Experimenting With Multi-Generational Living

My Mom and Edith and I spent all day today driving around looking at houses, because my parents and I are looking to buy a house here together. This was my idea, and I want to do it for a few reasons: mostly, I want Edith to have as many people around her who love her as possible. I want my parents and Edith to have a lot of time together (and I want to have time with them, too). Also, my parents have been looking to move here from Tennessee for a couple of years now, and it’s not really affordable at the moment, because the Austin housing market is insane (like over 90 competing offers on a house near me in one weekend insane).

Finally, and possibly most importantly, I am incredibly anxious about what is happening with the climate, and after everything that happened in 2020, I just want my entire family to be under one roof in one location. I don’t know that this will help me feel much better about things; I will still be anxious. But it will help me feel a tad bit more in control. Every time I see a news item about the climate lately (which is daily! So much shit is happening!) I feel this pressing urgency to do this as quickly as possible. I know this isn’t a logical response: I cannot control what’s happening and I can’t really even handle my own fear, so I’ve seized on getting my parents here as something that I can actually focus on and affect, and I have sort of told myself I don’t have to worry about the broader issue until that’s taken care of.

Anyway, I’m posting about all of this just to share that I saw a pretentious white lady blogger whose family is currently fleeing San Francisco and moving back in with her parents refer to their move as “experimenting with multi-generational living.” She wasn’t even making fun of herself! She really deadass said that! I could not stop laughing, and I think of it multiple times a day as we’re going about this. I have “experimented with multi-generational living” several times throughout my life when I was unemployed and at loose ends. I imagine that if things keep going the way they are now, all of our children will be “experimenting with multi-generational living” until they are 30 and perhaps permanently.