What happens when you go from college to a curfew

You just get home from college, so naturally you are still in what has become the normal routine of staying out as long as you’d like because you make your own rules.

You don’t have a care in the world and aren’t worried at all about checking in or coming home anytime soon. You are having loads of fun out on the town, bending some laws here and there. But hey, these are your golden years where you are invincible and no one can touch you.

That is, except your parents.

Now you are home and in their minds you are still a helpless child. So here’s what really happens when you come home to a curfew.

When your mother lays down the rules

You and the squad are reunited and hitting the town, reminiscing with old friends and making new ones. This is what adulthood is really about- staying out till the sun comes up and making memories to look back on later.

Then you get the dreaded text from your mom. The one that brings you back to reality and sends a bout of rage as you remember that you are expected home early. You are not an adult, you are a child and though you were in college five minutes ago, you are back to ‘my house, my rules’ ethics.

That means in the midst of your festivities, you have to haul ass back home before your mom either buries you in the ground or decides to call the cops.

When there are time consuming problems

Naturally, when your mom calls you home, you have to go home (sigh).

The problem is you do not want to go home at all and there is a surge on Uber, so there is an added price to pay. You wait five minutes, check back, now the price is even higher. You quickly switch to your handy dandy Lyft app because it is usually cheaper, but unfortunately, you’re wrong.

You decide you just have to suck it up and pay the charge. Then of course, more bad things happen, like the ride cancels or the driver goes the exact speed limit and you can literally feel time standing still. You can envision your mom and the growing rage that is building in her. And you feel the growing rage inside yourself where if you could have just waited another hour, maybe the charge would be lower and the driver faster.

Alas, nothing really ever goes smoothly in these situations.

When you get fed up with the rules

You finally get home after the night of fun and have to go and face the music.

Because you’re an adult now, you are highly capable of having a civilized conversation without throwing a tantrum. What you forget is that you may have changed, but mother is the same irrational human being that was there when you left for college.

You try to have a conversation and she cuts you off. You get fed up with trying to get the clear point across that you are an adult and are capable of living your own life safely and responsibly. But all your mother hears is ‘I want to go out with my friends and drink and do drugs.’ You regress back to your more irrational teenage years and slam the door.

Nothing gets done. Everyone is now upset.

Your mother is not swayed in the least that you have grown up at all. But slamming that door did feel really good, didn’t it?

When you purposely break the rules

Everyone has a limit to just how much they can take.

After pleading with your mother, trying to convince her or anyone else who will listen that you are indeed an adult, you realize that it is as if you are talking to a brick wall.

You are fed up with all these curfews and all these rules that you don’t even follow in college.

You decide to ignore that curfew text and totally disregard curfew as a whole. You live in the moment and say ‘To hell with tomorrow, I’m living for right now.’ When you finally get home, you realize you have to suck it up and face the punishment. But you’re still living on the euphoric high from being liberated the night before so you don’t even care how much trouble you have gotten yourself into.

When you say you’re sleeping over just so you can stay out longer

This is actually a method I found to work nine out of ten times.

In order to prevent an early night, just say that you are sleeping over at your friend’s house, who is going to be conveniently with you at the party. You technically are not lying to anyone because at some point in the night, you will go somewhere to sleep and as long as it’s your friend’s house or you are with your friend, you are lie free.

Disclaimer- This only works if you tell her before you go out. If you tell her after you go out or if she knows you are visiting a boy, then all bets are off and she will have a conniption if you even bring up sleeping over. And don’t even mention the fact that you may or may not frequently sleepover in college because that will make it worse.

When your mother gets paranoid

Sometimes you actually wonder if your mother is psychotic because even if you haven’t done anything wrong, she finds something to blow out of proportion.

For example, you’ll be at work with your work chums and will be back when you get off the clock. The problem is that your mother, for some odd reason, thinks you aren’t actually at work until two or three in the morning. Maybe she thinks that this is the moment that you are going to sneak out with your friends. She immediately calls the cops and drives around thinking you are a lost puppy – only to find you at home at the time you said you would be home, wondering why she is acting off her rocker.

When you think you’re an adult but realize you still need your mom

Even after all of this back and forth with your curfew and how much of an adult you really are, you still realize how much help you need from your mother. Making doctor and dentist appointments are still beyond our abilities as young adults.

Maybe if we show our parents that we can do basic things for ourselves, they will take us more seriously.

The moral of the story is be a little bit of a rebel, but don’t forget who takes care of you when you really need it.