Living with my mother, we get free child care and help with expenses. But all those perks come at a cost
Now that I live with my mom, my favorite way to communicate with her is texting. Those days we’re pretty much face to face. His first messages come in the morning, before dawn, when he hears my heavy footsteps from his suite on the ground floor of our Vancouver Special, a mainstay of the city’s residential neighborhoods. Once boxy and simple, the architectural equivalent of a Honda. Element, Vancouver’s specialty products are now touted for their ability to accommodate two homes, one on each lot. I’m in the kitchen, preparing school lunch for my eight-year-old son, when my phone rings and my mom orders me breakfast. .
Until she underwent dialysis at the end of 2022, my widowed mother, then seventy-one, managed to be active and sedentary; Luckily, she drove her van to her appointments, picked up my daughter from school, and participated in Mahjong nights. This arrangement had been very helpful to us as we all moved in together in 2021, a resolution that was made with my wife’s approval. My mother had been alone since my brother got married and moved, just before the COVID-19 pandemic.
In early 2023, dialysis, new medications, and an injury left her on her back for most of the day. My brother and I took her to hospital appointments and blood tests that seemed scheduled to fit our workday. We put up with their complaints and requests 24 hours a day at the bedside of my brother, who lives a few minutes from here with his wife and in-laws, in a more stoic way than I do. While my mother was off duty, my wife and I took care of picking up the school and getting her ready. Meals.
From the outside, we are enacting the best practices of urban family resource management. With rising housing costs and changing demographics, multigenerational living has finally gained social acceptance. Advocates trumpet its economic and emotional benefits.
Despite being so on trend, I don’t feel especially cool living with my mom. And even an hour from sunrise, I’m already exhausted.
Multigenerational living, according to a 2019 United Nations report, is a norm for older people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Some scholars argue that in the United States and Britain, the nuclear family is a new phenomenon that emerged when industrialization divided extended families and drove them from their farms to cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Elsewhere, this substitution never occurred. The U. N. report shows that more than 90 percent of older people live with their families in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In Canada, there are about 442,000 multigenerational households, according to the 2021 census, a figure that has increased by about 50 per cent since 2001. This figure would increase even more if we expanded the concept of multigenerational living to include families. live on adjacent properties, such as street houses. Last January, the Trudeau government began providing multigenerational tax credits for home renovations with an estimated charge of $44 million over the next five years. That month, a headline in the Globe and Mail proclaimed that “2023 is shaping up to be the year of the multifamily house. “The trend line is transparent and there is possibly no turning back.
The reasons for that trend, at least in Canada, are multifaceted: an aging population and rising life expectancy, increasing housing costs, and shifts in the country’s cultural composition. Multigenerational households are more likely to be found among immigrant and Indigenous communities. In Nunavut, for example, 13.5 percent of all households are multigenerational.
In suburbs with gigantic immigrant populations like Surrey, British Columbia and Brampton, Ontario, oversized homes built for extended families have been called “monster spaces. “A boisterous missive sent to the province in 2009 described Surrey’s monstrous houses as “monsters”. ArrayArray riddled with trash and many cars in the driveway and on the street. In the face of a similar outcry, some Canadian cities have cracked down on “illegal suites” and reduced the maximum floor area allowed in residential neighborhoods. A middle-aged friend of mine who grew up in East Vancouver recalled that his family didn’t have cable in the space for a while because their service provider decided that the cable splitter they used to share their TV signal with their grandparents opposed corporate policy.
But the decision to share a roof is now coming out of cultural circles where multigenerational living is the norm. After her daughter and son-in-law sold their home in October 2022, Jo Ann Lorimer and her husband welcomed them and their 3 elementary-school-aged children into their 4000-square-foot home in Saltair, a network on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Lorimer and her husband also have a forty-one-year-old son, who lives on their twelve-acre property. . Lorimer and her daughter prepare food together, while her son-in-law helps with gardening. (The woman and her family have since moved. )”They are our lives,” Lorimer said at the time. But I’m deadening their lives. “
In his 2016 book, The Death and Life of the Single-Family Home, Nathanael Lauster interviewed Vancouverites who reconceptualized the concept of “home” after their dreams of an isolated single-family home bit the dust. As more Canadians move in with their parents, Lauster, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, says our histories and expectations also replace validating our new identities. “If you can’t do that,” he says, “then it becomes the life-related stigma. “with your parents. “
Despite owning an apartment downtown, for example, Herman Cheng and his wife Moon live with their mother in a bungalow south of Vancouver to help cover their living expenses while paying below-market rent. Cheng defines his living situation in terms of money for his mother. , who has no wealth other than the price of his house. In Cheng’s agreement, his mother, who lives upstairs, cooks and takes care of the children.
