Curfews

I'm sure you've read, my mom died when I was 19. I moved in with my dad not long after. Dad was very old-school. He had ideas about parenting that were very specific and one of those specifics was curfew. My mom had given my sister and me a curfew, but she was a deep sleeper and so we kind of came and went as we pleased. Dad was strict and if he said you had a curfew, by God you came home by that time. This was an annoyance to me because I was in college at the time and none of my friends had a curfew, but I went along with it because I'm not a boat-rocker.

It became a huge problem, however, when I graduated college. I moved home because I didn't have a job and wasn't really sure what I was going to do with my life. I thought that things would be different with my dad because I was 21, could legally do all sorts of things, and was a college graduate ready to start really living. And then my dad informed me I had a curfew. 12 weeknights and 1 weekends. We are not specifically a religious family. We are all drinkers, my dad heavily so, and would drink together frequently, so that was not the issue. The issue was control, and the reminder of who was in charge. And that was, apparently, my dad. The feeling of being put in a box (my father's house) was so overwhelming I could stand it for only 2 months before I had saved enough money to move out. It wasn't that I didn't like my dad, because I loved him. And I could kind of understand that he, in his way, was doing it from a perspective of love. But the bottom line was that I could not breathe in such rigid constraints, and I had to get out.