People think living with other people, like your parents, for example, is pretty simple, or you're going to argue because of huge issues like political differences or something. In my experience, the bits where we've really struggled are the small things. For example, making a bed. To me, the label on the mattress sheet goes at the foot end of the bed. As far as I can remember, I have always been this way. Mum assures me we have always put them at the head end. To me, this feels, quite frankly, completely unnatural.
Thankfully, because we both make out own beds, don't share sheets (partly because I'm back in my childhood single and my mum has a double so we can't even do so by accident) and once the sheet is on the bed you can't tell anyway, we're just letting that one go, but there is one thing I can't make my peace with. If there are buttons instead of press studs or snaps on the bottom of the duvet cover, she fastens them with the button on the outside. What savagery is this? I mean, take out the idea that buttons could then get stuck on something, anything, everything, and I say that as someone who goes to sleep with a duvet one way and wakes up with it another with alarming regularity, but also, they're cold against your feet, and the press studs go on the insides, so why wouldn't the buttons? And it's not like you have to butcher the sheet to get them to do it. When I help out making any of the other beds, I do it wrong, because there is no way to get my head around the buttons on the outside of the duvet. It just doesn't seem comfortable or like it would make the end of the duvet look tidy.
Strangely though, when I first got here it was more a frustration, from both of us, that I couldn't figure out where the tea in the jam jar was caffeinated or not, and I couldn't keep in my head for long enough if the tea caddy was decaf. As it turns out, jam jar is decaf, tea caddy is caffeinated, but I had to ask for weeks (actually, I've just read back over that after making a cup of tea and realised I'm completely wrong. Jamjar, morning, caff-caff, tea caddy is for afternoon, so decaf) because in my house, most of the tea lives in it's own packets, most of it is loose-leaf and decaf is a dirty word only used when you get really decent decaf coffee and a problem with insomnia which means no coffee amounts of caffeine after two in the afternoon.
The idea of a laundry schedule is also baffling to me. No, I don't do certain kinds of laundry on certain days, I do my laundry when I have the time or when I realise I'm running low on the number of clean pairs of pants or socks I have in my drawer because I don't want to go sockless or commando. One of my big triggers is when I do a few loads on laundry in a day and have to have it on an airer because the thing just occupies far too much space in my flat. If I had a tumble dryer, I would do the laundry more often. Especially in winter. I miss having a tumble dryer in the winter because I used to pick out the clothes I was wearing, run to the laundry room in halls and give them a quick spin, then show them up my jumper to take them back to my room still really warm. That was university though and it was before my halls decided they could make more money out of their students by charging them for the convenience of using a washing machine and tumble dryer. People wonder why students get a reputation for going home to their mum's with their laundry or being the great unwashed - look at how different it was when we had free access to the laundry room to when they started charging and I wouldn't be surprised if students didn't use the laundry to save money, especially in expensive halls like mine. Anyway, breathe and refocus.
I don't really know why these are the things we've clashed on, me and my mum that is, and it's not as though they have been blazing arguments, but there have been other things like where stuff can be stored - that's been more tense - but there have been a lot of little things we have needed to compromise on those things, and we're all having to bend a little bit. It's not something that comes easily, because I'm used to living alone and my parents are used to not having any 'kids' living at home since I moved out at eighteen and my brother moved out last year.
It's not all bad though. My mum is trying to convince me breakfast isn't evil which is pretty damn good for me because even though I'm having breakfast at my desk whilst working, I'm actually eating Weetabix in a morning and it makes me less grouchy and means I snack less. Granted, I've had to accept that in this house, we have 'normal' milk. My parents drink dairy milk, and it was way too much of a faff to try and find a dairy alternative that I can tolerate in the places that they shop. Also, it seems a lot more expensive for the alternatives I like, so I'm just having to go back to dairy milk... Not the chocolate. She's also making sure there's salad in the house for either on sandwiches or next to them, which is good because when I try to do it for myself the ingredients often go off before I've finished them or I get bored of them and the same happens. She's also making more vegetarian food so that she doesn't have to cook two things, and that's been pretty cool because she's been trying different recipes and that's been pretty awesome.
What I'm having to remember about this is my parents are doing me a big favour. I want to buy a flat in London and that is by no means easy. I want to save for more of a deposit than I currently have and living with my parents is a lot cheaper than living in London. They're also reminding themselves of that and also that this is the most time we've spent together since I was eighteen because when I went away to university, I didn't come home for the summers. I loved being in London, so I just stayed there and worked and explored. When I graduated, I thought I had my life pretty sorted. I had a job, I had a partner, I had a place to live that seemed to be everything I needed, so I planned to stay. The place to live went wrong, the partner was clearly wrong, and the job wasn't ever supposed to be long term, but even with all of that, I never thought seriously about coming back to Manchester. I thought about it for fleeting moments when everything felt like it was going wrong, but it never really takes much for me to fall in love with London again. I just need to head over to the city center or Chelsea or any of the markets and I remember that everything is just a train ride away and this has been my home for nearly ten years. It made it really difficult to make the decision to move back to Manchester, even temporarily and for a purpose. Even though for a long time we've not been able to go out and do things and it'll be a while before it feels safe to spend time with my friends the same way we did pre-COVID, it was really hard to decide to be physically so far from the place I see as my home and the most of my friends who are there, too, even though I know the move will mean better things.
Despite all of this we're making the most of it, and it's already been quite a lot of fun. We're planting vegetables and herbs and that's been a lot of fun, we're working on the garden pretty well, too, to make it a bit more veg patch friendly and also to get rid of some of the plants we're not that enamored with. We've got fence lights and a bridge that looks like it's over watery pebbles and a new table, chairs and sun umbrella.
We are spending more time having meals in the garden as well, which is nice. We've got plenty of citronella candles to keep the hoverflies away, but we are still getting a lot of bees and a couple of them have needed to be rescued from the grass, but we've rescued them and then sent them off on their merry way and that's been awesome.
So, we're doing okay, we're keeping it together and we're getting on pretty well, and when we've had bad news, and there has been a lot of it about recently, we've been together to face it and that's been easier, but I'm still excited for the next few months and saving towards my dream flat in London. I want to be back home as soon as I can and create a place that can be my little utopia, and a space to hang out with my friends and for us to be able to write together like we have in the past.
Charlieswrite
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