I’m currently living in Florida with my parents, whom are divorced, and I still do the arrangement where I’m with one parent one week and the other the next, despite being 21. I just finished 2-year college and I’m just starting to try being an adult, I just started my first job a couple months ago and I’m working on getting my driver’s license (long story short, didn’t get it sooner because I was in a lot of car accidents as a little kid and I was scared to drive until the beginning of this year). My life has not been in a great place for the past couple years; I questioned my choice of major, had teachers die, and ended a lot of close friendships, as well as some other things I won’t go into. Right now, I have 3 people I’d call close friends, or best friends. One is in California, so I can’t see him often. The second is in the process of moving in with her fiancé, whom is an ex-friend she met through me and is not someone I can stand being around (ironically because I don’t like how he treats her), but that’s another story. But, what I am seeking advice about is in regards to my third close friend, whom for the sake of anonymity, I’m going to call Kitty.
Kitty wants me to move in with her, and she wants us to go to North Carolina. And I’m not sure if I should go with her or stay with my parents. I’m afraid that I’d be making a huge mistake either way.
What makes me hesitate to move in with Kitty is that her behavior (specifically her behavior a couple months ago) has been brash enough that my mother and close friend #2 think that I should stop being friends with her. She broke up with her fiancé earlier this year, and I know it’s taken a huge toll on her and perhaps caused some of the behavior, but I’m not sure if moving in with her would make it better or worse (it’s worth noting that she has been acting better these past few weeks). The issues, though: She’s been shoplifting. Always small items worth less than $12, but still, stealing is stealing. I’m with her when it happens, I’d stop her if I knew when she was doing it, but what happens is that we walk out of a store and after we’re already on our way somewhere else, she’ll pull something out of her pocket and be like “Look what I got!” So, I don’t know about it until it’s already done. And, she is very bossy, sometimes about things she really should keep her nose out of. She tells me I need to choose to live with one parent or the other and that I’m ridiculous for not having done so. She’s even said my parents were selfish for not having me only live with one of them in the first place. Her parents are still together, of course, so she has no idea what she’s talking about (she’ll say she does from seeing other people in the same situation, but she herself has never been in it, so she really doesn’t know). She’s forcing me to like Taylor Swift, actually argued with me about why I don’t like her music like it was a political debate and none of my reasons were good enough. And, her sense of humor can be really mean at times. A couple months ago, she found the worst photo of me on facebook she could possibly find, edited it into a photo with me and a rock star I had recently admitted I have a crush on, and posted it all over facebook and twitter. Just at my friends, I thought it was pretty funny, but then she actually tweeted the photo to the band. That was too far. And when I jokingly commented “I’m crying, I’ll get you for this”, she really snidely replied, “A little crying is good for you. You’re young, you’ll get over it”. (She’s a year younger than me, by the way.) Although, she DID delete the tweet to the band when I asked her to. She also “accidentally” brought up something that reminded me of a time when I wanted to kill myself, during a conversation with her date, whom I’d just met that day. At first, when I didn’t want to talk about it, she acted like I was being oversensitive, but once I was so miserable I could barely speak, she apologized. Then she cried. She claimed it was about having a first date after breaking up with her fiancé. I went quite a while without talking to her after that, and she’s been nicer since then.
The flipside on her is that she legitimately does give a shit about me and my problems. She was there for me recently when shit was really falling apart (like I said, teachers dying, and the incident that caused me to stop talking to close friend #2’s fiancé, family issues, and more) and I was crying all over the place. And she can actually be really fun to be around, especially lately (lately as in the past couple weeks/month) as she’s been more rational, no mean jokes or stealing. Almost like she was before the break-up. I got sick on my birthday so when I was well enough to celebrate, she baked a cake for me and gave me cool stuff for the car which will be mine once I get my license (obviously I wouldn’t be moving anywhere until I can drive, so that at least gives me a little more time to consider things). We’re extremely close; there are things she knows about me that I have not told anyone else (other than my mom). Kitty had to give away her cat when she moved back in with her parents after the breakup, and I took the cat in because it came down to either me or her asshole ex, and I was already pretty attached to the cat myself, so it worked out. Kitty and I have fun watching movies together and going out and listening to music and she’s usually fun to be around, we find lots of things to laugh at. And she has called out other people who are assholes to me. Plus, we talk shit about the same people, lol. Lately, I’ve felt like we actually could have a lot of fun together. And apparently, rent prices are cheap as shit in North Carolina, so it could actually be an awesome time.
