After graduating college, I moved across the country and lived on my own for nearly 3 years. Some unfortunate circumstances happened, and I got fired from my job, forcing me to move back in with my parents in order to save some money and get back on my feet. I was hesitant about moving back at first, and its looking like my hesitation was warranted.
I have done everything I can to prove to my parents that I can take care of myself. I do all kinds of chores, clean, cook them dinners, and even walk their dog while they are out at work. I finished updating my resume and starting going to the gym, and even sent my resume in to a temp employment agency so that I can start applying for jobs in the area. I am looking for new jobs to apply to every day. During my free time, I often go to the library to take some beginning coding classes online in the hopes of eventually going back to school or enrolling in a bootcamp to get certifications.
However, last night I decided I had worked enough and wanted to have some fun. I play a lot of video games, which my mother has always looked down on me for. She sees it as a failure in her parenting. She thinks that I am too old to be playing video games and always tries to make me feel guilty about it. I have already proven to her multiple times that I can balance my time and do other activities while also finding the time to pursue a hobby I enjoy (which happens to be video games, usually together with friends on discord). So, I found a pc/lan café within walking distance of my area and went there for the first time tonight. I had to sell my pc in order to be able to move back so I had been itching to go back to play for over a week now, so finding this place was a godsend.
However, I knew that this would be something that would upset my mother if I stayed out too late, because staying out late had always been a problem for her while I was growing up. She was your typical asian parent/tiger mom, except not in the way that made me academically successful. Think more of being extremely controlling and using guilt as a means of control and/or emotional abuse (for example, she cried every single night when I got my first girlfriend because she didn't know what to do about it and thought my grades would slip, even though throughout high school I had managed to get straight A's and B's. It was so stressful to deal with that I eventually ended up breaking up with her just to please my mom).
Being extremely jet lagged after moving back to the east coast from the west coast, I was always staying up later than anyone else in my family. So before I went out, I made sure to ask her if she'd be OK with me staying out late. She said OK, and she told me that she would have no problems sleeping knowing that I had been working so hard and seeing it for herself. But apparently it was not OK with her, AT ALL.
Starting at 3:00 AM I started getting calls from her accusing me of "gaming again" and that I needed to come home immediately, because she couldn't sleep knowing that I was not home yet. AhShitHereWeGoAgain.jpg
I told her no, I would not come home, that I was an adult now, that it was demeaning for her to treat me like a child by giving me a curfew and that she needed to respect my boundaries. I told her to leave me alone and hung up on her. She got so upset that she woke up my father (who I should mention does not care about me staying up late) and also forced him to call and text me multiple times to get me to come home. It made me so upset that I couldn't enjoy myself playing games anymore and decided to just walk back home.
Back at home, she dug up old and tired arguments she used way back when I was a teenager and lectured me nonstop about my shortcomings growing up. I know that I was not the perfect kid growing up, and let her know that that she was also not the perfect parent. We all have our shortcomings, but I am trying to live my best life here and I'm doing everything I can to get back on track (and eventually move out again, I can't handle this bullshit anymore). Yet she insists that she sacrificed her entire life in order to give me an opportunity to be successful and tries to guilt me for still playing video games at my age.
I'm honestly at a loss here. I think she is crazy and is in need of therapy. During a heated moment last night I asked if she received any attention as a child growing up, and she responded by saying she received NONE AT ALL and broke down into tears. I brought up how she abused my sister physically when she came home with tattoos. I told her that she has no concept of bodily autonomy. How my sister told me that after she had hit her, that she made it all about herself by telling everyone that she felt so bad about it that she tried to commit suicide with pills. I told her that this was not the behavior of a person with a healthy mental state and that she needed help, and she even agreed to go to therapy as long as we went together.
Anyways this ended up being a lot longer than I thought it was going to be,but it was nice typing all of this out. What do you guys think I should do? What happens when I start making friends again and want to hang out with them late into the night? Is she going to treat me like a child forever? I swear, sometimes I feel like I need to get out of this house ASAP.
TL;DR: Stayed out late to play video games. Mom freaks out. Got into heated argument. I'm too old for this.
Submitted June 21, 2019 at 12:00PM by ArceusDamnIt http://bit.ly/2WTdu1T
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