At 26 years of age, I pretty much consider myself to be an adult.  I managed to find a job (albeit temporary) in this crappy economy where I actually receive benefits and am paid enough to afford the essentials – rent and Internet.  The unfortunate drawbacks to this situation are that I still live in the town where I grew up and for the past year I was living at home.  I hear you asking yourselves why finally moving out of the parents’ house at 26 years of age is a drawback, and I must say, I wasn’t expecting it to be a pitfall either!  However, my parents have become re-accustomed to having a certain amount of knowledge – and thus power – over my daily existence.  Now that I have moved out, they can sense the deterioration of the umbilical cord they thought they were recreating between us.  This leads them to incessant calling, unannounced “just dropping by”s and the dreaded spying.

In a small town where a core of the community knows everyone and everyone else’s business, spying is easily mistaken for idle gossip.  It’s interesting that it sounds like I am living in a Faulkner-esque southern town in the late 1800s, but unfortunately, I am neither in a place as warm or as colorful as a southern town.  The thinly veiled bragging about your daughter or son to the neighbor merely serves as a distraction from the real intent of the encounter; namely, to see if the neighbor has any sort of dirt to tell you about your own child’s behavior.  If your child is under the age of 16 or so, this is an excellent way to keep track of them and the mischief they get into without them knowing.  However, once a certain age has been reached (and I like to think I am well past that certain age) it is a rather ridiculous, tedious, and annoying scheme for gathering intelligence on your grown offspring.  If you want to know, just ASK me.  If I want to tell you I will, if I don’t, I won’t and I think I am old enough to have privacy from my parents.  I mean, have a little confidence in your parenting abilities that I am not making decisions that will land me in jail, the hospital, or any other number of unappealing scenarios.

Oh, and if you try to call me to ask me and I don’t answer or return your calls, maybe it’s because I don’t feel the need to talk to you upwards of 3 TIMES A DAY.  Yes, I no longer live with you, and I know I am just across town so I am constantly on your mind and within easy reach should I decide to answer and cry for you to come over and help me with my overwhelming life situation… NO. Just resist that impulse.  Every little thought that floats through your head that is even vaguely related to me, my situation, or my past situation does NOT need to be phoned over to me at that instant.  For instance, calling me in the morning as you are driving down to the city to ask if I need a sandwich from wherever for dinner is a nice thought, but completely unnecessary.  Especially since you always end up fighting over whether the driver is watching the road properly, telling me about the latest tragic death in town, and/or telling me all the mundane, uninteresting occurrences of the few hours since you’ve been awake.

I make valiant efforts to cut the cord without much backlash.  Really, I try to rip off the bandage swiftly and cleanly, but you just keep clinging like a case of herpes.  I never know when you’ll sprout up to annoy the crap out of and inconvenience me.  So I’m SORRY I snap at you and hang up abruptly when you try to call. I’m SORRY I don’t want to spend hours talking to you every night about my day or come over for dinner more than once a week (isn’t once enough??).  We live in a small town; I live on the opposite side of town from you; which is at most 15 minutes away.  If something horrible or amazing were to happen to me I guarantee you’d likely hear about it even before I had a feasible opportunity to tell you myself.  From now on, I am capping the calls I respond to, the number of voicemails you leave me, and the number of visits home because you are starting to be the boy who cried wolf.  Nothing seems important because absolutely everything seems to merit a clingy phone call or visit.  STOP BUGGING ME, you’ll probably hear all about whatever I’ve been doing from Mrs. Nosy, Mr. Spy and Ms. Tattle anyway.