A Chronicle of Displacement and Social Media Restraint

From our very first room of our own to our last room (hopefully) of our own, many of us experience living arrangements that are not Conde Nast ideal.  This blog is for those of us whose living arrangements over the years seem like they were set-up by the "concierge" in the movie, The Best Exotic Hotel Marigold.  My purpose in writing this particular blog is three-pronged.

1. The Living Arrangements blog is my note-taking place for recording the quotidian events that will support the development of a play by the same name.  The play, Living Arrangements, is about the increasingly common phenomenon in which otherwise independent members of an extended family consolidate under one roof.

2. Writing this blog may help me with my resolution to restrain (note that I have not used the word refrain) my tendency toward excessive political posting on Facebook.  The GOP tilt in Congress causes me no end of lamenting and snarling.  I will attempt to enlist my resources in more constructive writing pursuits, such as finishing the smattering of writing projects with which I litter my life.

3. Since I exist in the learn-as-I-go world of full-time nannying and full-time freelancing, it occurred to me that I might be able to share an occasional insight about intergenerational living.  The nascent idea is  to write a humorous guide on grand-parenting in situ.

The reasons for intergenerational living vary, but money is probably the most common denominator.  My living arrangements journey began with being laid off in 2009 due to the fiscal meltdown, at which time I - and a staggeringly huge mass of people - became displaced.  This euphemistic term generally means that one's situation is not restored in short order.  In Victorian times, an even more polite phrase was whispered: unfortunate people experienced "reduced circumstances."  

It should be told that the occasion of a grandparent's reduced circumstances sends out a series of ripples to one's offspring that triggers opportunistic thinking.  To be honest, this is a mutual sentiment, but parents of young children are very quick to connect the dots.  

The highest bidder was the daughter living in Germany with her soldier husband, a toddler just learning to walk, and a three-story house with an open-design spiral staircase.   I believe her appeal went something like this: "I'm really afraid the baby will fall all the way to bottom floor; the stairs are completely open!"  The spiral staircase was indeed scary…carrying a squirming toddler down three-flights, I feared for my own neck.  I soon learned that my sanity was in greater jeopardy.

It wasn't until I arrived at the airport in Germany that I learned the toddler would no longer be the baby in the family.  My daughter was three months pregnant with her second child, and though we didn't know it at the time, would be put on bed rest in her third trimester.  Thus, I began my apprenticeship, morphing from doting grandparent to join the ranks of the weary and wary live-in mothers-in-law.

I will say that this episode closed happily with a series of dashes for freedom…to Munich, Majorca, Berlin, and Amsterdam.  I'll have more to say about those trips later.  But for now, I leave you with this question: What might be the reason "aloha" means both "hello" and "good-bye?"