Chapter Eleven: Not-Quite-Away from Home (~jinghan)
I just had the most amazing and relaxing Anzac Day weekend*. You wouldn’t have expected it (well I didn’t anyway), but this weekend coincided with the weekend where my parents decided to take a anniversary trip to the Whitsunday Islands.
By 4am on a friday morning, when I was still snug in bed and oblivious to the world, the parentals were already out and away. I half expected myself to resent the fact that they were going away without me or my sister, as is the usual custom for family holidays, but even when I rolled my eyes to my friends and said, “My parents are going to Queensland without us this weekend,” I hadn’t really meant it.
When my time to get up and ready for uni came, the cold semi-dark house wasn’t any different to any other friday morning. Differing obligations always segregated each family members’ morning rituals from another. Running into someone else about the house in the morning always came with a bleary eyed shock and wariness. But this particular friday morning felt like the weekend had already arrived.
With a hint of surprise, I realized that I had been looking forward to my parents departure as much as they had.
No, I’m not an ungrateful child. But there’s was something exciting and liberating about being entrusted with the whole house and my sister for four whole days. (I hadn’t been trusted with the house key until I started high school.)
Coming home in the evening to the chore of cooking should, in any normal situation, be something to groan about, especially at the end of a tiring Friday after a long quickly darkening trip home on the tardy train system. I’m always somewhat ashamed of my below-average cooking skills. But, this situation is entirely different when its me and my sister in the kitchen. What is a shameful lack of cooking skills becomes an adventurous exploration of cooking skills that I didn’t know I previously had. Nothing quite compares with the pride of producing something fairly edible after a perilous exploration of the kitchen.
Of course we ate in front of the TV.
Washing up seemed less painful. Getting to bed seemed less disastrous. Not checking my emails less imminently stressful. Actually, all those little annoying day to day things seemed to give me more of a sense of power, and all those little pointless things I usually stress about seemed less important in the bigger view of everything. (In fact, I didn’t check my emails all weekend! And it was wonderful.)
The next day I went out to see How to Tame Your Dragon with my sister and a friend, a gorgeous lovable Dreamworks production. Usually an outing involves an obligatory appeal to the parentals, at least a few days in advance. The parentals sometimes like drag the process out by haggling over my home-coming time. Sometimes the prospect of this painful and convoluted process is enough to convince me not to go out. Just to be safe, I had vaguely mentioned the proposal of going out to see a film the parents (so as not to destroy and sense of trust) but in their eagerness to be away and off to warm-tropical Queensland they had waved the matter past without much hesitation. I was able to arrange things the night before, and just leave the house the next day. How ridiculously simple!
To add to my good mood, I was also having my braces taken off. My teeth felt naked afterwards. It was so good! I had even been entrusted with the mysterious medical insurance card that magically paid for half the cost. (I wasn’t going to question it.)
The rest of the weekend followed with some productive studying, a new found addiction to the TV show Angel (thanks to the wonderful DVD section at the Rowden While Library), some tutoring (the closest thing to employment that I have had for a month) and seeing the boyfriend. All things that contribute to a good weekend. The rhythm of cooking, cleaning, feeling productive and spending some guilt-free time relaxing was something I could easily get used to. It was even a novelty to spend so much time with my sister who seems to otherwise spend a lot of time in her room or at school (something that that is not unique to just her living habits).
Monday evening: the parents wouldn’t be back until midnight. I spent the time listening to my very very humble collection of music and vacuuming the kitchen (which had shamelessly been collecting crumbs all weekend) and wondering whether I could steal the hi-fi system when I move out since I use it more than anyone else ( – a ridiculous notion since I am neither moving out in the forseeable future nor the man who bought the rather expensive hi-fi system before he upgraded his dodgy black and white TV.) Classical music blasting (as much as it can blast) throughout the house, I was savoring the last moments of this wonderful weekend of liberty. Up to a certain point in life, one is perfectly happy living in their parent’s home, eating what they eat, letting them do the cleaning and the nagging and the being responsible – but then one day we grow up and find that we want things our way.
For a while now I have been drifting between dreaming of moving out and suspecting that I’m still too unexperienced to do so. Perhaps the time will be right when I can afford it – unfortunately/fortunately that won’t be too soon. Maybe when I finish my bachelor degree? A girl can still dream, right?