Siblings, Living Arrangements and Nosey-ass neighbors
It’s a fairly nice Saturday –about a month ago. Jay’s outside presumably working on his bimmer, hanging with the kids. The other neighborhood kiddos are out milling about and a few of the parents. Conversation between Jay and one of the dads turns to our soon-to-be bundle of joy. A neighbor we’re not that friendly with (he keeps his distance and usually minds his business), somehow joins the conversation and wide-eyed comments “You guys are having a baby?! Wow, you’ll probably move soon, right? How are you all going to fit?” Jay brushes this off with a casual “ha ha, we’ll see.”
A few weeks later, a mom a few doors down, with one child asks me the SAME thing. A woman who rarely exchanges niceties with me, save for a wave and occasionally a hello – in the entire two and a half years we’ve lived here. Meanwhile, her extremely repressed, closeted husband walks their poodle and never makes eye contact with us.
Uh… What the F**K?!
We all know each others square footage. We all bought our condos from the same person… we all know each others purported home-value (or lack thereof these days). But when did these insights translate into free reign on our parenting style and living arrangements?
Yes. Condo. I said condo.
Here goes the eye rolling, the “you can’t raise kids in a condo” eyebrow. Funny thing is, our condo is a *whopping* three bedrooms and 1500+ square feet. According to both mine and my husband’s childhood, most of us grew up in 900-1100 square foot ranch homes, with a few siblings squished in for good measure.
In fact most of you did, too, according to my poll -and to the private responses I received (thank you). What’s more, some of you even shared a room with an opposite-sex sibling (gasp! how taboo!).
I grew up in the most insane Brady-bunch style family. Two parents, two prior marriages and myriad of children of different ages. A picture-esque “blended family” (yeah. right.). A small 1000 sq foot 3 bedroom home. It had a kitchen, dining, formal living/family and a cove/nook at the back of the house.
There were three sisters (including myself) and one brother (I had a few other brothers but they were long gone and grown by the time I came around). The two older sisters shared a room, I shared a room with my parents until I was perhaps 2 or 3 and my brother, the oldest of us, had his own room. Until one day my parents discovered brother had quite a “green thumb” and a nice little pot-rig in his dresser drawer. He then lost room privileges and moved into the alcove where there was zero privacy. Besides, he was almost an adult and ready to move out (which only took another ten years). That left me to bunk with the younger of the two sisters, and the older sister got the private room, and finally parents had some privacy again.
Now, if I’m not mistaken, the real Brady Bunch had six siblings? Three girls and Three boys (at least, what I can remember from that catchy opening theme song)… and if memory serves, didn’t they bunk three and three?
Your needs or mine?
At what point did the McMansion become a necessity?
At what point did our view of appropriateness when raising a family become so distorted that the minute we spit out a second child our square footage needs to be upped to no less than 2000 square feet? If you want a McMansion, fantastic. But your “needs” are far different than mine, buddy.
Jay and I experimented with a few different living arrangements before moving to Portland. The last being a Stepford-esque neighborhood in a “new community” so far East of the real Bay area that it was the worst conceivable carrot/stick scenario one could imagine. We spent a decent sum of money, comparatively speaking with say Portland in 2003, to buy a 3 bedroom detached single family home, with a huge yard, and upwards of 1500 square feet. Some of those square feet sitting unfurnished and unused… because who really uses a hallway/formal living room? Besides, no one wanted to drive the hour and ten minutes to hang out in Brentwood, so we entertained infrequently.
Our floor plan was awkward, having all the bedrooms spread out on one floor (a single story being our preference with little kids AND dogs). With children’s rooms at the front of the house on opposite ends, and a master suite off the family room.
Talk about weird and a waste of space. Our dogs occupied the formal living room on our formal couches, as did the Christmas tree for 20-odd days each year.
