CHAPTER SIX

Other Voices, Other Rooms

 

Before the Alexander Five moved into our house for the summer, they considered renting a house of their own instead. “You can’t do that!” I protested when Alexander mentioned this alternate plan on the phone. “I’m going to write a book about this experience.”

On the other end of the phone I heard—dead silence. I waited. The dead silence went on, and on. “Are you still there?” I finally said, and Alexander replied: “You’re planning to write about us? You’re writing a book about us? And you’re not even asking us if that’s okay?”

On my end of the phone there was—dead silence. I was shocked into silence by what he had to say. I had spent almost all my professional life writing about my family. And I’d never asked for permission along the way. I finally found my voice: “But I have always,” I told him, “written about my children.” To which Alexander quietly replied, “Mom, we aren’t children anymore.”

A number of follow-up conversations ensued.

We eventually agreed that though he and Marla had the right to not be written about, I’d write the book, they would read it, and if (without censoring it) they gave me permission to publish it, then and only then would I try to publish it. As I’m tapping out these sentences I still don’t know what their final word will be.

Meanwhile, I decided that I’d acquire a little perspective by talking to people who’ve done what we are doing, people who had invited (or allowed) their grown children and grandchildren to live with them. Finding families who’d been involved in these three-generation living arrangements turned out to be a lot easier than I’d expected.

Grown kids (and their kids) moved in with their parents because they were switching jobs or looking for jobs, or renovating a house or trying to find an affordable house, or saving up money. Some stayed a few weeks; some stayed for well over a year. All of the families I talked with survived the challenges of living under one roof, and everyone is still speaking to everyone else. But while some sailed smoothly through days and weeks and months of intensive togetherness, others have had a significant number of…issues.

These issues sometimes arose over differing expectations or personal habits or child-raising theories. These issues sometimes arose because when grown children move back home, their relationships with their parents are subject to change. And these issues sometimes arose as a result of the inescapable reality that some family members are going to be less accommodating, less adaptable, and significantly less lovable than others.

Surely one big reason why things are working out well with the Alexander Five is that all of them—five for five—are so easy to love.

But “lovable” is not a word that would ever cross Allison’s lips when describing the three weeks, the “truly interminable” three weeks, she has just finished spending (or, as she puts it, “enduring”) with her younger son, his wife, Gayle, and their “spoiled rotten” daughters, four and nine, who—while her son was in between jobs and Gayle was on vacation—came up to stay at her summer place in Maine.

Gayle, who works long hours at a high-priced, high-profile advertising agency, feels guilty, according to Allison, about having so little time to be with her girls. As a result, when she’s with them, their time together must be wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, which translates, Allison says, into “no limits, nothing expected, nothing denied.” They never say “thank you”; they call their parents rude names; they eat whatever, whenever, wherever they please. And, as Allison documents, they respond to even the smallest disappointment by throwing extremely loud and lingering tantrums.

“You cut my toast in squares and I wanted triangles.”

Gayle says she’s sorry and toasts a new piece of bread.

It isn’t as good as the first piece. Daughter has tantrum.

“I told you my yellow sweater and you brought me this stupid ugly striped one instead.”

Gayle says she’s sorry, runs upstairs, and brings down the yellow sweater.

Too little and too late. Daughter has tantrum.

“You promised we’d go on a picnic today, but it’s raining and now we can’t.”

Gayle says she’s sorry for making it rain and proposes an indoor picnic.

Both daughters have tantrums.

Though Allison has long been aware of Gayle’s permissiveness and her granddaughters’ brattiness, she had never before been exposed to twenty-one days of what seemed to her—and sounds to me—like a cross between Lord of the Flies and Sartre’s No Exit. During this time, however, she expressed almost no disapproval because, she explains, “It wouldn’t be warmly received.” She also says, “I wouldn’t admit this to everyone. But I really don’t love—I don’t even like—my grandchildren.”

Allison says she managed to remain sane and nonconfrontational because she kept her eyes on the prize—family peace; and because she kept reminding herself that in three weeks…two weeks…one week she would be rid of them; and because she kept phoning her women friends to wail into their sympathetic ears, “You’ll never believe what Gayle let the kids do today.” She is hoping that now that the families are living apart and on opposite coasts, distance will restore her grandmotherly feelings. But she says she won’t be sharing her house with her son, his wife, and their children anytime soon. Or in the foreseeable future. Or maybe ever.

