How to Give Away a House (part II)

On building a home to hold the people you love, and realizing it holds much more

I’ve learned that some moments in your life repeat themselves, like reading a book that means something different when you are twenty, forty, or sixty (I haven’t reached sixty yet, but I hope to be wiser then). I never expected to repeat the experience of giving away a house, but here it is. I first began writing this when the addition for my mom was a bunch of lines on paper. Now, she’s lived with us for a year. This is a record of everything I expected to change before she moved in.

Almost two years ago we began the process of building my mother’s addition to our house, with a downstairs full bath and accessible living space, a separate entry for caregivers.

We will have our house. She will have hers. There will be a hallway that connects our kitchen and the part of the house she will live in. The hallway serves as a transition between her life and ours. Separate, but connected. An umbilical cord.