Millennials do not return to the parental home for visits as often as the previous generation did, said a recent article in the newspapers.
I read the headline and the blurb but I did not read on, because it is a touchy subject in our home, given that we wait seemingly endlessly for our children to touch base and instead they wander the world, say “Hello” from Cape Town or Melbourne or Geneva, and leave us gasping for breath at the speed at which they transitioned from clinging to apron strings to fleeing the nest to distant destinations.
With the world wide open for travellers, young people are venturing into the unknown to build experiences and memories instead of going back repeatedly to the same old place where they grew up — but this does not mean that the two generations do not meet.
The young seem to have much deeper pockets than we did at their age and many seniors like us have counted pennies all their lives and built up a nest egg that they don’t mind using on travel to exotic places they had always wanted to visit. So, sometimes destinations and travel plans are worked out between both generations of a family and they set out on holidays together to enjoy a cruise or a relaxed week at a resort that caters to everything, without one person having to plan each meal and make sure living quarters are cleaned and cleared daily.
It seems like a dream come true — especially when we think back to all the years when “holidays” were anything but relaxing.
We would pack up and leave our bases somewhere in the north of the country and undertake a journey by road or by train over a couple of days until we finally reached “home” to our parents. (Since we could only go to one set of parents at a time, it was home for only one of us, and the other one made do and tried to be as comfortable as possible as he/she adjusted to a different set of house rules.)
Actually there were really no rules, but there were so many differences in the ways of the household that it seemed like we were always getting something wrong and messing up in little and big ways. Mealtimes were different, food habits were different, there were times we had to make sure we didn’t make too much noise, there were other times when television programmes were turned on at full volume and we had to cover our ears and make sure our children wore ear plugs to protect their delicate eardrums...
A lot to adapt to
Yes, there was a lot to adapt to in parental homes, especially since, without realising it, we had also changed our ways in our years of being on our own and then starting our own families.
But we told ourselves that we had the bonus of meeting siblings and re-creating childhood experiences and equations. We rejoiced that our children could play — or scrap — with their cousins and we convinced ourselves that all that family time was helping to build unbreakable bonds.
More often than not, of course, there was so much dissension and so many arguments that it would have been way more peaceful and relaxing to have stayed put in our own homes in the middle of nowhere, but that was not considered an option and we just went through the mill until the next time.
Looking back on all that stress for both generations, it seems that millennials are not doing so badly after all. Isn’t it easier to pack our bags and meet our children/parents away from home so that all of us can put up our feet and find peace of mind?
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
