When I was three, my father was three. When I was six, he was six... he needed me to escape from being 50.
I'm always fascinated by the theme of children who parent the adults.
We hear the stories every day now: the father who puts on a suit every morning and leaves the house so his daughter doesn't know he lost his job, the recent college grad facing up to the painful reality that the only door that's open to her after four years of study and a pile of debt is her parents'. These are the faces of the Obama economy.
When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.
You just can't move back with your mom at 64. It just doesn't quite work.
She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.
I don't think it's an exciting thing to move back in with your parents.
Before getting married, I was never really able to travel because of work and I was always with my parents.
My mom lived with me until I started making enough money to support myself. I was asking her to leave the entire time. I'd been ready to move out since I was, like, 14.
There are certain things I talk to my mom and certain things I speak to dad for. But I also know that it has never been that I can tell my mum something and my dad won't know. They are very dependent on each other even though they may not say it or realise it.
A lot of fairy tales are thinly disguised hostility raps against parents. Kids know that they can't make it on their own, that if they were left alone, they would die.
To be told that one can be dependent on one's parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.
My mum really depended on me. I'm the eldest of three girls, and she had emotional issues.
Other players do not rib me for being the coach's son. They rib me more for living at home with my mum and dad.
I've seen too many people who struggle financially who save thousands of dollars and go on a one year trip. And then they come back out of money, thirty years old, and back to living with their parents and saying 'I'm back to getting any job possible to get more money for travel.'
In a way, every parent is sort of dependent on the benevolence of the society around them to take care of their children.
I mean, I - it's so funny, I am, you know, I am, you know, a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I've been sort of taking this very long, stuttering period of moving out.
Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents.