Allison’s is by far the worst of the stories I’ve been hearing about various three-generational living arrangements. Sharon’s is definitely among the best, especially when you consider that she and her husband spent an astonishing seventeen months opening their house to their son and daughter-in-law, both of them radiologists, and their three little grandchildren, plus a sleep-in nanny. This household of six has just recently returned to their own home, following the completion of an ambitious renovation that lasted twice as long as had been expected.

Getting the chance to “really know” her daughter-in-law, drinking a morning coffee with her son, being greeted at night by a joyful, “Sharie is home! Sharie is home!” from her grandchildren, Sharon says she loved virtually every minute of the time they spent together. And although she grants that “seventeen months less three days” is a significant spell of togetherness, she says there are many good reasons why it went smoothly.

She explains that, unlike Milton and me, neither she nor her husband works at home, and that they tend to dine out several nights of the week, and that along with the nanny there was also a full-time housekeeper as well as a lady who came to clean every Tuesday, and that they had a country house where she and her husband retreated, alone, many weekends. Plus, “I never changed a diaper, I never drove a car pool, I never had any real responsibility.”

With a lot of paid help and their often separate routines, the two families managed to do very well together. But Sharon points out that one important secret of their success was that these arrangements didn’t have to work, that if things didn’t seem to be going too great, her son and his wife and his family—without any rancor—would find themselves a place to rent, and move out. “We just would have kissed them,” says Sharon, “and said good-bye.”

I am dazzled by Sharon’s attitude. So mature! So self-possessed! So…unimaginable. Just thinking about it, I’m breaking into a sweat. Because if, God forbid, our living arrangements start unraveling and if, God forbid, it’s decided—either by us or by the Alexander Five—that it would be better for all if they moved somewhere else, their moving out (no matter how lacking in rancor) would (in my opinion) prove to me and to the world that I was an utter failure as a grandmother, mother, and mother-in-law, as well as a woman and hostess and human being.

Sharon, however, experienced no such angst. Nor did she experience any difficulties. Now that her family is gone, she says, there may be some floors to refinish, some furniture to recover, some rooms to repaint, but such repairs belong in the no-big-deal category. The only real mishap that she can recall has to do with the leftovers scraped from everyone’s dinner plates and stored in a plastic container for her two dogs and devoured instead by her son when he came home from work that evening, late and hungry. “My son ate the dog food,” she cheerfully says. No big deal.

Another reason, says Sharon, that the house-sharing went so well was that all the adults respected each other’s boundaries, accepting the fact that each family unit needed, although (or because) they were living together, plenty of opportunities for separateness. In other such households, however, that respect and acceptance were sometimes harder to come by.

One woman I talked with admits that her feelings were always being hurt when her children took her grandchildren out for pizza and a movie and didn’t invite her. And another woman had already grabbed her jacket and her purse before it became quite clear to her, as her kids and their kids were heading out the door, that no one had actually asked her to come along. After hearing these women’s stories I’ve been uneasily recalling a couple of evenings when Alexander and Marla, all their children finally asleep, sat in our kitchen chatting and drinking a beer. And then I’d walk in with Milton, and without (now that I’m thinking about it) being in any way encouraged to do so, we’d sit ourselves down and join their (now that I’m thinking about it) private conversation. Sorry, guys.

While different grandparents have differed in how to handle the issue of sufficient separateness, every one of us took the same “don’t look, don’t see” position regarding the quarters our children and grandchildren occupied. Top floor, basement, wherever they were located, we all agreed that the state of the rooms in which our families slept and stored their stuff was best—for the sake of our psyches and maybe even our digestions—left unviewed. I’m told that one fastidious woman, ignoring this sensible rule and opening a few doors she should never have opened, almost collapsed with shock before she fled the premises screaming, “The horror! The horror!”

Okay, so perhaps there’s a little creative exaggeration here. But just a little.

What I’ve usually heard from women who, like me, have housed their children and their grandchildren, was that the issue of messiness only became a big problem when it took over—when, in other words, the mess had migrated out of the visiting family’s sleeping quarters and started expanding throughout the rest of the house. I’ve been noticing that whenever the matter of this expanding messiness is discussed, some heartfelt variation of the phrase, “It made me crazy,” occurs with great frequency. In Susan’s case it continues to make her crazy.

