I Don’t Live With My Parents; My Parents Live With Me
It’s about who controls the purse strings
My parents visit me every year for a few months. Being retired, they migrate north to avoid the scorching Pakistani summers, and pack their bags to return when the air turns frigid. When they visit Vancouver, they stay with me and my husband in our guest bedroom.
The last time they came was in February of 2020, a couple of weeks before the pandemic hit. A year later, they haven’t left. The pandemic and the abrupt, unpredictable travel restrictions have made it difficult for them to do so. Given that Pakistan is halfway around the world and the trip involves layovers in foreign countries, why take the chance?
Every time my parents visit, my Caucasian friends and colleagues bemoan the situation, commiserating with me for having to tolerate sharing a roof with my parents.
“I could never put up with living with my parents for so long”, they claim.
I, too, sometimes judge people that continue to live with their parents as adults.
In South Asian culture, this is not uncommon. In a joint family system, adult sons with families of their own reside in the parents’ home. They may occupy a separate floor to retain…
