Sometimes it’s really hard living with your parents when they just love their jobs.
Okay so reading that back it sounds incredibly selfish, but hear me out. My dad is involved in property conveyancing in Melbourne. Just hearing the name of what he does is boring enough to put me to sleep, but he is completely in love with his job. Some may even say he’s obsessed. He devotes crazy amounts of hours to it, both at the office and when he gets home from work, endlessly regails us with boring stories about property acquisition, and points out conveyancing references in tv, movies, and any other kind of pop culture you can think of. It’s a nightmare. I’ve even caught him (just once or twice) trying to nudge me into following a career in property law. No thank you. Taking me along with you to do conveyancing in Highett is not going to make property law appeal to me more.
So even though he’s incredibly passionate about what he does, which in itself is something fantastic which we should all aspire to, it’s also very grating. There are only so many conversations I can have with him about work before I want to jump up and scream ‘STOP’ into his smiling face. A lot of the time it can also be pretty taxing to try and get a word in edgeways. It’s always ‘work this’ and ‘work that’, never ‘oh hi Mel how was school today?’ It can be a really suffocating environment, where my personality is boxed out of the way to make room for dad’s property talk. Just once, I’d love it if my interests could be the topic of our dinner conversations. Maybe the French Revolution is a boring topic to listen about, but surely my family could suffer through just one night of it, for my sake?