A long piece in the online mag Fusion has detailed the latest dispatch from the frontline of millennial woe. It profiled a residential facility in the US called Yellowbrick that was quite expensive and treated young people who had psychological conditions of varying levels of seriousness, one of which was a “failure to launch”. They were kids who just couldn’t grow up.
It told the story of in-patient Sean, who’d been a promising student but got stuck and ended up living in his parents’ basement when he was 30, delivering pizza and doing heroin. At Yellowbrick, his treatment included learning a variety of life skills, such a keeping house and paying bills. It’s a powerful and thoughtful investigation but readers from the older generations – 30 and over – may have found themselves reading it with a measure of jaundice, even disdain. Just grow up, hey.
Except I didn’t. I didn’t because I had just had a fight with my mum about my untidy bedroom. My untidy bedroom. I am much older than Sean.
I had been at my parents’ house at the weekend, straight from the airport where I had been in Asia for a couple of weeks. In my suitcase were bits: business cards, packets of … stuff … clothes, books, bits, shoes, loose socks, some melted chocolate, sand.
In the middle of night, suddenly feeling cold – the only place where there was blanket was under the open suitcase, so I dragged the blanket off without removing the case, and the suitcase’s contents were tossed everywhere, drifting up into the night, then falling again, like a tickertape parade. I went to sleep – warm under my second blanket.
The next day I went to the beach – picking various components of swimwear from where they had landed on the floor and other nearby surfaces, stepped over the rest and carried on.
The effect could be adequately described as a scattering of debris.
When I returned from the beach there had been a shift in temperature. I could sense it. I was about to get in trouble. Every child, no matter how old, can feel it, and braces against it. Each child, no matter how old, can never really shake the feeling that they are about to get in trouble with their parent, particularly if the grievance is ancient – and speaks to character.
Mine: my fatal flaw since I had little hands to throw things.
I find it difficult to be tidy. I’ll start cleaning but, when I am almost done or part of the way there, it’s as if some sickness comes upon me. I feel weak and fatigued. My limbs get heavy. Finishing the job seems impossible. And what does it matter? It will only get messy again. So I stop and rest and then never return to the task.
I say all this to them and invoke Sisyphus, but it doesn’t wash. And just like Sisyphus, the argument reoccurs. It is the argument of a lifetime.
How frustrating it must be to be the older parents and have the same goddamn fight for decades. Why can your child do a cryptic crossword or cite and apply a privy council decision from 1927 about easements but struggle to fold a T-shirt or pick up a towel? Is it really that much to ask your child to keep their room tidy (and not even their room, but the guest room, in the parent’s house)? Engaging in such a prolonged battle can make one feel very young and very old at the same time.
I’d seen them around the traps – on holidays or out for dinner. Elderly parents with their crinkly children in their 50s or 60s, everyone enjoying themselves then a word is said, or a look – and time stops or reverses in an instant. You just know some ancient battle has been revived. The 50-year-old “child” sticks their bottom lip out; the octogenarian parent flashes their eyes in that look. They are not in the restaurant anymore – they are in Balwyn at the dinner table poring over the school report card and its 1968 and even to breathe feels dangerous.
Catching such an unguarded moment would be comical if it didn’t contain so much heat and history. But as Tim Winton once wrote: “The past is in us, not behind us. Nothing is ever over.”
So here I was: I was six again, I was 12, I was 24 again, I was 32 – it was always the same. We were getting older, and this argument probably looked ridiculous – but here we were again, doomed to be always locked on to this eternal question: Why couldn’t I be more tidy? Why? Why? Why can’t I iron a shirt? Why can’t I put the cover on a doona? (I have a phobia of suffocating.) Why can’t I stack a dishwasher? (Although I can wash dishes – particularly if they are small, and not pots or pans.) Why can’t I fold sheets?
I couldn’t even put my contact lens in! Just that morning my father had to make an emergency dash to the optometrist with me hand over face in the passenger seat, as a lens had split in my eye and then a rogue, torn half disappeared up into my eyelid, causing swelling and weeping.
I returned with my bad eye – puffy with dye and bloodshot, like I’d just had a massive pull from a bong – to my untidy room and the feeling of “failure to launch” hanging heavy in the air. Would Yellowbrick take me on or was I too old? Was I afflicted with the character traits of a slovenly teenage boy or was I merely – and this was the worst – lazy?
Radio daze
These days the broadsheets being delivered on the front porch are in danger of being mistaken for catalogues. Who hasn’t spent a Saturday with your favourite paper spread out before you, wondering if they forgot to deliver a bit, only to realise with great sadness that the paper is thinning. Sections disappear, the news pages shrink, magazines once produced in high-quality paper stock now feel rough.
It’s depressing – but at least there’s RN.
I don’t have a TV, so Radio National is my main form of entertainment and one of my main sources of news. To hear that bits are being lopped off it – particularly the lovely music bits that provide a respite from comment and talk, makes me feel heartsick.
The broadsheets are shrinking because of economic woes. I’m not sure what rationale the public broadcaster has to make such cuts. Are the savings of getting rid of such shows really going to be that great? I can’t imagine.
PocketDocs, Soundproof and Earshot – you will be missed.
