How to host your parents as an adult

After successfully surviving another day at work (yay!), you pop a quick-bake double margherita into the oven and grab a can of Diet Coke – the perfect high-on-carbs treat for some well deserved me time. As usual, the kitchen smells like burnt pecans from that one time last year when you baked pecan pie, and the nuts spilled onto the bottom of the oven. You make a mental note to clean it next weekend, same as you have for the last seven months, but hey, life is hard and we can’t catch ‘em all so don’t sweat it.

Sprawled on the sofa, you wait for the oven timer to go off while revenge scrolling on Reddit. From the corner of your eye, you spot a little spider web building near the window, but does it even exist if you don’t acknowledge it? Back to that subred! Din-din’s ready in 20, give yourself a pat on the back for “cooking”, and rinse and repeat for the next week. Life is not bad, in fact it’s pretty good – there’s even extra toilet paper and garbage bags in the storage. Who says living away from home is hard?

This blissful denial rings true until that fateful day when the parents decide to come by. Maybe it’s someone’s birthday or a wedding and your flatshare is right around the corner. Maybe they just want to see how their little pumpkin is living, no, thriving on their own. Maybe they want to taste all that delicious, rich in fibre, healthy food you’ve been claiming to cook. Maybe they’re going to find all that undone laundry shoved under your bed and say “pack your bags, we’re going home”. Maybe they’re going to see the bathroom light flicker and say, “you should have learnt how to change a bulb when I told you.”

Okay, breathe. It’s not as bad as it sounds. They don’t have to know that you don’t have fresh fruit or milk in your fridge, or that your cactus died two months ago and you forgot to throw out the carcass. If they never see it, they will never know ("no face, no case" as they say). It’s truly all about the presentation and if there’s one thing young people excel in, it’s ~ curation ~. Just place all the right things before their eyes and they’ll not only believe, but also congratulate you, for being a fully functioning adult.

Bring out a vase with sweet-smelling flowers; only real grown-ups have the time to change the water every two days and nip off the droopy buds. Also pin a faux grocery list to the fridge door and scribble all sorts of veggies on there, extra points for spinach and kale. To help you on this journey of make-belief, we’ve curated a list full of beautiful (and unsuspicious) things that scream adulting. Happy shapeshifting!

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