Fee Free Flatting.

On the outside I look relatively ordinary.

My eyes both focus in the same direction, I have the right number of fingers and toes (attached to the right hands and feet) and braces can speak for a lot. I don't think I would appear on a worst dressed list but nor would I make the best one. I don't wear pilled cardigans, 80's glasses perched on the end of my nose or nude coloured tights with ladders. I eat with my mouth closed, I have an aversion to crocs and I'm as equally worried as the rest of the civilized population at why I'm still watching Trump talking himself up and gaining votes to become President of the Free World.

But I’m also a 25 year old, living at home with her parents.

I'm under the same roof, using the same kitchen (metaphorically) and sharing a pre-historic internet connection (think dial-up for dinosaurs) that somehow fuels their needs but makes connecting to YouTube impossible.  

This is something I feel the need to get off my chest, like it's been living in the cold, dark basement of my secrets and people are starting to peer in the windows so that not airing it out will only lead to mildew, or fleas, or worse, exclusivity. My peers could treat me as a fungus, keeping their distance and refusing to communicate; where proximity breeds and multiplies. I fully understand. As a child I went through lice and as a travelling 20-something I encountered bed bugs. I am nothing if not aware of the need for distance in certain situations. (Or a freezer for the latter works a treat! But belongings, not the person...)

It's a bizarre predicament to be in, and though perhaps becoming more common with rising house prices, it's not exactly a bandwagon anyone willingly jumps on. It's not the Furby for mid-20′s. This is not a trend. However, having left home at 19 and living in multiple different countries for over four years, being back in my home town is not without a strange feeling. Indeed, the notion of being under my parents roof surrounded by childhood relics is certainly unusual. It took me about 2 home cooked meals till I could get used to it. Well, one slow cooked chicken dish with vegetable side and a green garden salad and I was pretty much convinced. Vegetables are a rarity for the young independents living in the expensive metropolises we tend to gravitate to and can be traded like gold. London taught me nothing if not how little I can live off and how often I can consume expired goods from the Tesco discount section. As I explained to my mother on countless different times, recent scientific developments have deemed it not expired but "best before" and 'best' is something I gave up in order to travel. It has been replaced with milk at yogurt consistency and the most indistinguishable kind of meats. Tuna on toast for every meal is the making of champions. 

My parents were not strict disciplinarians as I was growing up and as a mid-twenty something they certainly weren't going to start to be now. The mistakes they made in my years of development are well and truly set, and my return would do well in reminding them. Moving home was not without considerable thought, but the truth is that financially, it absolutely makes the most sense. All surrounding thought and decisions was trying to find other things that would off-set this obvious trump card. I never could. I back the mass exodus of late teens from the familial home to live on their own, earn their own money to spend on rent and power bills and nightly alcohol, but having done that for a number of years, I suddenly saw the advantage of retreating back to that childhood roof. I would be returning to University and thus not earning a full time wage. It would be silly to spend my savings on housing myself in the same area where I could count on free rent and cleaner carpet. But it was a package deal, the lack of mould and central heating came with two people more than double my age who still feel the need to ask me relentless questions about my daily life. A quick trip to a friend’s house is not without an intervention about place, duration, activity. I started to worry I would revert to my 12 year old self, start wearing stick on earrings and delve into a deep obsession with the Olsen twins (which admittedly I never left).

What I started to learn was regretfully, that they aren't too bad. They still maintain a home, a garden, have jobs and even use their laptop with relative efficiency. I taught my Dad how to turn his iPhone off as he didn't realise the phone had a button at the top, which was alarming for many reasons but this is still a great electronic track record for my father. Although there were a few minor initial stumbles (being out late does not mean I’m in trouble or lost in a ditch somewhere like when I was younger), they don't parent me just because I'm back under their living arrangements and technically they're paying for my existence; they are a constant source of advice and aggravation, mostly without even trying. I can go from interested to irritated in less than one breath and back again in one home cooked meal. I discovered I can forgive anything if it's delivered with a steaming plate of herb sprinkled roast potatoes.

The fridge and pantry are always elaborately stocked. I don't know if I ever noticed this when I was younger but I'm assuming I merely took it for granted. Stocked by the magical maid that also ironed my clothes and cleaned up my breakfast dishes. Running out of food was inevitable when I lived with housemates. I would frequently return home from work to find a bare cupboard, dust circling the space where food should be and a lone bottle of half-drunk wine providing an exclamation point in the resolute darkness. In comparison, home is a ready made supermarket at my disposal; payment not necessary. Gourmet delicacies are at the tips of my fingers; opening me up to a world of consumer goods only bought when you pass the stage of financial inadequacy I seem to be unable to escape.

