It’s a very, very, very fine house, with three cats in the loft, four dogs in the yard and people stacked like firewood. Notes on a domestic blitz
Let’s begin with an inventory of sorts. As I write this, there are ...
six adults
one preteen
one toddler
two infants
four dogs
three cats
one rat (thankfully caged)
... living in my house, for a total of 18 significant life forms in these 2,900 square feet. Which isn’t as big as it sounds, especially when you factor in all their stuff. Clothes. Baby furniture. Toys. Litter boxes. Lumpy bags of miscellaneous items I don’t wanna know about. That it’s a temporary overcrowding — as you read this, the house will have exhaled four humans and several animals — doesn’t make it any less crazy while it’s happening. Or, frankly, all that unusual for our place. It’s kind of nutty here. (Have I mentioned that one of the infants was born in an upstairs bathtub? It’s a tale that accounts for the pickle jar in the illustration across the page.) Previously we’ve had seven people and four dogs; seven people — spanning four generations — and six dogs; and there have surely been other arrangements I’m forgetting. Welcome to our home! We’ve always had trouble deciding if it’s best compared to (a) a sitcom; (b) a circus; or (c) a sitcom about a circus.
As you might expect, these days there’s a lot of commotion, a fair amount of barking, plenty of baby squawking, people in one another’s way ... aw, hell, can you tell we enjoy this madhouse? That we have cultivated it? That when our oldest son, his wife and kids and their enormous dog, two cats and pet rat needed a place to stay for a month before moving to Illinois, we said yes right away?
Of course we did. (Okay, we did fret briefly about their dog; it’s rideably large.) Just as we invited some friends, and their dog, to stay with us for a few weeks when they moved to town. Just as we opened our doors to my mother and brother and her three dogs for six months while they were house-hunting. There’s just something about domestic cacophony that works for us.
*****
In the beginning, there were just the two of us: my wife, Laura, and me. But before the beginning, there were many more children — we both grew up in large families. I had three siblings, she had four; we know our hubbub, bub. We were born in it. Molded by it. Consequently, once we were married, I didn’t want kids. Zero. Finally, a lifetime of quiet! That lasted until a few minutes after our first child was born. Then came the pivot: “I want nine of these,” I gushed to Laura, brandishing newly born Steven while she lay on the Caesarean table. We settled for three.
Wherever we’ve lived, we’ve always encouraged a casual, crossroads feel to our home. Kids, some of them ours, crashing in the living room; an extra plate or two for dinner. Sure, your friend Daniel can join us on vacation. Like that. We had dogs adding to the chaos — a pair of schnauzers so smart we had to childproof all the lower cabinets — plus a cat or two. A snake in a terrarium. You know, starter cacophony.
Then the kids grew up and the grandkids started coming.
According to Generations United, an advocacy group, one in every six Americans lives in a multigenerational home. That’s trending upward, increasing by more than 10 percent in the three-year span beginning in 2007. No doubt the recession has a lot to do with it, cash-strapped families banding together to stretch their resources. As it happens, that’s about when it started for us, too, and the economy had a lot to do with it. That’s when our first grandchild, Cadence, was born, and to save money, Steven, Cadence and his girlfriend lived with us. The girlfriend eventually moved out, but Steven and Cadence stayed for most of the next seven years. The two schnauzers were succeeded over time by a skittish Yorkipoo, a chill shih tzu and a schnauzer-terrier mix.
“About 7.8 million children across the country live in households headed by grandparents or other relatives,” Generations United tells us. Often it’s a circumstance of last resort, undertaken for unhappy reasons, but that wasn’t the case with us. It’s an amazing thing to have daily access to your grandchild as she grows up. Did I say grandchild? I meant grandchildren. My youngest son, Spencer, and his fiancée, Kayla, added not only to the stockpile of grandkids — bearing Liam three years ago — but to the population of the house, the three of them moving in.
*****
Last year, after Steven and Cadence moved out, my mother and brother relocated to Southern Nevada from Colorado, bringing three small dogs and a garageful of stuff. Stay with us!, we insisted. Added to our own fleet of yappers, that made six dogs. (Thankfully, all six had hair instead of fur and didn’t shed.) So, bark bark! the house bark bark! could get very bark bark! noisy. One dog always set off the other five. Nor were any of them inclined to distinguish between, say, a potential intruder and the sound of a leaf blowing down the street. Bark bark!
And you do not want me to describe what six dogs can do to a backyard.
Still, everyone got along pretty well and tempers rarely flared, even when the water heater leaked and required many days of wall and floor removal, not to mention industrial dryers RUNNING VERY LOUDLY night and day, a mold scare, insurance voodoo and time-sucking reconstruction. We had to move my mom’s bed into the living room during the tear-down. Hey, at least the dryers drowned out the dogs.
Through it all, I was mostly able to keep my cool amid the racket. It felt good to help my mother and brother. And it was especially gratifying to have four generations under the roof. How many kids interact daily with a great grandparent? How many seniors enjoy (or, on some days, endure) the attentions of so much ancestry? The time-span was boggling: When my mother was the same age as the great grandson bouncing on her lap, the atom bomb was still a few years from changing everything; he’ll grow up in a world that would have seemed like science fiction to her back then. There are cultures where this kind of multigenerational home is closer to the norm, and I think they’re on to something. I have to believe that there are intangible benefits to this familial continuity — each generation is a living road map for the other, of where our family has been and where it’s going.
The six-dog home, on the other hand, is for the birds. (Have we ever owned birds? Not sure; I might’ve missed them.)
*****
Okay, about the baby and the bathtub. As the May due date for Spencer and Kayla’s second child approached, Kayla let us know that she planned to have a home birth in one of our tubs. I was dubious. Our house has a few nice amenities, but a surgery suite ready for emergency C-sections isn’t one of them. Should I have someone sign a waiver or something? I had immediate visions of a 20-hour labor, frantic shouts of “It’s crowning!,” rampant midwifery — afterbirth flying everywhere!
I quickly amended my to-do list: “Tack up plastic sheeting in front of my books, just in case.”
So it was that in the wee hours one early May morning, I sat on the stairs outside a very crowded upstairs bathroom, listening as the rampant midwifery was cut short by the squealing arrival of our home’s newest resident, Marshall. (No surgery needed.) The moment seemed to call for a lofty benediction of some kind — perhaps a bit of enduring wisdom about not tossing the baby with the bathwater, just in case no one was paying attention during cleanup — but I was, frankly, overcome with emotion.
I got even more emotional when I opened the fridge an hour later to find the placenta in a bag, next to the jar of pickles Kayla bought when she was pregnant and immediately declined to eat. Just a bag of afterbirth — a completely transparent bag, I might add — sittin’ in the fridge. Beside the pickles. As if that’s a normal thing.
Hey, it happens. That’s our life, what can I say.
Postscript: A few days after my son and his family and pets departed for Illinois, leaving the house suddenly quieter and less frenetic, we got a text from a family friend. She’s coming to town for a few days. Could she crash at our place?
Absolutely.