Family battlegrounds

Being back in the mothership is nice. I'm on vacation mode, which consists of sleeping in, eating out and staying up late. You may call it jetlag, I call it being home. It's a generally pretty awesome way to be.

Sometimes, however, the pleasantness is interrupted by the fact that every single member of my family is a person of strong opinions. Staying true to all things Bulgarian, we are very much involved in each other's business and for one reason or another, feel like we have the right and authority to give advice regardless of what the issue is. On top of that, we are all extremely verbal people: talking is what we do best. None of that ever used to be an issue when we lived together. Now that my sister and I have been away from home for a while, we are starting to bump heads a bit more than usual. I, for example, have been away for seven years. I've got my own personal agenda with all kinds of weird personal habits that, for better or worse, have helped me do just fine on my own. Same thing applies for my little sister, who being not so little anymore, has also developed her own little ways of doing things. In our absence, our parents have drawn new rules of the game that seem to work for them. Nothing unusual.

The problem is that we all seem to think that our own rules are clearly the ones that everybody else should follow. Needless to say, people's expectations are being vociferously disputed by the rest. All of a sudden people's dinner choices, sleep schedules, beauty routines, and reading material is up for debate. We've argued about what I need to wear to work, whether my sister should go to graduate school, how much cheese one must eat at dinner, which consulting company my dad needs to contact, what kind of birthday present we should get for my cousin who just turned 20. Important things, you know. It's been a week of a whole lot of voice-raising, door-slamming, and polite fuck-you's.

Sometimes I get really pissed off. I am old enough to take care of my shit. And I don't need to know what everybody else thinks about my stuff.

The rest of the time, however, I love it. Door-slamming included. It only shows how much we care for each other. And as much as the whole thing sometimes reminds me of a Kusturica film, it's why I came home.