But, I’m back to not being sure on moving in with her, because, as I said before, she’s bossy. She wants to basically take nothing with her and buy shitty cheap furniture. When I said I wanted to bring my bed and dresser set, she basically challenged me, saying it would be too expensive to move it (and buying new furniture isn’t?!). But, I think she’s adjusted to the fact that I want my furniture (it would be in MY room/section, anyway), but she also says I should only own like 5 t-shirts, 3 pairs of jeans, 3 pairs of shoes, etc….? She says I’m materialistic for owning more clothing than that, yet she makes fun of my tracfone and tells me to “buy a real phone” and says my laptop is too old and to get a new one, and I feel no need to replace these things because they still work. A bit hypocritical of her, isn’t it? But, the other thing that really scares me lately is that she seems to be pinning her entire future on moving in with me. She might quit college to work full time to save money to move out (which is why I’m trying to make my choice asap). When we’re together, it feels like every other sentence she says is “Let’s run away to North Carolina.” Not kidding. She’ll say it, then I’ll talk about something else, and we might have a conversation on whatever topic it is, but as soon as it’s done, she’ll say it again, “Let’s run away to North Carolina!” Literally, over and over again, as soon as another conversation ends, or when there’s a silence. It’s near constant. I’m wondering if she does it because she can sense that I am reconsidering the idea. Both of my parents (who don’t agree on shit, mind you) and close friend #2 have told me that they think it’s a terrible idea to move in with Kitty because she’s too bossy. It’s definitely a big red flag to me. But, shit, sometimes I feel like leaving Florida, and the rent is so cheap in North Carolina, if Kitty and I manage to find the right place and we split an already low rent, living could be cake, you know? It could be an adventure, a real change of scenery, a so-called “fresh start”.
But, to give you the other side of this issue, there’s what I have to live with if I stay with my parents. I love them. They’re my family. I stayed local for college because (other than staying local being a whole hell of a lot cheaper) late Junior Year of high school, dad was riding his motorcycle and he got hit by a car, and now he still has all of his limbs, but some don’t function as well as they used to, so bottom line he’s disabled / is on disability because he can no longer do the job he had done his whole life. This causes him to have some pretty intense mood swings, and they do get scary. He often yells about how his hands don’t work as good as they used to, and I understand why he’d be mad about that. He’s talked about feeling like he’d have been better off dead, and that he’s considering finding the guy who hit him and killing him / running him over. I think he’s just being pissed in the moment and doesn’t mean it (I hope), but he’s isolated himself from pretty much everyone but me. He has no friends anymore. He is avoiding family because he thinks they’re stupid and behaved strangely when he was in the hospital (which, to be honest, they did, it was fucking bizarre, a damn zoo). He has a girlfriend but talks as though he’s going to break up with her soon. So, if I leave, who am I leaving him with (he’s not so disabled that he can’t live on his own, he’s perfectly capable of doing so and does so when I am with mom, but I mean emotionally, who will he hang out with, who will he relate to)? What will he do when I’m too far away to see every day? Would he keep being himself, or would he become irrational? Since I got a job, dad and I have been getting along better, having good talks and some fun times, but right after I finished college was hard. I admitted that I might have fucked up with my choice of major a few weeks before I finished college, and he was disappointed in me, acted like I was lazy, like I was giving up on what I wanted (this is not the case; my interests simply changed). He never congratulated me on graduating. That really hurts. I’ve never had him be that disappointed in me before. Sometimes when we work on the car, he’ll reveal how lazy and disappointing he still thinks I am when I don’t know how to do something or where something is in the garage (a constantly rearranging mess) or if I make any mistakes at all, basically. He’ll say me waking up late is a sign that I’m unenthusiastic and that I should be up at 8 or 9 am, even if I was working until 3am the night before. (And, unenthusiastic? I’m saving up/spending most of my paycheck on things for the car.) I feel like he’s going to be disappointed in me and think I’m lazy no matter what I do for the rest of my life, because so far it’s