STAYING HOME
Pandemic stay-home orders create a new definition of ‘household’ and ‘home’ for many
Share of young adults living with their parents has reached a historic high during pandemic.
“Like flies in amber,” Helena Michie said, the members of her nuclear family were frozen in place the day that Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo issued the coronavirus stay-home order. It was March of 2020, and Michie’s adult sons — Ross, who taught high school in Austin; and Paul, a student at Syracuse University — were both in Houston for spring break, sleeping in the tiny guest bedrooms of their parents’ house in the Heights.
A week later, when the U.S. Census asked who was living at that address, the four of them were immortalized as a “household.”
They were a tiny piece of a COVID
statistic — a fragment of the soaring number of multi-generational households. Not since the Great Depression have so many young adults — 52 percent — lived with their parents.
But Michie is an English professor, not a sociologist; the statistics weren’t what mesmerized her. She’d been writing a book about Victorians’ ideals of the home, so
for her, the word “household” ech
oes through time and literature.
But the idea of “household” and “home” is personal, too — and for Michie, it became even more so when Hurricane Harvey flooded her Braeswood house where the boys had grown up and where Paul, the younger son, had just left for college. Suddenly Michie had lost her home’s feeling of safety and stability. She’d been cast out, dispossessed. Her belongings were covered in mold.
Slowly, she and her husband, Scott Derrick, recovered. They bought a tall-but-small house in the Heights, one with high ceilings and a second story that, to someone who’d lived through a flood, felt reassuring. A “very middle-aged house,” she called it, a place without a basketball hoop in the driveway, a place where the floors stayed shiny.
“We were lonely,” Michie said. “But we were also dignified.”
Then came the pandemic: a new, and very different kind of disaster. Instead of being cast out, her family was suddenly locked in.
What, Michie wondered, did it mean that she, Derrick and their sons were once again a “household”? What did it mean that her grown sons were “home”?
Porous household
It was lovely and strange, all of them being together all of the time. When there were sports to watch on TV, the family watched sports. They swam together in the pool. They cooked insanely complicated things: tiny tamales shaped like Christmas gifts; chicken bisteya cigars; a chicken-liver mousse topped with cherries they’d pickled. “They were my social life,” said Paul.
Sometimes there were tensions — when chores would be done — but mainly, they were glad of each other. Paul and
Ross took on the new roles of worrying about their parents, who because of their age were more vulnerable to the virus. Michie liked having them take care of her sometimes — a new sensation — liked being able to ask them to lift things for her.
She felt almost guilty for how much she enjoyed having them there, for their “vocabulary born of shared daily moments of no real moment at all; the ability to be silent together or to decide to be alone in the full knowledge that the house is full. I love not worrying about them and yet not having to bug them, not having to take my phone to bed in case I miss an emergency text.”
Time became woozy, as it did for everyone in lockdown, with everything somehow boring and urgent at the same time. Eventually the number of people and animals in the household began to fluctuate: One son or the other moved out, back to school or Austin, and then in again.
Sometimes they took their dogs; sometimes they left them. Sometimes three home-office setups were simultaneously sucking down internet bandwidth; sometimes two; sometimes one. “There was something porous about our household,” Michie said.
‘Homing’ blog
She felt an urge to pin down the moment. In July 2020, the book she’d been working on turned into something else entirely: a blog she called “Homing.” It wasn’t an academic project — not really, though occasionally she’d write about Jane Austen’s idea of home, or Charles Dickens’. It was mainly personal: a description of her own life, at this strange moment that she was all too sure would not last forever.
Her sons are both living in the house again now, but Michie knows that won’t last. “Knock wood,” she says, the pandemic is coming to an end.
This time-out-of-time changes you, she wrote in the blog, “and in basic ways. Those ways have something to do with what the assertiveness training classes you took in the seventies would have called ‘personal boundaries.’ Sometimes you have none. Sometimes a hard shell forms around you. You are a paradox, and paradoxes make you tired. You did not think, in the days before COVID, that you could be lonely and overwhelmed by the presence of others at the same time. You crave touch but insist on your bodily space. There are too many dogs in the house, but when your son takes his back to Austin with him, you feel a dog-shaped hole in your heart.
“Your biggest realization … is that during COVID you are not so much a part of a household, or even a family, but of a pack — with its shifting but crucial hierarchies, its strange intimacies and interdependencies, its wild enthusiasm, and its obsession with thresholds. It is a pack made up of animals and humans, who move through the space of the house and the time of the pandemic, not knowing quite where they are going, but who are grateful for the sense that others are moving with them.”