By Clarissa Wei
Let’s be honest — living at Mom and Dad’s is not sexy. In America, it screams dependent, broke, entitled and extremely lazy.
I’m 23 years old, and I live with my parents in Los Angeles. Yet at one point in my life, moving as far away as possible from my overbearing folks was among my regular rotation of daydreams.
Five years ago, my parents cried when I was accepted at a college 3,000 miles away from home. They begged me not to go; I left anyway. I went on to live in six different apartments: four in New York, one in Shanghai and one in Los Angeles. I started to hate buying furniture; I hated assembling it even more. But I insisted on all of that because I wanted sexy — that sleek sense of independence that came with solo living.
I wanted to have my friends over for as long as possible without the passive-aggressive side eye from my hovering parents. I wanted to throw lavish dinner parties without worrying about displacing a utensil or a beloved dish and getting lectured the morning after.
According to statistics from the Pew Research Center, I’m not alone. Living with a parent is the most common young-adult living arrangement for the first time on record.
Because let’s face it, no matter how old you are, lectures from Mom will never go away as long as you’re under her roof. Parents are parents, and worrying is in their job description.
Yet a while ago, I found myself giving up the keys of my nice little apartment in Studio City, moving all my accumulated furniture into a warehouse and dragging all my remaining possessions back into my childhood home. I’m back, and I have no immediate plans to leave. My parents were delighted when I announced my decision. “You make the right choice,” my mom had quipped cheerfully.
According to statistics from the Pew Research Center, I’m not alone. Living with a parent is the most common young-adult living arrangement for the first time on record.
I’d like to think I’m far from lazy, dependent, broke and entitled. I pay my own bills; I feed myself; and I work a healthy five days a week as a freelance writer. I live at home not because I have to, but because I want to.
It’s convenient for me. My parents live in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley, a region of Los Angeles County that’s ripe with the best Chinese food in the nation. As a food writer, I find it to be a gold mine. I live within a 10-minute driving radius from four Taiwanese breakfast joints, a handful of great noodle eateries and my favorite hot-pot restaurant. Our house is also tucked inside suburbia, relatively far from the traffic-infested centers of Los Angeles proper.
It’s extremely comfortable here, and while I admit I have a pretty sweet living arrangement, the biggest reason is this: at this point in my life, I want mobility, and I want to save money.
I want my income to be used toward experiences and trips. I’d rather pay rent to my parents instead of the money going into the hands of a random landlord. I don’t want to deal with inevitable roommate drama. I don’t want the burden of home ownership right now. In fact, I want to own as few things as humanly possible.
It comes with sacrifices, though, and at times the arrangement can feel a bit regressive. While friends get to have cocktail parties and hot guys over at their places, I’m extremely careful with whom I let into my house. My dating life is effectively down the drain, and privacy is hard to come by. Hilariously, basic knocking etiquette does not exist in my family, and my parents have taken great measures to install security cameras around the property.
If I leave a misplaced book on a table or forget to put my dishes immediately in the sink, I’ll hear a frustrated sigh from across the house and signs of an impending sermon.
The surveillance extends outside my physical home. I can’t stay out late without an inevitable blast of texts that read, “Where r u?!!!!???????!,” “Come home soon” and “No stay out that late, OK? OK? OK?”
But there are also some sweet spots to it. Sometimes those texts will read, “I did your laundry,” “I helped you deposit your checks” or “We have dinner at home. I make food.”
When I get sick, a hot cup of warm ginger tea will magically appear by my bedside. And when I’m heartbroken, they’ll know to leave me alone and speak more gently.
And so while my home life is far from glamorous, it’s definitely full of comfort and stability. And that’s exactly the stability I need as I figure out the unstable parts of my 20s and ask myself, who am I? Whom do I want to be? Who are my friends, and what are my priorities?
Then there’s the reality of it all: I’m going to have to leave home one day. My parents can’t house me forever, and eventually, I will want to start my own home, my own family and my own slew of overbearing text messages.
But at 23, that time isn’t now. So I’m going to stay at home because it makes sense logistically and gives me the flexibility and spending money to pursue my ambitions and dreams.
Maybe living at home will be the new sexy. Maybe it should be.
