I've lived with my mother my entire life. It has it's ups and downs. Some people say I should appreciate the situation, that she won't live forever (nor will I), things change all the time, it could all be over tomorrow. So I try to heed what they say, and focus on the positives. And there are some. In some ways, my mother provides a comforting, if overbearing, presence. The need to spread my own wings is, at this point of my life, more my reason for wanting to leave home than any annoyance at my mother.

The teenage years are so difficult, but those are far behind me now. I've lived with my mother as a working, relatively independent adult for quite a long time, but that's not the same as me living alone. There are certain things she still does not understand. Not that I have a curfew or anything (I never did, even as a teenager), but it gets very old having to run my plans by her all the time. As she is a perpetual slob, and as I'm neat to a fault, I am always picking up after her. Some people would just say leave her clutter alone, but trying to cope with that messiness would send me into a padded room. There are times when I'd rather not have my evening revolve around making and eating dinner- if I lived alone, there are times I wouldn't eat at all. She wants a lot of my attention- watching TV together and stuff is important to her. But I'm a fairly solitary person. There are many evenings, especially after working, when I simply want peace and quiet. There's little of that here. My time and space are all wrapped up with hers, and I often feel like I'm suffocating. She is home more often than ever before. When she worked down the road five days a week, the smothering existed, but was not so readily apparent to me. But now that she works at home, and I'm out of work for a little while, I feel the drain of my nerves.

I didn't choose her, or to be along for her ride. Unlike getting married, or having kids, this person being in my life was not a choice I made. That said, we mesh fairly well together. She and I have similar tastes in music, movies and TV. And I have to give my mother credit, she never tried to influence my scholastic, religious or intellectual life. Some would call that disinterest (I did, in the past), but I am thankful for it now. I pity people who never got the chance to explore their own minds, what they really believe and feel, because their parents made them too afraid to try.

No one could accuse me of being brainwashed by my mother. For example, there were no limits on what I got to watch on TV growing up- such a thing would have gone completely against my mother's liberal viewpoint. My mother made the Keatons on "Family Ties" look like members of the far right- she was that liberal. I grew up with the joy that was MTV blaring every Saturday, until the HBO movie came on at eight o'clock, that is. This was in the eighties, when cable was downright magical. And I ate it up, drank it in, like I was at a years-long feast. I simply don't know what I would have done, in my rather bleak childhood, without the escapism of cable. I had no brothers or sisters, no father, few friends. I went outside and played, don't get me wrong. I spent hours at a babysitter's house every weekday, a woman who did not have cable and wouldn't have let me watch it if she did. I listened to music on the radio, sang and danced. I played with Barbies all the time. But cable TV is what stands out in my mind as providing the true enjoyment of my childhood. Call me shallow, but it's true.

But my mother was not lax on the discipline, not at all. She ruled with an iron hand, as do many Southern parents. Her word was law. To say I feared her would be wholly accurate. She was brought up the same way, so I don't blame her for it. We didn't have it particularly easy. I didn't understand how hard it is to work full-time and have a long commute when I was a child. I resented her, and I'm sure the feeling was mutual at times. It's taken a long while to get over that resentment, and there are days, when my life isn't going well, that I still resent our life together.

But resentment is not my motivation here. For one thing, I need to test my own strength. I need to know I can make it on my own, although I'm aware that has become a cliche. I need to come home to utter silence. I need a place where the only things in it are mine. Where the only things I have to get done are what I decide to do. I have a feeling my plan for independence will not go over well with my deeply-attached mother. But I'm going for it anyway.