COMMENT: Why a trip home is a test of EVERYONE’S last nerve

Aug 4, 2016

There are people who, following a well-intentioned trip back to the parents’ homestead, leave feeling drained, mildly irritated, with an acute awareness of their family’s numerous shortcomings.

And then there are liars.

Because even those who step back over the threshold of their childhood home with the best of intentions (and a desire to talk to people who don't take photos of their dinner) ultimately find themselves questioning how they ever lived with these humans for a prolonged period of time.

A trip home is like viewing adulthood through the eyes of a child.

It looks great, it sounds great… and then you get there.

And it’s more stressful, more exhausting and has a lot less ice cream than you were promised.

Returning to the family home for a weekend feels like a balancing act – one where you’re on fire, the tightrope is on fire, and the person holding the extinguisher won’t help because ‘aren’t you doing a grand job looking after yourself’.

Chores you were tasked with as a teen are now apparently beyond your capabilities because things have changed since you flew the nest.

“Don’t give him the purple dish, for Jaysus sake. That cat won’t eat out of the purple dish,” you'll be told as you watch the cat eat happily out the purple dish – zero f*cks given.

And tasks which you’d gladly forego for two days – because you spend half your life doing them now – are heaped upon you at every available opportunity.

“Help your dad with the washing, good woman. He won’t use the dishwasher because it made an extra beep last February and he thinks we’ll be burned in our beds.”

Moving out of the family home also gives your parents the distinct impression that your general interests have drastically changed.

You’ll follow your mother around the garden as she points out every item she’s painted since you last visited and you’ll shadow your father as he guides you through the latest additions to his stash of old-fashioned stationary, and this is because they genuinely think it’s now your thing.

Oh, you were a self-obsessed gobshite when you lived there – cared about nothing but yourself, the WiFi router and the contents of the freezer – but now you’re different.

Now, apparently, you want to talk dado rails, dustbusters, funerals and the fact the neighbour’s house looks the absolute biz with those hanging baskets.

And this is because when your parents try to do it with each other, they may as well be shouting into the abyss.

Whether you tuned their conversations out when you actually lived with them (that’ll be the self-obsessed part) or this bizarre conversational quirk is an entirely new development, a trip home will act as a reminder that most couples – after a certain age – possess the ability to conduct two separate conversations… at the same time.

Refereeing a conversation between your parents the morning after your mother plied you with red wine – something which she refused to do years previously – is as welcome a notion as a baby at a Donald Trump rally, and yet it's your principle role on your return home.