Monthly rent against their combined income — my father’s pension was small but real, my mother’s Social Security was the larger part — was tight but not impossible. They would need to budget carefully. It was not the situation they’d had when they owned their house and had no housing costs beyond utilities and taxes, but it was a situation that existed.
“You hadn’t looked,” I said.
“We thought this would be simpler,” my mother said.
“Simpler for who?” I asked. Gently, but directly.
## What My Parents Actually Thought
I want to be fair to my parents here, because the story is easier if they’re villains and they weren’t, quite.
My mother grew up in a household where adult children and parents moved in together as a matter of course. Her mother had lived with her aunt for six years. The idea of parents moving in with an adult child wasn’t, in her mental model, an imposition — it was a form of closeness, even a privilege. She had genuinely thought that telling me was a courtesy, not a permission-seeking exercise, because in her understanding the answer was going to be yes and everyone knew it.
My father was more pragmatic and less sentimental about it, but he’d deferred to my mother’s framing and hadn’t thought it through on his own terms. He is the kind of man who is good at many things and not particularly good at anticipating how decisions that don’t seem to affect him might affect someone else. He hadn’t thought about my office because he doesn’t work from home and the concept of a home office as a professional space is slightly abstract to him. He hadn’t thought about the deposit on a rental because he’d assumed the simplest solution — Natalie’s house — was available and sufficient.