About to go running on a bright clear sunny morning.

One week from today I'll be picking Matilda up at the airport!

Also EM is back in town so she'll come over on Monday to help get Matilda's room in order.

We'll all go out for a celebratory dinner for Matilda's return and Emmett's new job.

I've been very happy with our hybrid C-Max car. It's such a sturdy little no fuss mule of a car. But I have been tempted by the electric little Fiat. The C-Max has an old fashioned key plus fob but I feel weird about not having a car key so I'm not keen to go Full Fob.

Matilda seems to be leaning towards going to USF for college, and I really don't want her to go to school two blocks from our house.

I felt incredibly constrained by her in the eight months after her HS graduation and her going to Japan. It wasn't really living with her - she was in the Garden Apartment with her friends 90% of the time and I had to make an appointment once a week just to watch TV. So we weren't making dinner together, weren't waking up and having coffee together etc.

Which is fine - she's of an age where she should be focused on her peers and also, I'd be very happy if she was doing this off at college. But she and her friends would just waltz into our floor all the time, so I had all of the loneliness but none of the privacy or freedom that normally comes with that.

After JZ' death, and my sister and my friend Josh, I'm keenly aware that I don't want to waste the relative health I have in my sixties, nor do I want to settle into a cozy decline. I want to grow and change and I want to explore relationships.

I'm turning 64 this summer and I don't want to lose another 2 to 4 years because Matilda is stuck and failing to launch. We're going to have to have some tricky conversations about boundaries and expectations if she goes to USF.

I can't fucking imagine wanting to go to college two blocks from my house and six blocks from my high school! Jesus, I couldn't wait to get away, reinvent myself and put thousands of miles between myself and my childhood.

Off to run and think about how to broach this with her without getting mad about it.

I feel weird about not having a car key so I'm not keen to go Full Fob.

Our 2024 Corolla hybrid is fob only, and it was weird at first, but I got used to it so quickly.

our hybrid C-Max car

What? We have the same model car? How did I miss this?

Mine is a 2018. For the most part I like it a lot. My two gripes are the wide turning radius, and the big key with remote controls in the bow.

What with Covid and retirement, I haven't put many miles on it. Coming up on 40k.

I wish I could have spread my wings a little wider.(Did I have wings? Not even sure...I come back to that a lot.) But San Francisco is light-years cooler than the Phoenix suburbs, too. M. has a lot of things the rest of us want to run away to get. Am finally convinced the thyroid pills are really working. Which is a physical relief, but if I look at it another way, I went from square, say, -9, to square one again. Fucking yay. Even if I moved eight spaces.

When I went to the Pasadena F2F, my rental car was a Nissan Altima. It had fob with a fold-away key. That fit in my pocket much more comfortably than my Ford key does.

my mother...kind of picked a lot of fights with me to get me to leave. Feels like I could put quotes around that, in a sense, because at first I stayed with dad and stepmonster Would not rec either of these situations, exactly.

I was also a “get as far away from the fam as possible” college kid but I am also envious of others I know who liked their parents enough to settle down nearby (like my cousins who both live within a mile of their parents). Totally fair to have a privacy convo though.

cereal: One reason why the sitch with Dad sucked was that we were not on the same page. On some level, even though I wanted an independence life had not prepared me for, at all--I think I also thought that Dad and I could fix some unfinished business. They were kind of hoping for more the garden apartment experience(SM especially thought my having a separate entrance made her VERY cool, in a way that seemed kind of mean to me at the time...I hardly had friends, money or rides--breaking curfew wasn't a thing, right?I think they were also trying to shoehorn a decade's worth of self-reliance into ten months...it was a lot. I had a point, okay, well, basically, I'd say be clear about what you expect.say it out loud, sometimes.

I liked being where I was (DC), but it happened to be far enough away/close enough WRT to home (2 hours by train) that I really only spent holiday breaks at home, and I always spent the summers working for the Summer School and staying on campus. And yet I still managed not to grow up in ways I should have, but what can you do?

I can't fucking imagine wanting to go to college two blocks from my house and six blocks from my high school! Jesus, I couldn't wait to get away, reinvent myself and put thousands of miles between myself and my childhood.

This was me, and I've been at least a couple hours away since I was a teenager. (moved to Philly in my teens) My parents were awesome, but I needed to live elsewhere. In later years (my 40s) I bought the camp in Otter Lake next door to Mom, because with the decades came a new appreciation for being close. But that was only for summers.

I do think that part of this difference is generational. My sons would have lived home forever. Bobby lived with me until 25, even after he was married. The only way I got B Jr out of the house was to subsidize his rent and/or give him a job.

eta: I know countless parents now who have adult children that just don't want to leave. This was not the case in the 70s, at all.