Free Home Free by Marni Jackson

parents living with only children has risen since my upbringing. It’s easy for the single parent to fall into a quasi-marital relationship with their school-age kids, bringing them along to adult occasions and absorbing them into the culture of the parents. The thing is, kids are often better company than the departed spouses. And sometimes the power struggles aren’t as daunting as they are in adult relationships, because in the end they are the parent, in charge of the child. There is no anxiety about the relationship ending because it will never end; they will always be the mother, or the father. The role is permanent, a tattoo—unlike other kinds of love, alas.
    I worry that these only children, cast in the role of mini-wives and mini-husbands,will grow up with a deep sense of being indispensable to their parent.
    I’m not peering over the fence here, by the way. There was a degree of singleness involved in my own early motherhood, when Brian was freelancing and often out of town on assignments. The daily stuff of raising Casey belonged largely to me. So I was grateful for my son’s company. Even at four (especially at four, actually). He liked to talk, he was reflective and funny—I deeply enjoyed our relationship. But I hope I didn’t count on his company.
    I’m sure he has felt the weight of being an only child and the weight of our love for him, our desire to solve his problems and see him happy. I wish he had siblings. He’s had to grow a bit of armour in order not to respond too quickly to other people’s expectations. Or to ours.
    In my family, I have a brother seven years older and a sister seven years younger. Twenty-one years of diapers. And while I was drifting around Europe, as it turned out,my parents were coping with serious family issues. Teenage rebellions, shaky first marriages, health crises—it was all going on back home, and my parents had to perform some search-and-rescue missions. It must have been mystifying for them: the family they had so carefully engineered, their great life achievement, seemed to be buckling under various stresses. Meanwhile, their middle daughter, while not yet in rehab, was gadding about the world wasting her education and talents.
    When my well-behaved little sister ran off to Quebec City at the age of 16 my father phoned me, upset. They had just read her note, saying she’d be back in a few days and not to worry.
    â€œMaybe there’s still time to intercept her at the airport,” he said. Of course I thought they should “trust her” and let her go.
    â€œIt’s your lifestyle that’s partly to blame for this,”my father said in a rare angry outburst.
    Now the pendulum has swung to the other side, from the Generation Gap to the Fused Family. We share so much with our children that carving out our autonomy, and letting our kids pursue theirs, has become another something we must work at. Note to self: back off. I await the new manuals on “Learning to Un-Mother.”
    The generation gap made it easier for us to stay selfish, confused, and adrift in the embrace of youth culture,which helped us believe that our world was more interesting than any other world. Of course, everyone in their early twenties enters a self-involved orbit to a greater or lesser extent. It’s the decade when you give birth to your adult self, and an inward focus is part of that. But my lack of trust in my parents’ ability to handle my real life only increased the emotional gap between us. We loved each other and were unusually tolerant of our different paths. Classic post-war liberal optimists, the bunch of us. But I think we settled for too much distance.

Landscaping
the Family
    W HEN WE MOVED into our current house, we inherited a number of extravagant touches from the concert-pianist, flute-playing, interior-designing woman who lived here before us. The bedroom was painted a glossy eggplant black with gold