Standing on the grocery check-out line, I overheard two shoppers behind me bonding over their empty nests. “My stomach physically hurts with missing my child!” one moaned. Her comrade-in-loss nodded knowingly. I muttered, “Enjoy the empty nest while you can.”
My college graduated daughter, Skyler Rose, is back home. Don’t assume my mumbling is grumbling. It’s more complicated than that. I love having my baby back and I miss having that self-centered simple life I experienced ever so briefly. Our house is a full house like millions of others. Recent 2010 Census data shows 34 percent of young adults ages 19 to 29 live with parents, up from 25 percent in 1980.
When I tell people Sky came back to live with us they cluck with pity. I can smell their blame. Boomerang kids are cast as dysfunction post-adolescent freeloaders skulking back to childhood bedrooms with tail between their unlaunchable legs. Humiliating for them and a black mark for their parents who obviously did something wrong. Poking around the blogosphere I couldn’t believe the animosity out there towards these kids! They are called lazy, good-for-nothing slugs with no shred of self-reliance and worse.
My daughter, Skyler, finished up at the University of Miami and moved home on Long Island to accept a Marine Science graduate fellowship at SUNY Stony Brook. Since then, she snared a prestigious NOAA Ph.D. fellowship, one of ten awarded nationwide. She is no slouch. And my husband and I are not failures. But there is failure to address here.
As it turns out, my adult child and her peers are no less self-reliant than generations prior. Social historian Stephanie Coontz wrote The Way We Never Were to expose how our nostalgia colors the truth about family life. Self-reliance is more myth than reality.
Those 1950 young adult surburban pioneers had help. Federal GI benefits financed the education of a generation returning from World War II. The Federal Housing Authority gave vets home loans with a dollar down! The federal government underwrote the real estate industry by insuring lenders. It subsidized science education, funding ($50 billion) wartime inventions and company’s production processes, creating whole new fields of employment.
My 1960s generation after a bout of 1970s recession flourished with the Clinton era of prosperity, jobs, peace. How? Our designer shoed feet were buoyed by credit. A car, a home, a vacation home, furnishings, family vacations, a boat—credit fueled a consumer revolution.
Skyler’s generation on the other hand faces a launching pad scenario with a broke government, the worst housing market in half a century, and a dismal job market shattered by the combo of technology and global competition. Many carry college loan debt averaging $30,000 per kid. Hers may be the first generation expected to stand on their own two feet without help.
Sky told me I should write a book in defense of maligned twenty-somethings in inter-generational households. I could. Some days are hilarious; others exasperating. Still others idyllic. Good news first. I can return from a day’s work to find my glass of Pinot Noir waiting for me beside a homemade pasta dinner on the table. My laundry is fragrant and folded on my bed.
My child and I are more companionable roommates that I ever would have been with my parents. As I twenty-something living on my side of the generation gap, I couldn’t wait to get out of my parents’ house. Between the women’s movement, the war in Vietnam, the sexual revolution, the drug culture and civil rights, we couldn’t be in the same room on Sunday afternoon without arguing. No such gaping divide exists between my generation and our adult kids. We’ve had psychology, affluence (till recently), a love of blue jeans and rock’n’roll on our side. Rebellion is not the defining issue for the millennials. Most of them like my daughter actually like their parents and spending time with them.
The bad news—we are all control freaks here. How much garlic belongs in a recipe? Jeopardy or Family Guy reruns on TV at 7 pm? And then there are the new additions.
Sky’s boyfriend moved up from Florida also to accept a graduate fellowship and moved in (supposedly a temporary condition.) I felt my prim mother turn over in her grave. Fortunately, we live in a big house and they have upstairs privacy because my husband and I have a downstairs bedroom.
Then came the new puppy, a fluffy white Samoyed named Kodiac. I did not want the dog having cared for and lost two already over the last two decades. I was out-voted. Remember Jekyll & Hyde? Dr. Kodiac and Mr. Fang is the canine reincarnation. He is lovable and cuddly half the time and a biting destructive maniac the other half. Getting bitten on the butt literally is my new wake-up call.
Life in our house for me at sixty-two is not what I expected. I’m not alone. I don’t have any answers, although I am collecting tips and strategies. I do have questions like: When are jobs coming back? Is real estate ever going to move again? And the most pressing one…Anyone out there wishing for that empty nest once again?
Margaret Sagarese formerly was inspired by her daughter— then a tween—to write along with Charlene C. Giannetti The Roller-Coaster Years: Raising Your Child Through the Maddening Magical Middle School Years.
