moving into my parent’s basement

(our front door is the white cellar door on the left of the house)

One week before I turned thirty, I joined a growing percentage of my generation and moved my entire family, including four kids five and under, into my parent’s basement. Yes, after ten years living in Chicagoland, I am once again living in the same house I grew up in for twenty years.

Recently, a number of people have attempted to pinpoint the reasons for this steady increase of home-crashing, usually in economic categories – the recession, lack of jobs, the rise of housing costs, education debt, etc. For the most part, moving in with ye olde parental units has little to do with being lazy or self-entitled and more to do with the simple and strategic need to hunker down and earn some dough. That dough makes it possible to pursue other things – like saving enough money for a down payment, pursuing a career that they actually want to pursue, etc.

why we’re okay with this

We’re in both categories, actually, but there are a variety of reasons we made this choice. For one, my grandmother is aging (in her mid-90s actually) and we don’t know how much time we have left with her. Another reason is that my sister, adopted when I was in college, is close to graduating. I never got the opportunity to redeem some of the time with her that my siblings received. Now we get to hang out and watch the new season of Trollhunter.

I think we’re most pleased to be living in community with family, though. We’re blessed to have good relationships with my parents, but that alone does not make it easy. Swaths of my friends would never dream of moving in with family – the relationships are strained beyond the chasms between ideologies and understandings. In most cases, communities made of friends or even strangers are more compatible than those who have known you for years. I feel this tension, in some regard, even though not to the intensity of my friends. One reason is that we’ve already become a family unit from our time in Chicago – we have ways of living and values that are pretty set and an identity that is more or less secure.

(finally got a family photo of all six of us!)

the old is somehow new

It’s been increasingly helpful to remember that we have grown in a specific direction as a family unit, and so have those we are returning to now. My parents and siblings are not static entities – with ten years running by under the bridge, they did and experienced things that changed them. It would be easy to assume they hadn’t changed over the years, but it wouldn’t be true. The same goes for families I grew up with, friends I’ve lost touch with over this or that reason, church folks. This place, the place I knew, is not the same even as it is so similar.

This disconnect is another blessing, by the way. As I sit on my childhood porch looking out at my childhood yard, I’m thankful for the surreal nature of returning to something old and finding it new. I’m thankful for the fact that growth occurs everywhere and in everyone, not just in me and my proximal community. I’m thankful that time really does move forward in ways we cannot foresee, and that they are good.

And in the midst of this blessing, I’m cognizant that many, many people return home after years and see only stagnation and rottenness. Home is not a place of safety, nor of growth, nor of blessing for them. My faith requires me to believe that it doesn’t have to stay that way. And I also believe that perhaps, in certain circumstances (for every situation is nuanced), the sustained presence of a child of God in those stagnant places might prompt some beneficial conflict and growth.

But in the meantime, I will take the smaller tensions as they come and seek to live intentionally with my family. I would appreciate your prayers on this matter – that as we continue to integrate into this new situation, we would be flexible and patient, and that our parents and siblings would be the same.

I know several of you have moved back in with family, for short or long time frames. Any advice or thoughts on the process? What did you learn from it?