In addition to talking about perks like sharing appliances and daily, low-pressure interactions with her parents (as opposed to holiday visits), Michelle Cyca positions her choice as a rejection of the consumerist exhaustion of maintaining an independent household. “The nuclear family is fantasy now,” says the writer (and frequent contributor to this magazine), who welcomed to the world her second child this past spring and shares her parents’ home in Kerrisdale, an affluent Vancouver neighbourhood. “It feels like this capitalist trope. The idea that it’s better and more worthwhile to strip away any social or familial support and do it all on your own is a scam.”
My wife and I cover the loan for an area for which my mother has a seven-figure down payment, while I take my mother to her appointments, bring her trash, and fix internet problems. In return, we live in a large-gentrified area and community that we love and couldn’t otherwise. We also babysit freely, which includes dim sum trips and lightly supervised iPad time for my eight-year-old daughter.
And yet that narrative still gets steamrolled by the stigma. At an appointment at the kidney clinic, my mom will tell the nurse that we live together. I am always quick to blurt out my qualifiers: WITH MY WIFE! AND MY CHILD! (WHOM I CONCEIVED DOING ADULT THINGS!) ON SEPARATE LEVELS!
In describing the tensions of multigenerational life, the other people I spoke to cited conditions that don’t seem out of place in Everybody Loves Raymond, the American comedy where the main character’s belligerent parents live across the street.
Michael Kwan, whose mother lives in a suite below the one he has with his wife and children, talks about the lack of privacy, especially in front of a second kitchen, a must-have, I found, as well as separate entrances and exits. Doors that close on both sides have been installed. “It took a while for my parents to respect the ladder as the boundary between our domain and theirs,” he says. And then it evolved when we became parents, because the kids just run between the two parts of the house. “
For Cheng, dealing with the conflict between his mother and wife is difficult. “They’re pretty friendly with others,” Cheng says with a nervous laugh. “But if there’s something they don’t like, they tell me directly. “
My mom and I also had our sitcoms: my wife and I would laugh as my mom came and went at all hours, the rattle of the garage door waking us up when she came home from the casino or a game of mahjong at one in the morning. Then there are moments when I feel like an irritable forty-eight-year-old teenager, answering their questions with monosyllabic grunts and rolling eyes as I storm-out of the room.
Like Cheng and Kwan, my Chinese ethnicity culturally predisposes me to live with my mother. Maybe that’s why I end up feeling like a bad Asian, like when I speak my lousy Cantonese in a restaurant and get a derogatory reaction in English. .
That feeling of guilt temporarily came back with another realization: I never wanted to be a smart Asian. Growing up, I rejected the materialism of my Chinese upbringing in Hong Kong. (By contrast, my edgy wife and stepson wore my mother’s old Louis Vuitton bags. )I hated going to Chinese school on Wednesday nights because it meant I couldn’t watch The A-Team. I didn’t like inflexible hierarchies: the way parents expected obedience by default and walked away when they didn’t. Get. This ambivalence and active resistance to my cultural heritage is, for more or worse, who I am. But living with my mother was a breach in that firewall.
Old resentments resurface. When she was little, my mother, like many Asian mothers, mercilessly attacked her children’s self-esteem. To say the least, I was an awkward teenager: studious, obsessed with women but too awkward to do anything but what she did. she wanted. It’s not strange that before leaving home, my mother, who suggested that in order to lose weight, even if it wasn’t easy, I finish all the leftover food at the restaurant so I wouldn’t have to take it home, told me that I looked ugly and fat. . . Pretending words didn’t matter shaped my personality: stinky and distant, at worst.
In January, my mother’s medication for latent tuberculosis interfered with her appetite to the point that she fainted and hurt her back. My brother and I took turns taking her to different medical appointments, to acupuncture, to get her hair done. I brought her toast and coffee every day, soup at night. One morning, before an all-day dialysis training session, she started complaining about my brother. “He’s so stupid,” she began. “Stupid” continues to be a frequent putdown, directed at real estate agents and bad drivers as well as friends, relatives, and her sons when they do anything she doesn’t like. (I have a work friend from Hong Kong whom I recall shrugging when I described my mother to her: “She sounds like a typical Chinese mother.”)
“Don’t call him stupid,” I told my mother. “He does so much for you.”
My mother’s face exploded with disgust. “You just wish I’d die,” she barked.
“I don’t care,” I said, leaving my answer open-ended.
I watched her as she tried to put on her shoes, almost crying in pain from her torn back, until I knelt before her.
Again, I have to let go of my qualifiers: I love my mother, and she has done many things for me, one of which includes remortgaging her space in the 1990s so that I can do an MFA and then take care of my daughter, when she was little, 3 full days a week, when her daycare turned out to be inadequate.
I love her, she’s a smart mom and I’m not a hopelessly fucked up person, but. . . Phew. But this. Why?Why? If we had the choice, why would anyone relive the trauma of their formative years just for cheaper rent?
