From empty nest to full house

Angela Neustatter reveals the daily triumphs and challenges when three generations of the same family decide to live under one roof

It is 5pm, and a piping voice fills the stairwell as my three-year-old granddaughter Isana announces that she wants to come and play. I willingly drop everything and prepare to spend the next hour giving voice to her toy tiger while she assaults me with the “very naughty” pink fluffy flamingo. Or she might want to swing on the rope my husband, Olly, has put up in our living room, and before supper we will read one of her favourite books, flopped on the sofa. Later, her mother, Aykao, 41, my daughter-in-law, may come in, bringing 10-monthold Seiji, for a chat. Or our son, Sam, 40, might collect Isana for supper and pause to share a glass of wine with Olly and me. For the past four years, Olly and his family have lived with us as extended family. It all happened in a very unplanned way and was not at all what we had in mind. When our sons left home, Olly and I expanded into using the top floor of our house, which Sam and his brother Cato, now 35, had occupied. We turned the empty bedrooms into our offices, a studio for my stained glass work, and a spare room. Sam and Aykao lived in their own flat a few miles away. So we couldn’t quite believe it when Sam came to say that Aykao, now pregnant, would like to live with us in an extended family. She had grown up in Japan, surrounded by different generations of family in the traditional way, and wanted the same for her children. It would mean Olly and I shrinking back into our original space and giving up the first floor, but any hesitation was quickly outweighed by the idea of having our grandchild woven into daily life, and the pleasure of closeness to Sam and Aykao. Nor, after all, was this the grown kid moving back home expecting Mum and Dad to foot the bills, fill the fridge and pop his things into the washing machine. Sam and Aykao, whom we both like a lot, wanted clear-cut, separate living quarters, and proposed a rigorous sharing of costs, taking on jobs and payments for things that needed doing to the house in place of rent. Friends warned us to be wary. What if we had a screaming row and it ended in a family split? What if they began acting as though the whole house were their territory, with no boundaries? What if they took against the way we were with their child, however kindly meant? What if my daughter-in-law decided I was the epitome of the notoriously difficult motherin-law? Olly and I decided it was worth the risk, but also recognised that expecting everything to work out