“That room is my office,” I said.
“You said you work from home some days,” she said. “You could work at the kitchen table on those days.”
I looked at her. “Mom,” I said, “I have two monitors, a printer, a filing system, and a job that requires a door I can close during calls. I cannot work at the kitchen table.”
She was quiet. I could tell she was recalibrating — that she had not, until that moment, understood that work-from-home meant something with equipment and privacy requirements, not just a preference for comfortable clothes.
“We’d need to work something out,” she said finally.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to say,” I said. “We need to work something out. Before anything is decided.”
## The Family Meeting Nobody Wanted to Have
I proposed a family meeting. My mother’s first reaction was that family meetings were for serious problems, and then she seemed to hear what she’d said and adjusted her position to something more neutral.
It took a week to coordinate schedules. Adam drove from his apartment, thirty minutes away. My father made coffee. We sat around my kitchen table, which felt both ordinary and freighted — the same table where we’d eaten holidays and ordinary dinners for the years since I’d bought the house, now the site of something that needed to be documented rather than assumed.
I had written down, on a legal pad, the things I needed to say. Not to read verbatim, but because I knew that without the pad I would get pulled off course by whoever was talking most expressively, which in my family has always been my mother.