Friday 12 October 2012

Living alone

I grew up in Kelowna. When I was 18, I moved out of my parents' house. The house I moved into belonged to my grandparents who had passed away a few years before. It is old, quirky, and fills me with a lot of good memories of my childhood. It is only 5 minutes' drive away from my parents' house, so it was very convenient for me to go there for dinner (or breakfast or lunch). Living in that old house taught me how to live alone. It taught me how to clean, how to fix something when it wasn't working properly, how to manage money (I had never paid bills before), and how to actually be alone. At first I was messy, ate a lot of frozen dinners, and was scared to turn off the lights at night.
Six years later, I have learned to love living on my own. I love and cherish the independence it gives me, and the control I can have over what happens with the house. I am a perfectionist, so I clean the house in a certain way and often. I like to come and go whenever I please, to have my pets there with me, to listen to music as loud as I like, to walk around in underwear, and not have to talk to anyone.
In this Kamloops house, I have been alone because my landlady has been travelling Europe for a month. She gets home on Wednesday. I am trying to prepare myself for living with another person; a person that is my mother's age and will probably have motherly instincts. My mother is more like my friend than my mother since I have become an adult so I am worried that that will be the biggest challenge. It will also be difficult for me to live in her space, with her there. I don't want to be in her face; I want it to look like I hardly live here. It feels like I'm about to live with an Aunt, we'll see how it goes.

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