The Parent Trap

There were two reasons I didn’t say no when my lovely wife Cassandra asked if her parents could stay with us and our almost 3-year-old child for an entire month. First, it was nearly a year away. I’ll agree to anything that’s nearly a year away, which is why we have a child. Second, when she asked me, her parents were in the room. It’s virtually impossible to say no to someone asking on behalf of people right in front of you who obviously want something. All Rick Santorum has to do to get Newt Gingrich to quit the race is ask him in front of American voters.

All my friends in Los Angeles said living with our extended family was a horrible idea, something attempted only by the insane, all the other cultures in the world and every previous generation throughout human history. But now that I have this kid I was tricked into, I’ve often wondered if being so isolated from our family is such a good idea. By “isolated from our family,” I mean “stranded without free babysitting.”

When Cassandra’s parents Hope and Ken visit from Hoosick Falls, N.Y., they are always excellent guests, in that they laugh at everything I say, even when I’m totally serious about purposely scheduling three business trips during the month they’re visiting. This visit was no different. Hope cooked a lot and washed the dishes, and Ken spent entire days fixing stuff around our house. Though it was mostly stuff that wasn’t broken. In the month they stayed with us, he cut down a tree, moved a lot of dirt from one place I’ve never been on the hillside behind our house to another place I’ve never been on the hillside behind our house and carried rocks from the bottom of the steps, where they looked pretty, to the steps themselves, where they also look pretty. If Ken had been in the Army, I do not think he would have noticed when he was being punished.

At one point, Ken went to Home Depot to buy a machete. I’m not a parenting expert, but I would have guessed that keeping a machete in a house where a toddler lives is about as good an idea as putting rocks on steps that get slippery in the rain at a house where a toddler lives. Ken, to my shock, returned the brand-new machete the next day because it was not sharp enough. This is something that not even Jason Voorhees does in Friday the 13th. A second machete, which he bought from a different hardware store, was also not sharp enough. He looked into buying a machete sharpener. I looked into booking a fourth business trip.

Still, that first week was nice. Our son Laszlo loved having more people around the house paying attention to him. As did I. The only difficult part was that Cassandra kept me up late at night talking about flashbacks she had to things in her childhood she didn’t like. I can’t tell you what those things are, since I wasn’t listening so much as worrying that her parents could hear her, which would lead to my having to hear a second conversation about this.

By the second week, we started becoming uncomfortable with aligning our daily routine with Ken and Hope’s. For instance, they have a carefully designed nutritional plan whose main purpose, as far as I can tell, is to torment any diabetics who might see them eat. Breakfast is toast with jam, dinner is pasta with bread, snacks are chips and crackers, and dessert is candy or ice cream. Also, because they don’t have cable at home, they excitedly surfed all of DirecTV before deciding to watch Antiques Roadshow all the time, which was a problem since it meant that sometimes Antiques Roadshow was on. They, in turn, thought we were snobbish, with our longing for protein and vegetable matter.

By the third week, though, we stopped worrying about entertaining them with restaurants, museums and TV shows shot from multiple angles. They did their thing during the day (mostly reading and machete-ing) and we did ours (Facebooking and tweeting), and Laszlo happily ran between us. I think he instinctually knew that this is how people are supposed to live. At night, we’d sit down at the table and have carbs together.

After a month, I was surprised to find that I was used to it. Actually, I wanted them to stay longer. At some point they would have stopped being guests and started being people who lived in our community, with a car, friends and local fame as L.A.’s only non-Latino gardener and nanny. We would have gotten into fights, sure, but that’s what you do with people who are in your life instead of in your past. And Laszlo would have learned the odd but true lesson that sometimes Civil War belt buckles are worth $35,000 and sometimes they are not.

The only major downside of the whole experience is that my parents know about it. If they come for a month, I don’t know how I’m going to explain the eight business trips I need to go on.