When I was nine years old, my mother moved us from our grandparents’ house (where we stayed for a year after my parents split up) into a small camping trailer with her boyfriend. That’s five people in a knock-off Airstream.
The boyfriend had recently been injured in a work accident. He had a herniated disc in his back and frequent migraines. My mother worked.
So, from nine years old on, it was my responsibility to get the kids up for school (myself, brother, and sister), make breakfast, get us on the school bus, walk everyone home from the bus stop, make snacks, help with homework, make dinner, do all the house cleaning, and take care of mom’s sick boyfriend. For two of the first six months, we didn’t even have electricity, so cooking dinner included starting a campfire and cooking over a grate laid across a couple of bricks.
When we finally moved into an apartment and from then on, my duties expanded to include laundry and yardwork. By then my brother was old enough to start helping. Eventually my stepfather was healthy enough to take care of some stuff by himself, but by that point we were old enough that “chores” was a normal, expected thing.
At 17 I started working. At first it was to pay for a student loan they took out in my name to attend some bullshit trade school I didn’t want to go to (since they refused to allow me to attend college because then I would “think I was better than them”). I also paid my own car, gas, insurance, etc.
Then, behind my back, they had the whole thing paid off by his father and demanded I reimburse them up front. I refused, since the agreement my name was on had monthly payments that I had never failed to pay, and they had chosen to do that without consulting me. I was quite angry.
At one point when I was 18, I had worked for three months in a temporary position with the local government, and saved a good deal – about three thousand dollars – to get me through until another job came through. About that time, my stepfather decided he needed a truck topper for his Silverado. They asked me to put up the money until my mother’s tax return cleared in the bank, shouldn’t be more than a week.
They never paid me back, and when I brought it up they came back with the student loan thing. They left me completely broke for months.
Soon after, they started asking for rent money. I shared a bedroom with my little sister, still took care of all of the housework and took care of the kids, spent most of my time at church and was not allowed to choose my own comings and goings. I wasn’t allowed to date. I wasn’t allowed to have friends over. I wasn’t “allowed” to move out. So I said “no”. If I’m paying someone rent, I’m paying for the privilege of making my own choices and having privacy. Neither of which were benefits of the space I was occupying.
When I was 20, my parents and I got into an argument, and one of the last things out of my mother’s mouth was “And you better start paying rent or I’ll make you move out!”
The next day I made arrangements with a workmate who had been looking for a boarder anyway.
Friday evening I started packing, and I spent Saturday moving my stuff out. My mother asked me what I was doing when my car was about halfway full. She immediately launched into a diatribe about how I was “abandoning the family” (taking the one full-time income that didn’t come from disability or child support away – I did the math, and every dime of my mother’s income at that point was paying for cigarettes.) and how I would never make it on my own, and would be crawling back in a week.
Less than a month later they were asking me if they could borrow money.
My son is five. I expect him to clean his own room once a week and take care of his puppy. When he’s a little older he can start on basic housework, but my expectations for him are more academic than laborial. I don’t know how I’ll feel when he’s an adult, but I do know if he pays any rent, it will be because he has his own private space and the ability to make his own decisions about it.
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