Everyone knows that you can not be angry with your parents, those who gave you life. But how can you not be angry if they don’t give you life?
This story stretches back to my student years. I absolutely did not want to go to university in our small town, so I applied to other cities. I got in. The question of housing came up. Since my parents couldn’t afford to rent me an apartment or a room in an apartment, or even a room in a communal dormitory, I lived in a student dormitory. It was a nightmare, but it was cheap and angry.
I am grateful that they paid for my stay there, but I had to earn my own money for some groceries and extra purchases like clothes, shoes, and appliances.
After graduation, I had a lot of hope for my grandmother’s apartment, which was left after her death. While I was in my last year of school, my father and mother rented it to tenants, and when I returned to my small town, I started a conversation with my father about whether I could rent this very apartment from them. At first they took my determination as a joke, but I wasn’t joking. I wanted a nest of my own, and since my parents needed the money so badly, I was willing to pay them rent.
I lived in that apartment for about a year, until all the debts I had accumulated for the apartment came out. My grandmother, with her small pension, didn’t even think about paying, my father kept waiting for the debt to be written off, and there was more than three thousand dollars in debt accumulated there. My dad offered to pay off their debt, while still paying the utilities and the rent.
I didn’t expect that kind of nerve from my own parents. I left the apartment, letting them sell it for a pittance so that the new owners could cover the debt.
I was getting myself back on my feet and settling into another rental apartment on my own. Only it turned out, not to build my personal life, but to shelter my parents.
They suddenly decided that I was bored to live alone and they wouldn’t bother me, so they started renting out their apartment and came to me unannounced with bags, suitcases and a cat. They didn’t bother to ask if there was room for them, if they would be superfluous – what if I have a young man who would be against it?
I had no right to throw them out, of course. But why should I tolerate their visit when they lost one apartment because of debts, and now they have decided to make money on the second. I pay the rent, I pay the rent too. And what will they pay for in this case, or, will they pay at all?
Of course, someone might say, “They’re your parents, you used to live with them too, and you didn’t pay for anything,” but that’s a little different in my mind. When you decide to have a child, you have to understand that you are responsible for them, not the other way around.