We ended up bunking our two oldest children, with one room pretty much spare while our the third child shared a room with us the majority of his first year. This proved to be an exercise in sustained paranoia for me, as night time sleeping was impossible with all of our kids out of earshot, and the children’s rooms at the front of the house, with low level windows.
Even then, neighbors with less children speculated we were “bursting” at the seams living in a 3 bedroom home. We were always dumbfounded by this assumption –full on knowing that we were a pretty tight-knit family, that preferred to huddle together in the smaller family room, than space out and ignore each other throughout the various rooms in the house. Tack on to that the only real time spent at home was sleeping and eating with all of the boys activities, and a larger home just seemed to be excessive (read: more work that I want to do).
Our family and condo
So far, over the years, our room sharing arrangement has worked. Let’s pause for a moment to understand the benefits of room-sharing! Let’s think of the problem solving skills they’ll learn in the scenario, how much more tolerant, gracious and less entitled kids will act. If you’ve taken a look around at kids today, entitlement is a disgusting issue that needs to be addressed. I’ve never seen a more lazy group of youth with their hands out to their parents daily that “have to have” an i_________ (insert your must-have Apple gadget here), or their own laptop, or their own car (what?! It can’t be a used car!), or whatever is new tomorrow.
When we moved to Portland, we were convinced we’d get a row-house somewhere close-in. Neither of us really desired a yard, but if we had one we definitely did not want a large one. Especially when the trade-off was a years worth of raking mountains of leaves all to enjoy the yard for maybe 45 days a year. We ended up in suburbia, again. In Portland metro –where the row houses are interspersed in neighborhoods with homes ranging from 3-6 bedrooms.
We rented a cute little row-house for a little more than a year. We came to the slow realization we weren’t going to get a dime for our once equity-abundant home in Brentwood and decided to buy the first thing that made sense in Portland before the market crashed here, too –still being a little gun-shy, a little raw, from our California home-buying experience.
We opted to purchase a modest condo. It seemed like a good idea. Especially as our focus was not on more kids at the time. Two kids share one room, one kid gets his own. Then we threw in the “home office” – which basically was a laptop on the couch, or kitchen table, or desk in the living room… because again, we were left with some awkward square footage to fill. If you’ve ever seen that show about hoarders… we’re the exact OPPOSITE we’re always trying to figure out just how little we need. And again, it felt weird having a couple of the kids bunking while one was on his own.
But what about the yard for the kids? Imagine that, we don’t really need one. As I mentioned above, it seems as if we’re home long enough to eat and sleep considering all of the kids’ extracurricular activities each day. The only family members that seem to be suffering from lack of yard? The dogs. They haven’t quite adjusted to condo life, but realistically they hate pissing in the rain- (just watch as Brutus makes the 100 yard dash to the fence in front, pees for five seconds then bolts back inside) so a yard wouldn’t do much good for them anyway. When it is sunny, they set up camp on the balcony over looking the creek. Lazy bastards. More often than not, when the subject of possibly getting a bigger home comes up- its not number of rooms we’re talking, its yard-for-dogs oriented conversation.
So what of baby-bundle-of-joy-to-be? Well, because apparently we are freaks-of-nature-parents that don’t ferberize our kids, or teach them to be self-reliant when they are 3 days old, and we tend to spoil the shit out of them every time they cry (yes, we pick up, soothe, breastfeed, coddle and goo goo talk to our babies) we’ll room share with little monkey #4. Yeah and probably bed-share (oooh, real taboo stuff now!)! And when he’s sufficiently sleeping through the night and not requiring night changings and feedings (because, really -who wants to get out of bed, walk the 10 feet across the hall to the other room to do all that?), he’ll bunk with his older brother… and we’ll have an even, happy two kids per room.
The same scenario most of you all had growing up. In other words, mind your f***ing business!
-b
Side note- while researching “stuff” for this post… I came across a few cool nuggets that show I’m clearly not insane for opting for a smaller household, or rather, there are more insane things I could be doing in a small home… like having 19 children (ala Dugger)!
