Why I wish growing (up) was more like growing (down)

I’ve spent most of my teens & early 20s desperately trying to run away from my parents- away from the rules, the advice, and more importantly, their decisions. 

Now, way into (and almost on the wrong side of) my 30s, I desperately want to run to my parents for every little thing in life. The number of times I wish I could just ask them to make my decisions for me… teenage Shreya would have a huge ‘wtf’ expression on her face, reading this right now. 

But dear teenage Shreya, one day, you’ll have a never ending root canal with a thousand complications, and you’d wish your parents were the ones driving you to and from the dentist, and deciding whether you need to get an implant, or a new dentist. 

One day, you’ll need to understand taxes and investments and make decisions that will affect you when you’re retiring, which suddenly isn’t a far off age, and you’d wish someone would just tell you what to do instead.

One day, right out of college, when you go grocery shopping for the first time, you’ll realise just how expensive fruits are, and will come back to your dilapidated PG with one apple, one mango and 2 bananas, because that’s all you could afford. And you’ll have a sudden appreciation for all those times your parents tried to force feed more fruits to you.

And there will be multiple painful days when office is giving you trouble and you really wish you could ask your parents to come down and talk to your boss and somehow just sort it all out for you.

As I write this, I’m contemplating running away home for a week. 7 days of not deciding what should be made for breakfast-lunch-dinner. 7 days of cuddling between my parents the way I used to when I was a kid. 7 days of realising how different I really am from my parents, and being amused at all the similarities I can now see too (that teenage Shreya would be appalled at). 

7 days of unconditional love, which I now realise is not always the easiest thing, and find myself craving for, instead.