So as school was drawing to a close in May, I was excited to take a break and have some quality time at home with my parents.

Now I’m about as full of quality time as a person can get and I am sick, sick, sick of it.

It was quite a shock from being at school, making my own choices, keeping my own time, and being around my friends to coming home and being told at 11pm that “it’s time for you to go to bed now” and having my mom constantly poking at me about my weight, what I eat (or don’t) and nearly having a seizure when I expressed a desire to see a movie that was rated R. It’s like she has this filter that if something is rated R it is automatically evil, anti-Christian, and filled with lots of “bad stuff”.

I don’t think she’s quite come to grips with the fact that I have probably watched a couple (several) of rated R movies without her presence. Heck I may have even gone to see some in theaters. Quelle horreur.

Also–I do have a mirror. I am perfectly aware of my figure (or lack thereof) and I have been trying to exercise a lot this summer, and eat healthier. I don’t need a daily scrutinizing of my weight. Or my facial hair. Or any of my other imperfections that I am more than aware of, thank you very much.

I am just tired of being poked and prodded 24/7 to be somebody I’m not. I think very differently from my mother, I enjoy very different things, and she says that I don’t know what’s good or what’s fun just because I don’t enjoy the same things of her.

To be quite honest…I just need some space. I love St. Martin’s, and the profs and people there, but I am now wishing I picked somewhere across the country where parents can’t just “pop in” any old time they feel like it.

I understand and thoroughly appreciate everything that my parents do for me, but they don’t want to give me a chance to grow up. They just want to mash me into this tiny box that they think ‘THEIR DAUGHTER’ ought to fit in, and either completely overreact-or ignore-any tiny corner of me that tries to stick out.

I try to let them in and share with them, but quite honestly they don’t really know me. They know what they expect me to be, and they don’t allow themselves to see anything that might contradict their sunny image.

I’m not saying that I’m this huge rebel or this bad girl or anything because I’m not. But I’m also not this 11 year old that still always wears frilly dresses and blushes when she sees a couple kiss on tv.

I know I’m not an old, revered, sage ADULT or anything, but I’m not a tiny child that needs to be constantly sheltered and instructed and taught every five seconds.

I don’t need the little lessons anymore all the time, I can probably tell them better myself.

It’s not that I don’t think they’ve been places before me and they know better, because they do. But the burnt hand remembers better and longer not to touch the flame. I don’t want to be burnt per say, but I do want to be given the opportunity to make my own mistakes.

Even to decide what I want to eat and whether I want seconds or not and whether I want to read until midnight or go to bed at ten. I don’t want to be ungrateful, but I fear that I am becoming (slightly) resentful. I don’t want to be but I don’t know what to do. Whenever I try to communicate, to explain this I just get the same old “I’m the parent, you’re the child, when you live under our roof you do as we say regardless of your age. Got it?”

I don’t think the phrase “friendly discussion” even exists in this house. It has always been “my way or the highway” and I am sure that is the way that it will be for the rest of my life.

I’ve pretty much exhausted this subject…it probably won’t interest anyone else and I am sorry for the lack of more interesting subject manner. But to be quite honest, I really blog for myself. I get things out through journaling, and I don’t know why but I’ve found it to be more releasing when it’s published in a blog than if I write it in a journal.

If I write it in a journal, it’s like I’m hoarding all of my thoughts, sticking them in one spot, and then dwelling on them like a jealous dragon guarding its hoard. But when I publish them in a blog, sharing them, I no longer have to sit the lengthy vigil covering them up. I can release my thoughts, expose them to the air, and they can float away on the wind.

Thanks for sitting through that.

Sincerely,

Emilie