You're never too old for a childish whinge

I realised recently to my ongoing surprise that my relationship with my family had, without my knowing or consent, changed. It had always been a hotbed of hostility and aggression which though probably unhealthy had been consistant, and there's nothing like a bit of consistancy in life. I'd a series of simmering resentments and grudges i'd proudly managed to collect and hold onto for over a quarter of a century and for their part they tended to view me as a mixture of a moronic village idiot and a hedonism chasing fiend with no moral compass which isn't a totally unfair assumption based on first impressions, as i tend to look like one of Charles I's cavaliers on a heavy diet of crack.

                                                              This dude is mad for the crack           

And so life had continued in this respect until i eventually decided i had the required number of hairs on my chest (at least 12, 6 on each side) and decided to move out.
The problem of moving out of home apart from all the tedious day to day stuff you suddenly have to contend with is your relationship with your family suddenly changes. You no longer live with them, enjoying the type of healthy relationship that a small parasite shares with it's host, where you can happily leach off them, sucking them dry of their delicious nutrients and leaving a desicated husk as a hideous monument to your insatiable appetites.


You see when that was the situation everything was very simple. You got everything done for you, and if you didn't then screaming fits, slamming doors, crude graffiti on the walls and dirty underage sex on their bed was an appropriate response to their unparalled cruelty, whether it being refusing to buy you and your 13 year old mates booze for a party or dragging you to see your piss smelling Grandparents on a Saturday and enduring their gnarled, artheritic hands tugging at your cheeks like toothless zombies who have lost their enthusiasm for the flesh. The point is like every healthy teenager you hated your parents, hated them with the irrational loathing only a hormore pumped teenager can possess. This can be sustained through various stages from the foot stamping, high pitched temper tantrums of your early years through to the 'emotional' years of your early teens where you wear only black, spend hours trying to rhyme 'razor blade' for your apparantly deep and perplexing poetry and smoking low quality hash whilst pretending to read the works of Byron and Shelly. And finally and gloriously the last stage of your rebellion is spent with a 'give a fuck' attitude, staying out as late as long as you can (or dare) and trying to find the one drug dealer who will give you pills, rather than walking away with your money and an insincere promise to be back in '10 minutes'.


This level of hostilty is pretty much the only level of relationship you've had with your parents, apart from a handful of years as a toddler which your parents will recall fondly as a golden time but you know really that it's just because you hadn't yet gained the ability to say 'fuck you' and besides, you made up for that by shitting your baby pants with your weird baby poos as often as you could.

                                                                   Sweet vengeance!


But as soon as you move out this is supposed to end (not the pant shitting part, there's years of fun left in that). You're supposed to now have mature and adult conversations with your parents about tracker mortgages, track and field atheletes and Tracker bars.
 

                                                              The cornerstone of all small talk

They'll enquire about your savings and investments and make horrified noises when they decipher your vague, non-commital grunts and realise that you have none. All of a sudden the ground rules have changed and no one bothered to tell you. If you respond to their eager question about how your job is going with the standard, 'it's shit' they'll decry you as immature and tell you to gain some goddamn responsibilities. Suddenly the job you do isn't just a means to an end so you can party it up at the weekend. No, now it's your career and one you have to take seriously, which to a parent means sucking up to your boss and making eager beaver bullshit suggestions in the twice weekly meetings which your boss carries out so he can pretend he has friends. The rules of engagment have changed and for several years they will despair at how immature you are and irresponsible you are and you will burn with a new type of hate as irrational and unfair as ever which will slowly poison you.


But eventually over the years the anger dulls. You start visting them on occasion at the weekend, ostensibly to just pick up your post and get some free food but you find yourself, horrifyingly, gaining a low level pleasure from it. The beasts of your youth are now softened with age and they start to resemble a perpetually smiling and stoned muppet whose clumsy yet well meaning fumbling enquiries about your life can hardly be met with a blitzkrieg of hate and bile as in your glory days, when you were firm of buttock and greasy of skin. I recently returned home for a family birthday and we talked very pleasantly about holidays, drank buckets of tea, did some garden work and parted on pleasant terms. It was boring sure, but also pleasant in a way like antiques shows and sponge cake.
As your life changes around you and you feel the sands shifting beneath your feet the cosy familiarity of family becomes the one constant which you can hold onto in a world where situations and circumstances change with a breathtaking pace. The old issues may remain. They may still patronise and intefer with your life in a way you find infuriating and disrespectful. The scars of childhood will still ache on occasion and the memories of youth may rear up it's ugly head and flashes of the old anger will resurface, but increasingly these are gently swatted away like an irksome fly. The cost is too much to pay, you no longer want these enemies so close to you when life has given you more than you would ever require. You do not want to rage against them, for them to burn in the heat of your fire, such anger and energies can be put to better use and targeted at more deserving foes. No, they will become the anchor of your life, the port in a storm. Family finally becomes what you imagined it was supposed to be. A place of close, familiar belonging.