Being Parented

I have declared that we WILL be living in the new house by tomorrow night. I'll be here with AugDog all day, getting the unpacking mess contained and setting up some work space for Les and getting the kitchen to a functional state. The basement, guest room, and Les's office will become staging areas for the rest of the boxes, and I'll continue to clean and unpack from here, our home, rather than driving back and forth from Les's parents' house every day.

Which means we are about to rescue ourselves from our crash landing at the in-laws.

Here's the craziest, most unexpected thing. I think I will miss it. A little.

For the last two months, I've been parented. Les's mom makes hot breakfast every morning for herself, Les's dad, Les, and me before she leaves for work. There's a pan of warm hash browns and veggie sausage on the stove when I stumble downstairs. There's a half pot of Pumpkin Spice coffee on the warmer for me to polish off. When I get flustered from the constant back-and-forth and forget our laundry in the washer or dryer, I find it dry and folded in a laundry basket. Les's dad comes over to the new house after work once a week or so to help fix things and assemble our Ikea furniture. We go out to eat at pretty nice places once a week, and we do not pay. His mom buys our favorite cereal at the store and always has chips and salsa on hand.

Is it kind of pathetic to be pampered this way in our mid thirties? I suppose it is. If we were just visiting for a weekend or something, I could see it. But we have been there since August 10.

The thing is, I know my mom and dad would have behaved the exact same way. We would have become the kids again, and they would be the parents. I forgot how nice it feels to be taken care of. I forgot what it feels like to be a daughter.

I am really excited to have our own home, our own space, and our own life, but I am so thankful to have had the experience of a temporary cocoon of shelter and care. I don't know if I will ever be able to call Les's parents "Mom" or "Dad", but I realized this morning for the first time that they have filled those roles in my life for the last two months from a practical perspective. The emotional angle is still growing, but our relationships are closer for having lived our day to day lives together. The things that drive me nuts still make me crazy, but I feel better equipped to handle those things now. And the insecurity I felt before about whether or not they like me, or like me with Les, had totally evaporated. You have to love someone to clean up their dog's poop when he has an accident. To label their to-go coffee cup with their name so they don't accidentally get the mug of black coffee instead of their coffee + milk. To work a long day at work and then come help your daughter in law screw together a massive Ikea wardrobe.

When we were about to leave Raleigh, I was queasy about living with the in-laws for so long. And there have certainly been moments when I've needed to scream into a pillow to keep from lashing out during political conversations, but those have thankfully been few and far between.

And I'm slowly warming up to the reality that I am part of a bigger family, and that I like that more than I thought I would.