Together Again

For Vanessa Hua, Moving In With Her Mom Wasn’t Just A Necessity: It Was A Chance For Deeper Relationships.

THE DINING ROOM REEKED of dead flowers, of pond scum and festering. A few weeks after my father’s funeral, I’d returned to my childhood home and discovered withered petals heaped around floral arrangements, their stems gray with mold, in vases long gone dry.

Gagging, I shoved it all into the green waste bin. Our family had held off from cleaning up, not certain if my then-74- year-old mother was ready. As I slammed down the lid, I thought about the help she would need, not only in her mourning but in the life she would make without my father.

Who would move the heavy bins down the steep driveway to the curb each week? Who would keep the house from feeling too empty? Independent as my mother was—she was a research scientist who still headed her own lab—who would watch out for her?

I scrubbed the vases until they sparkled. Upstairs, my mother puttered in her room. I glanced around the kitchen, trying to picture living here with her, my husband, and my twin sons, who were under a year old. She never asked outright for her children to return to the woodsy San Francisco suburbs, but we were supposed to understand these expectations without explanation. She and my father had sacrificed for me and my siblings, and just as they’d had a duty to us, we had a duty to them.

My brother had been telecommuting, helping sort out the estate, and was prepared to make the move permanent. But he was single, and living with our mother would crimp his dating prospects. My husband and I had wanted to return to the Bay Area from suburban Los Angeles, and by moving in with my mother, my sons could deepen their relationship with her—a bond that seemed even more important after my father’s passing.