felt that way. What also hurts is that, recently mom ended up revealing that dad basically accused me of killing a small animal when I was 15. What happened was, I had a pet bird (a cockatiel), and she had a tumor on her wing, and when I took her out of the cage to pet her one day, dad said to be careful, and I tried to be, but the bird jumped out of my hand, tumor prevented her from flying, she fell on the floor hard and died. I was devastated. Dad immediately blamed me, but then seemed to stop blaming me when he calmed down and I was still crying. When mom asked how the bird died, dad apparently told her that I threw it on the floor. And despite mom asking me and me giving her the real story at the time, dad’s version got into her head enough to just blurt out one day a couple months ago. I found an essay I wrote about the bird and she said, “Did you write this before you killed it?” And of course I was like, “What the fuck?” and she told me everything and it apparently left enough of an impression on her to remember all these years and maybe judge me based off of it. My parents think I’d purposely kill my pet bird. Do you realize how much that hurts? It must seem silly that I’ve dedicated a whole section to that story, but it really bothers me.
Which is also totally ironic, because my mom has turned out to be way less stable than I previously thought, specifically around cats. Mom is closer than my best friend, okay? She knows the shit Kitty doesn’t know about. I tell mom everything. Well, almost, I don’t talk about sex, that would be fucking weird, but, pretty much everything else. So, we’re really fucking close. Which is why this next part shocks me so bad. When I took in Kitty’s cat (lol), I took the cat to mom’s house because dad’s house has dogs and we thought that would turn out bad. Turns out that mom really hates Kitty’s cat. And, here’s the thing, it’s a great cat. She’s mad at it for being a cat, and for once belonging to Kitty (mom doesn’t like Kitty, dad’s kind of neutral). Mom complains when the cat is aloof, she complains when it’s affectionate, she complains because it’s sitting on the table, she complains when she bathes herself because she “doesn’t like the view”, she complains because it’s curious. It’s. a. fucking. Cat. The cat HAS done some things to mom, she says it just walks up and bites her, chews her fake plants, chews her pillow, which are things that the cat does not do to me or my stuff. The cat might be doing this to mom’s stuff because she is mean to the cat. I didn’t realize how bad it was until mom admitted that on a week when I wasn’t there to speak up for the cat, mom was cleaning out the refrigerator, and she emptied a crisper, and the cat, being curious, jumped in. So, mom shut the crisper shelf, closed the refrigerator, and left the cat in there for five minutes. I was so shocked and so pissed when she told me. I still am. She doesn’t seem to comprehend that shutting an animal into a refrigerator- even for five minutes- is animal abuse. I literally asked “Don’t you think that was a little fucking overdramatic to shut the cat in the refrigerator?” (Not that cursing at mom is good, but you have to understand how pissed I was, what if she had left the cat in a little longer and had seriously hurt/ killed the cat?) and mom honestly responded, “No, I don’t. She’s too fucking nosey”. She was shocked and offended when I said I don’t want her to kill the cat, she said “I’m not capable of killing an animal.” But, keeping the cat at her place just isn’t safe anymore, I’ve decided. Luckily, thanks to dad having to babysit the cat for a week when mom and I were on vacation previously, dad learned that not only does the cat get along with the dogs, but this happens to be the only cat on earth that my dad likes (like I said, it’s usually a very good cat), so as soon as I told him what happened, he said I can take the cat to his house. This conversation with dad happened because mom wanted to get rid of the cat, saying she hated it and wouldn’t care if she took it to the pound whatnot, and to talk to dad about taking it. Well, after I did and said “dad’s ready for the cat”, suddenly she wants to keep it because she “just spent so much money on cat stuff” and said the cat would act better if I took better care of her (I’m usually good, but for a couple weeks I was slacking because I was working irregular/overnight shifts and came home exhausted). To make matters worse, much in the style of how she revealed the bird story, she let it slip that she lied to me about the kitten we had when I was 10-ish. We had this kitten, like a 4-month old kitten, and mom told me that one week when I wasn’t there, it tried to eat the guenia pig we had at the time, so she threw the kitten outside to try and save the guenia pig, and when she went