Is That A Good Thing?

One of the things my mom and I talked about when she was here was what she wants to do with the next ten years. She turned sixty this year and has been thinking, for quite a while, about retiring (which for her would mean going down to just one job, probably). Last year was really tough with the hurricanes, too, and I think she’s getting sick of the shutters and the storage unit and the insurance and the evacuation and the flooding and the roofers and the yard guys and the fallen trees and all of it, everything. She had to cut back a big section of the maho tree in the backyard this year because of storm damage and she says it’s good because all the extra light means she has a fantastic vegetable garden, but…well, still. Time for a change.

She’s been talking about leaving Miami, and specifically the island, for a while. The community has changed a lot since I was a kid, in both good and less-good ways, in my opinion. She’s been at her school for about twenty-five years, since I was in kindergarden, and walking around the neighborhood with her is like walking around with Oprah; all sorts of people run up to her and tell her how wonderful she is with their kids and what a genius she is and how fantastic, in general, she is. She loves the beach and she loves her friends and she loves her work, and I know she loves the little pink house that is falling down around her into her lush tropical garden, which may or may not last another couple of hurricanes. She says she would be a fool to leave a community that has been so good to her and in which she’s such an integral part, but…well, still. Every time she comes to Seattle she can’t stop talking about how beautiful everything is and how she loves cherry trees and how friendly the people are, even if it’s very cold here. Monday before we went to the zoo she spent some time in my old neighborhood of Green Lake and told me proudly that she didn’t get lost (I come by my utter lack of sense of direction honest, it would seem) and that she felt really calm and at peace there, that she could see herself living there. She says Miami makes her tired and she doesn’t want to be tired all the time.

We’ve been talking about all this for a while and in the back of my head has been the assumption that when I Settle Down, whenever and wherever that may be, that she’ll move to be with me. That’s about as far as we’ve taken it: that’s she’ll retire not to Florida but away from it, and that she’ll be close to me and that we’ll have the kind of relationship that we’ve wanted to have since I left for college, where we can see each other regularly and casually and not in these vacation-y gulps, where someone takes off work and someone else flies a long way and no one is on her diet and everyone does lots of special touristy things. Those long weekends are fun but they are sort of artificial. My sister is living with Mom right now and I get very jealous sometimes when she talks about being roommates with her, how it’s very chill most of the time and how they fit nicely into each others’ separate schedules and very different lives. I’ve often thought that’s something I’d really like, but I haven’t thought about it much beyond noting that it’s something I’d really like.

Monday, though, when she was here, we started talking more concretely about it over lunch at the Hi-Life. Mom’s looking into selling the house by the end of the year, although she’ll have to wait until after hurricane season to do so, of course. She wants to buy a smaller place and stay on the island six months of the year, during the gorgeous winters, and keep her work and her friends and all the good things about living there. During the summers (95 degrees, 95 percent humidity) she’d come out here. “I could be bicoastal,” she said. “I could just rent a place every summer and I could try it out for five or seven years and go from there.”

“Rent a place?” I said. “Every summer for five years? Mom, you should just buy a place. We should buy a place together.”

Cue the sound of the record skidding to a stop, right there.

It makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways. I certainly won’t be able to afford to buy anything by myself before I’m forty, if then. Mom could come to the same house every year and get to know a neighborhood and a community and have some continuity that way, and also not have to worry about renting a new place every year, which I think would be annoying and hard to do anyway, for only six months at a time, and with a cat in tow. She could put down a big down payment on a two-bedroom place in Seattle with the proceeds of the house on the island, where the market is still pretty crazy, potential-bubble-burst and hurricane issues notwithstanding, and six months out of the year I’d have a roommate.

We talked pretty seriously about it for the rest of the day, about timelines and dealbreakers and boundaries, about extenuating circumstances and investments and expectations. I said that’d I’d probably want to buy her out at the end of five-to-seven years and that we should draw up a contract specifying the terms of the agreement, so to speak. She told me what’s worked well for her in living with my sister off and on over the years and said that she wants to concentrate on selling the house on the island first, getting a new place there, before buying anything in Seattle. This works out well with the whole I’m-leaving-the-country thing for me, of course. There’s no rush, no hurry, a lot of time to think about stuff. 2008, maybe.

It’s a very interesting idea but it’s also sort of a weird one, I admit. It’s one thing to move in with your parents for a while, but to have one of your parents move in with you? Before they’re old and need full time care? It’s not really done in our culture, is it. You move out around eighteen or so, to go to college or whatever, and in my circle of friends at least, you tend to move pretty far away. You see your family for holidays and then at some point you partner up and you have to decide where you’re going to go when, and if you have kids it only complicates the matter. They’re still your parents, of course, but they sort of live in your past, in your childhood, and it’s always a little weird to be home with them, or to have them in your home, even though you love them, because it’s not the eighties anymore. Or something. I don’t know anyone who’s done anything like this, do you?

We talked a lot about independence, too. I’ve been considering this proposition from that angle all week. I know pretty well how to live on my own, and the last two years have afforded me the opportunity to re-learn how to live with other people…people not, you know, my mom. I haven’t lived with her since I was eighteen years old, and even then I was hardly ever around. I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a time with my mother for thirteen years. What would it be like to share a house with her, even part time? What kind of house would she like, would it be similar to the type I’d like? Would I have to tell her where I was going in the evening and when I’d be back? Would she have to tell me? Do we have similar viewpoints about separate sponges for kitchen counters and for dishes and about turning off the lights when you leave a room? I have no idea. Part of me thinks this could be a really good thing for me, for both of us, and part of me thinks that it’s really dumb and unrealistic and would be setting us both up for heartbreak. I mean, can you be thirty-three or thirty-seven or forty-one and live with your mom, not in her house but in the one you own together, as adults? Is that even allowed? Would you do it, in a similar situation, with the mom (or parents) you have now, knowing what you all know about each other, or would you run the other way?

After lunch on Monday afternoon before we went to see my cousins I had to send off some packages and so we went to the Sip And Ship, Ballard’s finest mail service/coffee bar. While she was in the store across the street I sneakily got her one last present, one of the super cute Ballard (BALLARD!) shirts that I see everyone wearing and which I totally need to get for myself before I go in case I get lonely, in New Zealand, for a neighborhood in which you can FedEx a package and get a nice decaf mocha in the very same store. The guy behind the counter asked me if it was a gift.

“It’s for my mom,” I said, picking out the pink ribbon with which I wanted him to wrap it. “She’s thinking of moving here and I want to get her a shirt to convince her. In fact…” because I can’t ever keep my mouth shut, apparently, “In fact we’re thinking of buying a house, if you can believe it. Together.”

“Wow,” said the guy, clipping the ends of the ribbon diagonally and tying a big fancy bow. “Is that…a good thing?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I mean, I think so. She’s a really great mom and I love her a lot.”

“Then that’s great.”

“Yeah. Weird, though, a little, right?”

“Oh, I don’t know. My parents live four hours away, in Spokane, and as I get older…I mean, I don’t know if I want to live with them, but…you know? It’s hard sometimes. I never thought I’d say that, when I was a kid.”

“Me neither, but I’m saying it now.”