But there is a form of payment for these luxuries. I pay it every day, but in different measures, always undetermined; patience. The payment of tolerating flatmates more than double my age, and the intricacies that come with it. While I’m used to putting up with flatmates that come home at all times of the night, mostly staggering in the door with a member of the opposite sex close behind and proceeding to use furniture as a stabiliser for the wobbly boots they’re unable to remove until morning, it’s quite a different tolerance needed for the over 60′s.

My dad refuses to get much-necessary hearing aids. Just the other day I asked him if he could help me change the oil in my car and he merely glanced in my direction, replying "it's going to be 39 degrees in Sydney tomorrow." Having not mastered his first language, nor the ability to listen, he often delights in speaking French with me. He smiles as he produces words like "beret" from the seeming depths of his memory bank, inserted into no context whatsoever and pronounced with special emphasis on the 't' so that no Francophile would ever understand. Beret, he'll say while eating dinner, midway through a discussion about house renovations. With one French word apparently mastered, he added 'canape' to his repertoire, which the aural world pronounce as 'canap-ay' but my Dad eagerly esteems is 'canap'. He is a trail-blazer in more ways than necessary. Sometimes said in quick succession from beret, anyone that understands him wouldn't have a hard time believing that he had just eaten a hat. 

While trying to tell yourself you can manage the finer differences of your parents ways, it is harder admitting to friends that you're back in your single bed with the Winnie the Pooh sheets, watching Downton Abbey with your mum and the cat and making it past 9.30pm for The Graham Norton Show on Thursdays. It may not be conducive to meeting your future spouse or to inviting strangers met in clubs back for beer pong or darts but nor do these thoughts trouble me as much as they probably should when I'm lying in near cloud-like comfort thanks to a sheet count I didn't know existed and a belly full of nutrients not found in microwave meals. I have been cocooned in the comfort of familial homeliness and I can't see a way out.

The prospect of entering a flat with strangers who won't cook me meals or be forced by love and blood to tolerate my downfalls is frightening. I'm so out of the game I've forgotten how to play. Suddenly being over the hill and nestled by an impending pension and a buddy to pillow talk with (even if they're sound asleep and happily letting silent farts escape into the oven) doesn't seem such a bad place to be. The Kardashians are my safe reality, is that wrong? I will move out at some stage, obviously. Although my mum openly muses she would be delighted if I never left, my dad stares off into the distance and wishes his hearing was worse or training his imagination to replace him in a race car or a fighter jet, far from talk of hair straightening and the wrong shade of blush dress and the hot water bill.

There are amusing sides to having flatmates that receive the pension. My parents are both active and go for a long walk to the bottom of our hill and back up everyday, unfortunately their knee joints only sometimes join them. Agreeing to accompany them but strolling many yards ahead and still feeling like I'm being passed by trees, I turned around to find my mother conquering the hill like a sailor does the wind; tacking up the hill, drawing out long diagonal lines across the pavement so as to ease the discomfort of her leg joints in an ambitious vertical climb. She looked drunk. My father was following behind in her slip stream looking like he'd consumed absinthe for breakfast and trying very hard so as to not give it away. Coincidentally he uses a similar face after a big meal, not long before excusing himself with the newspaper for a considerable period of time.

I’m not surprised that more people don’t live at home at my age (it would be concerning if I encouraged it) and I only speak for myself and my situation, but I am enjoying its benefits at this stage. My bank account looks much better. I am certainly healthier. Even spending more time with my parents is a benefit if you think that their time on earth is certainly shorter than that of my friends. I have learnt invaluable knowledge about finance from my father and I am a sous chef to my mother (admittedly this doesn’t always end well. I frequently eat the ingredients when her back is turned.) 

In turn, I have inspired my parents to attend more events in the city, my mum has tried to step up her fashion game (my father is past help) and they have decided to travel more (which I, perhaps wrongly, don’t take as their escape plan from me). I am secure in the knowledge that I am perfectly capable of living away from home, have done so and absolutely plan to do so in the future. I have experienced wonderful parts of the world and had a thoroughly good time living overseas with different kinds of people. But the gains from living at home at this exact point in my life, far outweigh the negatives. As of today. This is something I constantly reevaluate, no more so than when I find myself falling on my mother’s cooking and cleaning, when I run to my dad to kill a spider or when I forget that most people my age are paying for their own internet bill. Likewise, I am building a list of things not to do when I reach their age.

I’m realising that with patience, humour and sometimes deep breathing exercises, you don’t need to be medicated to live with your parents past adolescence. I think we can all learn from that.