back out to get it, the kitten was gone. Well, turns out that what actually happened was that I wasn’t there, the kitten was “running around the house like it was the Serengeti plains in the middle of the night” and then it came in to bat around mom’s hair when she was trying to sleep, so she threw the kitten outside over that. A fucking kitten. I don’t know how long it took her between throwing it out and looking for it, but however long she took (very likely slept through the night before looking for it), the kitten left. Mom justified it with “cats usually wait to be let back in”. Again, this was a fucking kitten! So, now I know mom is a fucking psycho (or, at least severely irrational) around cats, and I still can’t really believe it, even though I know it’s true. This week I’m going to have to tell her that I’m taking the cat to dad’s house because I don’t feel like the cat’s safe around her. I have no idea how it’ll go (I imagine badly, she’ll be offended that I find her unsafe for cats and that will piss her off and blah blah blah). Kitty (yeah, I told her about it) said that now that I have a job and money that I should just offer to pay her back for the cat stuff she bought, if that’s still an issue when I move the cat (I think it’s a good idea), but… shit, this isn’t something I expected from my mom. Kitty was shocked, too.
It’s not all bad. My parents love me, they care about me, while I’m still working on getting my license they’re giving me rides to work, they aren’t kicking me out or insinuating that I should leave—on the contrary, both of them are saying I should live with them more than the other parent, and I don’t want to do that, I want to see both of my parents because I love them both, but I also feel like after a week together we need a break (is that bad?). And, sometimes my parents still argue with each other, most of the time they manage not to, but when they do, it’s usually over something petty. But, I know they love me. Dad had the house he lives in built for me when I was 2, basically; he’s said he’s “just keeping the house safe for me until he dies”. Which brings me to feeling afraid that if I move to North Carolina, I will somehow end up still being in North Carolina when one/both parents die, and it scares me to think about. I know I’d find a way to visit them if I did move, but moving out of state when I’ve lived with my parents my whole life thus far is a really drastic change and I don’t know what to expect from myself or them. But, I do have to move out eventually, I can’t live with them forever, even if dad seems to want me to.
Basically, I love my parents, but sometimes I wish I didn’t live with them. I guess that’s normal at 21, but some of the things happening lately are a little fucked up. Bottom line, if I were to move out, I would either go with Kitty to North Carolina, probably sooner than I’m prepared to handle thinking about (she wants to go ASAP, like in Spring or early Summer), or I would have to continue living with my parents for probably a year or two and compiling money until I can successfully live on my own (no other friends looking for roommates, I’m currently single, and I will not move in with a stranger). Basically, I’m stuck thinking that any choice I make here will put me in a bad situation. Moving in with one of my best friends could be super fun, or she could wreck my entire fucking life. Staying with my parents has a certain security to it, but I feel like from here certain issues are going to escalate, and I don’t know where it’s going to go or how bad it’ll be. If I move out of state, I’ll really miss seeing my parents. If I stay with my parents, I have a feeling that refusing to move in with Kitty could cause an argument big enough to end our friendship, or at least take a real big shit on it.
It might just be my depression, but I feel like no matter what I do here, I’ll have regrets, and I’ll feel like I just went along with what someone else wanted. I’m trying to figure out what I want, but it seems like right when I’ve made my decision, something new crops up to change my mind again. And the whole situation has left me feeling pretty sad and hopeless.
I’m looking forward to getting my driver’s license; I’m hoping it helps me put shit in perspective when I can go places myself, but until then I feel the need to ask for advice. The decision is still ultimately up to me, but I’m looking for good points to help me think more clearly. Is it better to move in with my friend or stay with my parents? If you want to give advice on some other thing I brought up, that’s okay, too, I realize I brought up a whole lot of stuff. Thanks for any input you have.
Submitted November 10, 2015 at 11:23AM by CakePieTart http://ift.tt/1OATuLA Advice
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