I graduated from college two weeks with two, apparently useless, degrees: one in history and one in political science. It turns out that both are really only good for graduate school or for teaching elementary school kids who really, really want to be someplace else. And in the end it all comes back to teaching because that is also what you do after graduate school (except then you teach college students who may or may not feel the same as the younger kids). And what do you do between graduation and graduate school?
You move back in with your parents, apparently. Or in my case, you move back in with your parent. After four years of freedom! and living the high-life on my own, moving back in with my father has opened my eyes to things I never realized about family or about myself until now.
My father graciously welcomed his college-age daughter back home with open arms and free room-and-board. Both things a jobless recent college grad certainly appreciates! In return, I clean our house. And I clean it again. And I pick up the yard. Make the beds. Cook dinner. And clean some more. Because not only am I a jobless college grad, I also don’t own a car, so I have spent the greater part of the last two weeks at home all day, waiting for my father to return with the car so I can get away for an hour or two in the evenings to ride my sister’s horse. My schedule is the type of thing any intelligent person with a paying job would envy: wake up around 8, eat breakfast and leisurely drink a cup of coffee while reading, go for a run, shower, read some more. Clean the house, wash my dishes. Check my emails, follow my Tumblr, play around on Pinterest, search for jobs. Do some writing. Do some yoga. Repeat. I am stir crazy.
I am stir crazy, and emotional. I go through phases of intense lassitude in which I lay on the couch, emotionless, mute, relaxed. Sometimes I cry - I do not want to live in this small town where I know no one and have nothing to do outside of our house and no way to get there if I did. Then I feel a strange burst of determination: I clean the house madly, with the kind of intensity and dedication an employer would appreciate (and somehow I think this will help me find a job). Then I am bored, because I have done the same thing everyday and the monotony is killing me and it seems as if my father will never get home and then he does and we eat dinner over small talk and then he wants to go the barn with me and so I let him and then we watch a movie and then he goes to bed and then….I go to sleep too and the whole cycle repeats the next day.
I do not see a light at the end of the tunnel. But I do see my father, grateful for my company but anxious for me to find a paying job. I see myself slipping into this routine and losing motivation despite my best efforts, or at least, I fear that this will happen. I fight my indignation when my father wants to know everything I plan to do and where I plan to be and why! but then I realize, that he has not changed, only I have. I am used to being independent, he is used to being my father. And so I try to humor him (while resolving that I must change this situation as soon as I can). I do not want pity, and I hate the contemptible looks members of my family give me over this situation….this is not the scenario I would have foreseen four years ago, and if it was, I guarantee I would have majored in something more useful. And yet, I try to appreciate this situation for what it is and make the best of it. After all, there is a roof over my head and food on my plate and a kind companion who does care about me despite it all.
