Three days a week I work from home. On those days I am in my office by eight-thirty, I take a lunch break of about forty minutes, and I am more or less unavailable until five or five-thirty. The home office is not an optional arrangement — it is a professional one. My employer understands that my home office is a workspace, not a location.
My parents did not understand this. I had said it, but the version of it they had stored was: Natalie works from home sometimes, which is convenient because she’s around. The missing piece was: Natalie works from home in the same sense that an office is a place of work, which means the room is in use, the space is professional, and the presence of other people in the same house during work hours creates real professional challenges.
There is also the question of the room itself. My parents had not explicitly said they wanted my office, but the geometry of the house made the math clear: if they moved in as a couple, they needed a room for sleeping and a room for everything else — clothes, belongings, the accumulated household items that don’t fit in one room. The guest room could sleep them. The office was the other room available.
I had a specific conversation with my mother about this approximately a week after the initial announcement, and it was the conversation that made the stakes concrete in a way nothing else had.
“There’s a perfectly good room right next to the guest room,” she said. “We could set that up as a sitting room.”