn it off in the morning, or it will be on all day, again alerting potential troublemakers that I'm obviously not home to turn the light off, and therefore my house is free to be looted.

Making sure the house is locked up completely when I leave or go to bed at night is another fixation. I have quite a few more doors than I had before in the apartment. I'm still unsure of the level of security I should maintain, now living on the ground floor, as opposed to the third floor. It's pretty safe to say that there aren't many thieves or potential troublemakers out there who will enjoy the challenge of climbing three flights of stairs to find out if an apartment door is locked or not. Regardless, I was in the habit of locking the apartment everytime I left, even just to take down the trash, to be overly cautious a bit. The apartment wasn't in the greatest neighhorhood. But now on the ground floor, even in a much better neighborhood, where anyone can wander down the street and into the house without much effort, I find myself taking many a lap around the house, making sure the doors are locked when I'm not going in or out. I usually also find that just as I lock a door and put the key away and wander off, I inevitably forgot something that needs to go back out to the garage, and I have to therefore unlock a series of doors to get out again.

Holy cow. This being an adult thing is hard. No wonder my parents were always stressed out and yelling at us kids to turn off lights and lock the front door and whatnot.

I'm definitely watching cartoons of some sort at some point this weekend. This overnight adult transformation is seriously wigging me out.

C.T.