In three days, my parents will move their home. Only a year ago, I would have said 'we are moving', but now, it seems, I have officially stopped being a deciding factor in my parents life.
That's not entirely fair, I know -- mum and dad are lovely people who amuse me and keep me supplied in books (dad) and dole out generous helpings of care and familial gossip (mum). If I ever need help, or money, or advice, I know that they're there for me. But that doesn't change the fact that slowly they have pushed me out of the nest. After my brother went off to university, they started leaving me for two weeks during the summer to have vacations. Normally, this is a teenagers dream; an empty house, two cars all to myself, and money for food/gas. But I am no party animal, and I like both my parents and travelling, so it would have been nice if they'd taken me with them to the East Coast and to Lake Superior. But oh well.
Then, they went to Italy. For two weeks (or six, if you're my Dad and teaching an english course there to rich Canadian kids). With my english cousins, whom I love dearly and would like to see. And they never even asked me if I wanted to come.
Then, this May, they started to look at buying a new house. "We're just looking," they assured me. "We'll stop before June so that it doesn't get in the way of our going to Italy" they said (for of course, they were off to the vacation site of my dreams once again). And then, they found a house with a sunroom and a two car garage, and
bought it. The first I heard of it was when Joel left a message on my Kingston answering machine saying "Have you talked to your parents lately about their house hunting?
Things are happening over there."
My boyfriend knew that my parents had sold my childhood house before I did. Soon after, I came home for my birthday in June, seething with frustration and sadness. To try to express my emotions to my parents over their somewhat pointless move (the new house is the same size, in the same boring suburban town, on a similarily quiet street), I told my mother as I walked in the door "You know, Toria's never known me in any other house." In other words, my oldest and dearest friend, who knows me better than I know myself, who taught me
how to be myself without being crushed by the big bad world out there, was somehow tied to this little house. My identity was in this house.
My mother's response? "Well,
I've known you longer than Victoria has."
Thanks mum. That's a terribly astute and helpful response. I felt like yelling at her. I didn't, of course, because it wouldn't have changed anything.
That night, I couldn't sleep. So I wrote this:
I lie in bed on the eve of my 21st birthday, weeping over the loss of my childhood. I had thought that 20 was to be my big year -- last year when I realized that I was no longer a teenager, that I had to take care of myself now and pay bills and be responsible. Only six hours ago I was boasting to my father that when you turn 21 you still have the responsibilites you gained at 20, but now you get all the perks too -- the ability to drink in the US, to rent cars, to be a legal human being in every sense of the word.
My parents are selling their house. I grew up here, have been here since I was eleven. My best friend, whom I can hardly remember life before, has never known me to live in any other house. She has lived in six different locations in the same time, and she once told me that not only was I her stable prescence in life, but that my house was a safe and familiar place to come back to when her world kept changing. And now, in three short months, this house will be gone forever.
As I curl up in my creaky bed with my heels hanging off the end, I remember my life in this room. The Paul Gross poster which has gazed benevolently down on me as I did countless hours of homework on the floor. The shelf I made in Grade eight shop class (proudly emblazoned with a badly drawn wood-burned image of a horse head) fastened above my bed, with layers of attempts at beauty products on it. The plastic horses which are all, in some way or another, scarred from years of abuse both by me and my charges during babysitting days gone by. The pictures on the wall; a friend leaning out over the boat on a trip to New York, the ill-fated twin towers prominent in the background, the pictures of canoe trips (one of the last remaining vestiges of my high school friends), friends drawings, comics that I once found funny, but have now been on the wall so long that they are merely part of the wall. That's what this room is to me -- a repository of memories gone by, so stable that I never notice how much I need it.. until it is given an expiry date. Then the memories come flooding back:
I remember reading Dave Barry in this bed late one night, hooting with laughter. My mother came, worried, into my room, as the sound of my amusement recalled to her days when sound from a child's bedroom meant tears and bad dreams. I remember my boyfriend and I making out in this room.
I grew up here, and now I have to leave.
My mother always made sad noises when I accidentally referred to Kingston as 'home' -- but I don't think she realizes how much this move is affecting me. My apartment in Kingston is nice, but I have roots in this house and in this room, roots which cannot be re-established in their new house. *Their* new house, not my house anymore. I have no home, and my memories.., what will happen to them? Will they be set free to roam at will, will they follow me in my material possessions, or will they hang about in my room -- ghosts of a childhood past?
so I sit here, on the eve of my 21st birthday, and I cry. For change, for uncertainty, for me.
Maudlin? Yes. Self-indulgent? Certainly. But true, nonetheless.
Since that night, I've seen the house in questions. My parents responded to my distraught manner and showed me their new house. It's lovely. I picked out my room, looked at the fabulous kitchen and bright sunroom, and found myself thinking
"I could live here, and have it not be my house. I can feel comfortable with this. This could be my parents home, but not mine -- and I will be ok with that."
I went from outright indignation and opposition to the move to grudging acceptance. But that doesn't mean that it's easy.
I have to take the posters down off my wall today. A bizarre collage of newspaper photo clippings, mementoes from high-school trips, drawings from friends, and posters of cute video-game animals and Canadian actors I used to have a crush on, those walls represent my past, represent how I came to be who I am now.
I don't feel 21. I still feel like a kid, like someone in high school who shouldn't have an apartment and a boyfriend of four years and be entrusted with responsibility. I love university and my burgeoning adult life, but sometimes I want to retreat back into carefree childhood; to go play in the sand, to have sleepovers, to lie in bed and squint at the names of Pokemon on my wall (without glasses, my eyes were never good enough to catch 'em all).
As long as my room at 852 Magnolia remained there, as long as the walls were encrusted with my life as a teenager, I had somewhere to run back to. Soon, even my parents house will become a reminder that I am an adult -- my new room will still have my old, creaky, too-small bed in it, but the memories that can only be held in a specific place will be gone. The only storage place for them is in my head, and know my own memory well enough to know that without the physical reminder of my room, the memories will rapidly fade to nothing but a few snapshots and yellowing bits of paper.
I have to stop. For two reasons: one, I'm writing myself into tears, and two, it's nearly three o' clock, and I really do need to take down my posters before starting my other responsibilities for the day. Hopefully I've done myself some good, hopefully this diary will now serve as the repository for my emotions so I can begin to move on. All sense and reason tells me that my parents need to make this move. More than the two-car garage, now they can leave behind the memories which hinder them as much as they help me. Memories of laughing children who have now grown up and left their aging and semi-reclusive parents behind. I want Mum and Dad to learn how to live without children at home, and I don't think they can do that at 852 Magnolia.
This, I suppose, is another adult lesson. For the first time ever, I can really help my parents, rather than the other way around. Not just by choosing to be here during the move to lift boxes and cook meals, but to keep my own sadness hidden from them and join them in their happiness.
