h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

when and how did you leave home, was it to work, to travel...? How was it all?
What about your parents, did they take it easily?


a long story short: at fourteen I left home to work, no problem with parents, actually it was one of the alternatives they suggested since they couldn´t afford my studies. Later... I studied, and worked, and studied... and so on until now.

I was at home until after A- levels, then moved away to university to study.... perioidicallylly coming back for summer hols etc, and lived back at the parental home for nearly a year, after finishing studying, before moving out.... it all just happened as a natural progression of things I think... I guess felt a bit strange in the early years, but then one just adjusts to the new normal...

Left home at 16 to join the Royal Navy. I would like to say I ran away to sea, but my parents drove me to the train station.

I escaped to university at 18 and never really went back. My parents had been very supportive most of the time, but this changed later (about 40 years ago)after which I never went "home"

It was a very mentally and physically abusive place for 4 of the 6 kids. One was thrown out at 16, I left in a blizzard at 17 and didn't return for nearly 8 years ...

After I graduated form college, I sat in my parents' house for some months, looking over employment and advanced education options. Finally, I worked out a plan to get a graduate degree in Boston. My mother arranged for me to stay in a rooming house in Brookline, run by a family friend. My first semester started the following January. By May, I had a part-time job, so I could pay my minimal rent [my other had been paying it at first]. After that, I was self-supporting, not just with rent and food, but also with tuition payments.

As soon as I went to uni my mum sold the house and 'helpfully' sold off some of my stuff, including all my Lego. She'd gone on holiday to Turkey and came back and said she was moving there, which was a bit of a shock. After I'd found out that she was getting rid of everything I managed to persuade her to delay just long enough to give me a chance to pack up and put my things in storage.

<BB<

I didn't, really.


I went away for three years to university. My first job after school didn't pay enough for both a car and an apartment, so I bought a cheap Subaru (2 of 3) and moved into the garage apartment. Back in the '80s, we built a garage apartment for my grandmother so she could move down from W. Virginia. (She died when I graduated college.) So I commuted 75 miles/day to work in Houston. After a couple of job swaps and paying off the car I moved into a very cheap apartment near work. Then after just a couple of years, I got fed up with that job and got one 10 miles from my parents home. After a few months of commuting in the opposite direction, I moved back to the "family compound". Now my parents are elderly and my dad is in nearly constant pain and can barely walk for more than 5 minutes at a go, so I just can't move away now.

Further education at 18,got my qualifications and before I started my first teaching post I got married and left home for good at 21.

However I now live in the parental home which I purchased when I was 24 as my mother was remarrying..

" my mum sold the house and 'helpfully' sold off some of my stuff, including all my Lego ." [Bluebottle]

Even the lego A'tuin Discworld?

https://ideas.lego.com/projects/36302

Sorry,

http://ideas.lego.com/projects/36302

paul, that's brilliant!

I left my parents' home just before my 21st birthday for my own apartment. I didn't go to uni, but was working full time, and my apartment was only about a mile away from my parents' house. I was out for a little over a year before I had to move back in, and was another year or so before I moved out again for good.

My dad liked to joke that they got to see me more often after I moved out because I showed up nearly every day at dinnertime .

And similar to me, broe jr turned 21 this summer and is still at home. Not currently going to school, but working full time hours and playing in a band. I'm not in a particular hurry for him to leave, but I have told him once he goes he has to stay gone, but only because the house is so small that as soon as he leaves the room he is in will immediately be used for something else.

I wonder what you'll use it for.

Suggestions/guesses: Sewing room, gymnasium, dungeon , library , aquarium , dragon storage , portal , woodshop, jewelry making , walk in freezer , wine "cellar" , safe room, escape room, garage, nursery, game room, vault...

I found the eviction of another brother from the parental home a bit amusing . . . He was the woosiest of the lot, and despite her despisal of me - the mother creature told him "if that worthless piece of scat can make it, so can you!". He was already 19, done school and doing nothing.

The only one that stayed beyond that was the youngest - the 2nd child they always wanted.

My 21st birthday was alone in a pub in Newfoundland, already having close on 4 years of military time under my belt. Well, not really alone - - - the regular bar chaps found out it was my birthday, and got me pickled.

Pickled? That's why you're so well-preserved.

My parents never discouraged me from going abroad, and after a year's secretarial course, following A-levels (don't ask why I didn't go to university, my own fault), I left for Germany.

The Grammar school I had been to was pretty small and only had room and resources for one foreign language - French, which I did pretty well at. So the obvious thing to do was more languages. Further education didn't cater for people starting German from scratch, so I came to Germany to au pair. That was 1973 and I'm still here.

I did go back to live with my parents for a short while in 1975, as I wanted to get some work experience in England, but I couldn't stand living under the same roof as my father any more, and for most of that year, I shared houses in Cambridge with students and other office workers. I did pop home on the train at the weekends though, to get washing done and some decent food.

So, summarising - left home a year after leaving school and since then have spent only a few months there. No problems with parents on either count.

My own kids left home to go to University pretty soon after finishing school. But even the eldest who is married with a child and lives in America still has a few boxes in his room which he will (hopefully) re-claim in a few years.

The middle one has cleared out most of his stuff, just leaving a few tee-shirts and underpants which come in useful when he comes to stay, and the little one still has everything in his room, and I wish he'd clear it up a bit.