Just writing about it almost makes me happy I don't live at home anymore. Except for the mild homesickness.

Whenever I go to my parents' house to visit (I refer to their house as "home home" because I still consider it to be my real home, even though S. and I have done a good job of making our apartment a new home for the two of us) I am filled with a weird type of homesickness. Even though I can be with my parents and my brother in the house where I grew up, I still have a sense of melancholy. What I am sad for is the way my house was when I lived there.

I miss the way my bedroom used to look, filled with all my clothes and books and CDs. Moreover, when I lived at home, things were cleaner. I regularly tidied up around the place, a habit I got into during high school.

Prior to my grade ten year, my mom was largely a stay-at-home mom. When I was in elementary school she did a lot of babysitting for neighbourhood kids; there were always tons of children in our house after school ended for the day. She also worked part-time at the school my brother and I attended; she was a playground and lunch monitor. The rest of time she did stuff at home: cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.

When she went back to work when I was 15, she had no time for all of that household stuff. Consequently she took to coming home from work in time to cook dinner, and tended to be in a bad mood. Then she would scream at me and my brother for not helping out more around the house. She yelled at my dad too, but he 1) was used to not doing anything around the house because she coddled him for 16 years and 2) didn't see why he should have to clean the bathroom after work when he had college-level exams and labs to mark.

It so followed that I started doing all of the necessary cleaning in order to avoid having her scream at me and to keep the tension in our house at a bearable level.

For the next nine-or-so years, I did the brunt of the housework. The place stayed . . . manageable. Then I moved out.

Now the house rarely gets a good cleaning unless I am visiting. Irritatingly enough I will scrub down the kitchen when I visit, and then return a week later to find it just as messy as before.

Everything is even messier than before. The bathroom attached to my former bedroom is littered with dustings of tobacco and marijuana; my brother uses it as a drug den. He has never learned any housekeeping skills because my mother, or I, did everything for him. I don't think he's even made a proper bed in his life.

My mom is too depressed by work, and visiting my elderly grandfather every few days, to do more than come home from work and sleep for a few hours, get my dad to pick up Swiss Chalet and wine, and then drink herself into a stupor from half a bottle of wine and the alcohol she keeps hidden around the rest of the house. If she does cook dinner she watches t.v. or and goes back to sleep before my dad and brother have even finished eating. Sometimes my dad cleans up the
dinner dishes and cutlery but rarely any of the pots and pans, which sit congealing on the counter until I return home to clean.

I am the one with bipolar disorder, anxiety issues, and a mild case of OCD, and I am the most sane member of my family, the guard against dysfuntion.

Let me point out that my own apartment is relatively tidy. S. is fastidious about cleanliness, and I am almost as careful as he is, unless I am in a low mood, wherein I couldn't give a shit whether the place is clean.

Maybe that's how my mom feels all the time. But the thing is, she could easily hire a cleaning lady. But she won't. Know why? My mom doesn't like the idea of some outside person cleaning her house, because she feels that person won't do things right. Also, my mom has said repeatedly that if she had someone come in to clean for her, she (my mom) would have to clean everything first so that the cleaning person wouldn't think they are messy. ARGH!

Getting to the point.

The point is: when I go home I feel sad for the way things used to be when I was home. Tidier. More structured. I get ever get back to that point unless I were to move back home. If I'm homesick, I can't ever go home because that place doesn't really exist anymore.