“I look around,” says Sue, “and the kids are dumping their things in the hall, and tossing their things on the chairs, and throwing their things on the rug, and putting their drinking glasses down on the nearest available table and just leaving them there. And they’re all, their parents included, completely oblivious.”

Sue also says, “If it was my daughter staying here, I wouldn’t be having a problem saying, ‘Pick up!’ But I’m careful, very careful, about what I say to my daughter-in-law. I’m scared not to be careful.”

So why doesn’t Sue complain to her son? I already know the answer. Because she’s convinced (and she’s right) that when he gets into bed that night he will tell his wife, and that then his wife (no matter how nicely it’s put) will feel she’s been viciously attacked, and that then she’ll deeply resent (and maybe never forgive) her mother-in-law for sneaking behind her back and saying bad things about her, and…And Sue, like long-suffering Allison, wants to keep peace in the family, which she won’t if there is trouble with her daughter-in-law. Instead, she has decided that since the family will only be there for a couple of months, she will shut up—and pick up.

Because I don’t have daughters I can’t tell if I’d treat them differently from my daughters-in-law on the grounds that, as one woman put it, “I’ve bossed them around their entire lives and they are used to it.” Isabel, however, has never developed the habit of suffering in silence, especially during the year that she and her husband shared their house with their newly divorced daughter, Wendy, and her twin sons.

That year was a tough one for Isabel because, unlike Alexander, who insists on his adult prerogatives and firmly resists my motherly ministrations, Wendy was all too eager to be taken care of. “She was trying to build up a nest egg so she could get a place of her own,” Isabel tells me. “This meant she was working at a couple of jobs.” And because she was running from job to job it fell to Isabel (who still worked full-time) and her husband (who had recently retired) to cook, clean, do the laundry, drive the car pool, help with the homework—deal with everything.

“My daughter was a spoiled only child, and as soon as she came back home, she wanted to be a spoiled only child again. I know she was working hard but I thought she could have helped more than she did with the kids and the housework.” She let Wendy know what she thought, but nothing much changed.

Then one day Isabel lost it. “Am I going to have to die,” she asked her daughter, “before you finally get your act together?” Wendy, who—without rancor, I’m told—soon thereafter moved to her own apartment, seems to be finally getting her act together.

“I’m proud of her,” says Isabel, then adds, “and I was glad to see her go.”

Audrey, a widow, would also be glad if her daughter and her daughter’s family would go, but unless she gives them a shove it’s unlikely to happen. For their original two-month stay has expanded into a year and a half and is looking a lot like a permanent arrangement. It’s not that her house can’t accommodate this extra family of three, including a son-in-law whose start-up business seems to be starting up very slowly and an almost-five-year-old granddaughter Audrey adores. But Audrey isn’t quite sure if she’s simply being a loving, supportive mother or what one of her friends is calling an “enabler,” as in enabling her daughter—who could be working and earning some money, enough to help to pay for a place of their own—to instead take this and that and the other course in graduate school while deciding what to be when she grows up.

In addition to the enabler issue—which Audrey would never discuss with a daughter she says is “sensitive to rejection”—Audrey has the issue of her beau, a serious beau who has long been ready to move into Audrey’s house, but only if the daughter and family move out. Audrey has come to realize that the only way they’ll move out is if she asks them to, though she frets, “What will they do if I pull the plug?” Nevertheless, she is bracing herself to suggest that they think about making other arrangements, though she fears that this conversation, because of her daughter’s sensitivity, will not go well. She is also bracing herself for some bad-mother guilt.

Another woman wonders whether perhaps she should have been more attentive and helpful during the months her son and his family were living with her. Her daughter-in-law’s own mother lives abroad and rarely comes to the States to visit, but “I know she is convinced that if her mother lived near by she’d be the most devoted, perfect grandmother. I guess she was hoping that that’s what I’d be, but I wasn’t—I was always disappointing her.” And, she adds, “I was always feeling guilty.”

When you’re dealing with children and grandchildren there are always opportunities to feel guilty.

