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I would like to say that I will eventually act like an adult in front of my parents. But, like a well-behaved child, I don’t like to lie. I firmly believe that I could be the dictator of a country (seriously), treating my subjects like ants, but then my mother would walk into the room and I would immediately expect her to make my bed and put a band-aid on the graze I acquired while at war with France. Or similar.

 

When I moved back into my parents abode, they spent more time plotting my demise than I did their’s. Purely because they had more time at their disposal, as my hours were taken up by calling to tell them when I would be home. Having spent the better part of two years pretending to be an adult, I had fallen into a groove of eating Chinese food instead of cooking, buying new clothes instead of doing laundry and, basically, doing whatever the Hell I wanted whenever the Hell I wanted.

“I have managed to keep myself alive when out of your sight,” I told AM the first week I had taken over her house by cleaning my shoe collection on her white dining table. “You don’t need to mother me.”

But she insisted that if I was to live under her roof, I would have to live by her rules. Rules that included cleaning up after myself and frequent updates of my well-being. Difficult things.

“No problem,” I eventually conceded. “You want a child? A child then you shall get.”

I started making my bed. In the lounge room. Where I could watch cartoons. I stopped ordering in my own meals. And started calling M&Ms a food group. I generally gave my parents an alibi for when they stood in front of a jury to explain why they shot me out of a cannon.

“Why didn’t you do it sooner?” I imagined one of the jurors asking. “That way you would still have saucepans that had not be burned the entire way through.”

To add insult to injury, my very liberal parents met more Californian Surfers than the average customs official.

 

After six months of competing who could hate the other more, we fell into a nice groove of half-parent-half-child. It kind of resembles Wolf Boy – half of the day I act as a perfectly adjusted and evolving adult. The rest of the time I bang my head against a wall and cry for more ice-cream. For their part, my parents simply ignore me and refuse to validate my behaviour at any time of the entire day.

 

I wouldn’t dream of acting in such a way if I were living with, say, roommates. Someone’s obligation to pay rent is, apparently, all it takes to make me act cordial at all hours.

“I am not paying you to do what every other person in the world does out of instinct,” RG scoffed when I proposed a business proposition to him. “You can just grow the fuck up and act like an adult.” 

 

RG’s mother is staying at my (read: his) house. It is the first time in my entire life that I have witnessed my dad and his master – sorry, mother – in a room together for an extended period of time. What is a vacation for her is simultaneously justifying my own behaviour and awakening me to a whole new side of my patriarch: The child.

At fifty-years-old and double the value in kilograms, RG lost any resemblance to a child decades ago. While I can still legitimately buy my clothes in the children’s department, I doubt he ever did.

 

I firmly believe that people only procreate so that they can one day be grandparents and finally punish their children in a way that is so powerful, even the law overlooks it.

Nanna RG, currently the closest thing to an adult in my house, has spent the past forty-eight hours scolding her son in front of his children, reminding him to clean up. Pick up his towel. Make his bed. Stop talking with his mouth full. Put down the scotch bottle. Don’t talk back. Respect your elders. Say Please and Thank You. Call when he is going to be late. And not where stripes and poka-dots at the same time. All stuff he does in her absence. But, amazingly, since her arrival, has ceased to see the importance of. 

“He never listened to me,” she informed me while I was busy taking thorough notes that I planned to not only laminate, but frame for prosperity.

“If you want to live under my roof, you live by my rules,” RG attempted to put a grown-up sized foot down.

The New Rules seemed a Hell of a lot more fun and easy going than the dictatorship I had succumbed to.

“An abdication of responsibility it is!” I sung. 

I felt like those lucky North Koreans who get to go to Olympic’s for gymnastics, only to escape and enjoy a free life under Chinese communism.

I started following Nanna RG around, asking her questions of what RG was really like in his youth, because the reincarnated image of Socrates never sat well with me.

“Stop asking questions,” RG warned me.

“Where do you think she got that trait from?” Nanna RG defended me before detailing His behaviour as a seventeen year old. (Read: My mental age.)

“Who wants to order in Chinese for dinner?” I interrupted. 

 

With the concept of subjective authority well and truly established, I occupied myself by watching The Flintstones while lying on a pile of my unwashed laundry.

“I thought you would be gloating,” RG sat down next to me.

“Please,” I scoffed. “I would never be so immature.”

He changed the channel and we sat together watching CNN while eating Freddo Frogs. For dinner.