Living With Parents - Is It A Good Decision?

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." Genesis 2:24

Filipinos have a knitted family culture, a son marries and lives with the parents still even after having children. The parents are okay with it as they don't want their children to be away from them.

I, on the other hand, had this principle that I must live away from my parents once I get married. I have seen the negative effects of living together with your parents when my sister-in-law was living with them and I don't want to experience that. True enough after our wedding, my husband and I stayed in Cebu City while my parents are in Bohol.

Fast forward to 2020 when I realized, it is hard to be far from your family when you become a first-time parent. Thus, we made efforts and spent money so we could live in Bohol together with them.

Our setup right now is that we live in the same compound but our room is separated from the main house, our room has our bath and shower as well as we have a mini kitchen but that is not furnished enough that we can cook so for meals, we have to go to the main house and we give food budget to my father in a weekly basis as well as we pay half of our electric bill too as we have bought our air-condition and we also have our computers and other gadgets.

It has been eight months since we moved here. At first, we planned to stay here until Matti is big enough but as the months go by, my husband had built his own office space, we have invested in our room's furniture, and more, we have somehow discerned that it is better to stay here instead. Aside from the investments we made, the environment here is much better compared to what we had in Cebu City.

But there are also cons to living with the parents. It is not all fun and you know why, living in a place with many personalities involved, there are indeed possibilities of conflicts and disagreements. We have to weigh the pros and cons of course and here are our points:

Sense of Responsibility

When we were still in Cebu, we pay for our bills, we budget everything, the groceries, electricity, and water usage. Today, since we live together with my parents, my younger brother, our house helper, and my cousin, plus, my other siblings would also come occasionally and spend around a week or two every month, I am having this feeling of entitlement that they must also be extra mindful of their power usage.

Every single month when the bills come and my father would tell me about the bill, I'd always ask why it's too high. Our latest bill for May was almost Php 10,000. Back in Cebu, our biggest electric bill was at Php 4000 so I ended up giving Php 4,000 only, I told my father about it and he was fine with us paying just that amount. He understands that our consumption has been huge due to the number of heads in the house who uses many of the electronics, the washing machine, of course, the television is always on because my niece would be watching her shows from morning until evening.

Sometimes, I'd feel bad when one of my siblings would use the washing machine and bring his wife's laundry from the other house to our house because they're going to just use the machine. I raised my eyebrows upon knowing it because this sibling is not even helping us with the bills and now, they use the machine for their laundry when they can wash it by hand at the other house.

I have been keeping my mouth shut about it but I felt bad. This is one of the negative things about staying with the family. It can't be avoided!

Food and Groceries

Aside from giving a weekly food budget to my father for our consumption, we also do buy groceries for Matti. Since we don't have our fridge inside our room, we share space in the refrigerator in the house kitchen.

Most of the time, the people in the house would eat some of Matti's fruits and vegetables, they'll drink his fresh milk and consume his yogurt, unsalted butter, and a lot more. I even stopped buying powdered milk and chocolate drink because I felt like they are consuming more of what we normally consume. Our supplies deplete easily, it would only take a week and the powdered milk, sugar, and all are already done, my husband doesn't even drink them!

So, I told my father about it and said it is okay not to buy anything for the house anymore if we don't consume them, as for Matti's supplies, he had assigned a section so no one can touch anything from that since it is intended for Matti.

Although I know this is right, I somehow feel bad that this has to happen. It just has to be done that way so that we would not be buying repeatedly of which causes redundant expense on our end.

Going Out

My husband and I love to go out and travel before we had Matti. When we bought our first car, we already planned that we will be having road trips now and then and would expose Matti to traveling too!

But because we live with the family, it is hard to say "no" to those who want to go with us when we tell them about our plans to visit this place for leisure, everyone just wants to be tagged along.

So, this limited us to go out, we would instead just stay in the house rather than be out with so many of us together. Going out with many people involves bigger budgeting in terms of food and gas plus, we can't fully enjoy the place because we have different personalities and likes, while one place might be a good spot for us, they'd feel the opposite and would be stating their opinions to us, questioning our choices, this happened a lot of times and I didn't like how that sounds.

That is why we have stopped going out since May, we will somehow try to go out in the next months and will be firm in stating that we are going out with just the three of us so we can fully enjoy the place and the company of just us and Matti.

Conclusion

These cons are just ones which we can deal with that's why we are still here living with the family. With the cons I mentioned above, please do understand that I also have a lot of pros and I will be sharing that in the next article.

How about you? Do you live with your parents? How is it?

xoxo,

mommy jean of momentswithmatti

Love harder than any pain you've ever felt.