The main thing I’m feeling guilty about, during this time with the Alexander Five, is that we’ve never yet offered—and we probably never will—to take care of all three grandchildren simultaneously. We thought we would. We intended to. We imagined saying to Marla and Alexander, “We’re here, and we’re staying home tonight. Go out to dinner. We’ll baby-sit the kids.” But instead, I’m sorry to say, each time we’re on the verge of proffering our services, we remember there’s three of them and just two of us. So while we’re willing to baby-sit, in any combination, two out of any three of the resident grandchildren, we can’t seem to find the courage to take on all of them.

But now that I’m turning my thoughts toward guilt, I’m comparing myself to a couple named Eric and Margaret. And I’m thinking that, compared to them, I probably am guilty of insufficiently loving my children and grandchildren.

For, as Eric explains it, when their daughter and her husband left Atlanta and came with their two children to live with him and his wife in Arlington, Virginia, everyone was comfortable with the fact that this was an open-ended stay, comfortable with the fact that it might take them several months before they found interesting work and affordable housing. But after Nora and Randy had finally settled into good jobs, and after half a year of remarkably easy and satisfying two-household togetherness, all of the grown-ups agreed that they wished to keep on doing what they were doing—indefinitely. Or, as Eric puts it, “Margaret and I would have been truly disappointed if Nora and Randy had wanted to move out.”

As I think I’ve already made clear, I too would certainly be disappointed—indeed humiliated—if Alexander and Marla packed up our grandchildren and their stuff and decided to move out of our house prematurely. But Eric, setting a far higher standard for familial harmony, was telling me that he and Margaret didn’t want their family moving out ever. Nor, it seems, in the year since they have made this two-household living arrangement permanent, has he or Margaret or Nora or Randy showed the slightest sign of changing their minds.

Indeed, these two married couples, plus a now four-year-old and a six-year-old, are delighted with their extended-family unit, sharing a kitchen and living room, eating most of their breakfasts and dinners together, and dividing up the cooking and cleaning and shopping and other chores—as well as each couple’s financial obligations—with what I’ve been assured is zero acrimony.

“We all like being together,” says Eric. “We all like connecting on a regular basis. We call what we’re doing our PIGL, our Project for Intergenerational Living.”

Why is this working? I ask. Eric replies that he and Margaret are quite tolerant of “the chaos and confusion” that accompanies their two-family living venture. He tells me that he’s always been—and that Margaret now feels this way too—an “enthusiastic extended-family person, welcoming it, reveling in it, convinced that this is the way life ought to be.” He also concedes that a lot of folks, including some very good friends, think that he’s nuts.

I might be among the folks who think that he’s nuts. On the other hand, I might have to conclude that he’s just a far far finer person than I.

Whose house is it? I ask. Eric replies that he and Margaret are the owners, “but we try to make them feel that it’s their house too.” Who raises the kids? I ask. Eric replies that Nora and Randy are raising the children, “and we don’t comment or tell them what to do.” How much freedom, I ask, have you relinquished? “No more,” he says, “than we’re willing to give up.” And what about control? I ask. Don’t conflicts ever erupt over who calls the shots or which paintings should hang on the walls? The answer he gives me is hovering between rarely and not at all. For it seems that none of the four of them—in contrast, for instance, to me—is struggling much with issues of control.

I’m feeling humbled. I’m feeling inadequate. And because, as I think about it, it’s becoming increasingly clear that I’ll never be as generous, tolerant, openhearted, or nice as Eric and Margaret, I definitely am also feeling guilty. For though Milton and I are happy—are, in fact, thrilled—to have this precious opportunity to share our house with the Alexander Five, a big part of what makes us happy and thrilled is that this two-family living arrangement is temporary.

But before I get any guiltier, I probably ought to remind myself that Marla and Alexander want to move out of here as quickly as they can. Like us, they view this living arrangement as temporary. Like us, they aren’t into overdoing this extended-family thing. Like us, though they doubtless appreciate the pleasures that sharing a household together can bring, they’re also prepared to say, “Enough already.” They want their own space. They want their own stuff. They want their own routine. They want to decide which paintings should hang on the walls. Maybe they want to show up for breakfast in their underwear. Maybe they want to show up in nothing at all. But whatever they want, and no matter how well our arrangements seem to be working, they have no wish to prolong any longer than absolutely necessary our adventures in intergenerational living.

And much as we adore them (and much as both of us want to believe that they adore us) we would like them to know that this doesn’t hurt our feelings.