After taking my mother to her appointment, I wrote a stern but collected message in which I outlined my years of resentment, the kind of note I wish I could have written for myself thirty years earlier, the kind of note, one could argue, that I wouldn’t have been able to write if I didn’t live with her. To my surprise, she apologized!
I could simply say that this new point of communication is worth the heartache of a multigenerational life. I would be wrong.
Statistics show that elder abuse reported by police in Canada increased by as much as 22 per cent between 2010 and 2020. In 2020, about one-third of those incidents were committed through a family member or intimate partner. A 2016 study indicated that approximately 10 percent of non-institutionalized seniors in Kingston, Ontario, and Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, reported that a family member had been violent toward them — which is explained in the study as “being yelled at, insulted, threatened, cursed, belittled, or physically harmed” — in the past six months. Being single, having few or few relationships, being a woman, having reported money disorders, having mobility and activity disorders, and being a smoker all increase the chances of being a victim. of violence through a member of the circle of relatives.
“Family, frankly, can be bad news,” says Lynn McDonald, a professor emeritus in the faculty of social work at the University of Toronto. As an alternative, McDonald points to Canada HomeShare, which she created the pilot for in Toronto in 2018 as the head of the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly. In that program, people over fifty-five rented out their spare bedrooms to post-secondary students, who paid heavily reduced rents and spent about seven hours a week helping their older landlord–roommate. The program, overseen by a social worker, was such a success that it’s now being run in six Canadian locations.
This kind of deal is a success, McDonald speculates, in part because “there’s a little bit of a distance. They’re not your mother or father, and they can’t tell you what to do. And they know it’s not their son. ” If you ask McDonald, recently retired, if she would ever live with her children, her answer is quick and laughing: “Never. Never. ” However, you could rent a room to a student.
I quickly game-plan a home swap with, say, three engineering students, but I know it wouldn’t fly with Mom. And yet while Canada HomeShare might not work for everyone, it adds another option. If the best thing about the new trend in multigenerational living is that it’s a choice, then the freedom to choose something that works better for you still remains vital.
I, the mother, my mother’s mother, my poh-poh, stopped living with us and moved into a senior apartment near Vancouver’s Chinatown. My mom and I, who were texting each other about this, can’t agree on when it happened. She says so. It was when we moved from the suburbs to the city, when I was twelve, and Poh-Poh wanted to be closer to his friends and allow us to have our own family life. (I spent a few languid summers in that apartment, playing mahjong with her and watching TV with my brother, long before that age. ) During our exchange, my mother reminded me that my grandmother had helped pay the deposit on our first apartment. Home: That equity that endures in our current home.
For Poh-Poh, living multigenerationally was a sacrifice he gladly made, but when the time came, he was able to forge his own path. She lived alone for another twenty years before being transferred to a nursing home.
“You and Dan” (my brother) “learned how to behave from her,” my mother texted me from the floor. “I’m proud of [both of them]. “
In the months after my mother’s fall, our dates stabilized. I brought him coffee and toast one or two mornings (a tacit acknowledgment of our conversion roles) until he recovered. Now that he has regained his health, he returns to his mahjong games, picks up my children, and makes them medicinal soups. Recently, he drove my wife, daughter and I to the airport and we found ourselves in a traffic jam. My mother temporarily turned onto a side street, through a residential area of Vancouver, crossing two advertising lanes without the aid of a friendly traffic light. She looked like an experienced Uber driver, albeit with the calm reflexes of a septuagenarian. She’d probably rate my course a five out of five anyway, because I’m not confrontational yet, but she and I know how smart we are with each other.
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If you need to make sure we keep creating stories that interest you, with a point of accuracy you can trust, become a supporter of The Walrus. I know it’s tricky with inflation and emerging costs, but smart journalism affects us too, so I don’t ask this question lightly.
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Before you go, did you know that The Walrus is a registered charity?We depend on donations and readers like you to maintain our independent journalism and have freedom online.
When you donate to The Walrus, you help writers, editors, and artists produce stories like the ones you just read. Each story is meticulously researched, written, and edited before undergoing a rigorous fact-checking process. These stories take time, but they’ll be worth it because you’ll leave our site better informed about Canada and its people.
If you need to make sure we continue to create stories that interest you, with a level of accuracy you can trust, become a supporter of The Walrus. I know it’s hard with inflation and emerging costs, but smart journalism affects us too. , so I don’t make this query lightly.
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Before you go, did you know that The Walrus is a registered charity?We depend on donations and readers like you to keep our journalism independent and freely available online.
If you need to make sure we keep creating stories that interest you, with a point of accuracy you can trust, become a supporter of The Walrus. I know it’s tricky with inflation and emerging costs, but smart journalism affects us too, so I don’t ask this question lightly.
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