“You work from home three days a week.”
“I know that too.”
“What did you say when they told you?”
I thought back to the Sunday dinner. The plates being cleared. The tone of my mother’s voice — that tone, the one that means the conversation is informational rather than consultative. “I didn’t say anything,” I admitted. “I was so surprised I just sat there.”
“Okay,” Leah said. “So the first thing you need to do is say something.”
## My House, My Office, My Three-Bedroom Life
I bought my house four years ago, before I met David, before I had any particular expectation of sharing it. It’s a modest three-bedroom in a quiet neighborhood — not a dream house, not a fixer-upper, just a solid, sensible house that I bought when I was thirty-two with a down payment I’d been saving for six years and a mortgage I’d calculated carefully against my income as a project coordinator.
The three bedrooms: mine, my home office, and a guest room that I use as a guest room when I have guests and as a storage room when I don’t. That last bedroom is the one my parents apparently plan to inhabit. But the math of where they would put everything — two adults who have been living in a three-bedroom Colonial for thirty years, who have accumulated the material weight of thirty years in that house — did not seem to have been part of their calculation.
And my office. My home office, which is where I work three days a week and where my project files are organized the way I need them organized, where my second monitor and my printer and my file drawers are, where the light is good in the morning because I specifically chose that room for the morning light. I had mentioned, exactly once, to my mother that I worked from home several days a week, and I could tell from the way she’d said “that’s convenient, isn’t it” that she understood this to mean I was home a lot, not that there was a professional function being performed in one of her prospective rooms.