Mama Moved Into the Flat Behind My Kitchen, and We Both Had to Learn New Manners

A reader writes:

My mother has lived in exactly three places in her life. Her father’s house in the country, the house she and my father rented in town for twenty-six years, and now the little flat I built for her at the back of my yard. I am writing because when we were planning it I looked everywhere for somebody who had done the same thing and could tell me honestly how it went. I found plenty about building. I found almost nothing about living with it afterwards. So this is my honest account, two years in.

Daddy died the year Mama turned seventy-four. The landlord was kind about it but the house was too big for her, the stairs to the front door were getting harder, and the area had changed. She would not come and live in the house with us. She was very clear. “Two women in one kitchen is a war,” she said, and she was not joking. I have two teenage boys and a husband who plays his music loud on Saturday mornings. She had a point.

Our lot is not big, but there was a strip behind the house where we used to hang washing and where my husband had started a chicken coop and given up on it. The idea came from my brother Winston, of all people, who lives in Birmingham and sends advice more often than money. “Build her something small out back,” he said on a video call. “Her own door, her own key.” For once he was right.

I will not pretend the building part was smooth. We got proper drawings done and went through the approval process, which took longer than I wanted, and I was vexed at the time. I am glad now. The draughtsman spotted that where we wanted the door would have put Mama’s step right where the roof water from the main house comes down, and we moved it. We did one bedroom, a shower room with a seat and a rail, a small kitchen area with a two-burner stove, and a front room just big enough for her chair, her television and her sewing machine. Level floor from the gate to her bed. No steps anywhere. That was my one rule and I would not bend on it, even when the contractor said a small step at the door would make the drainage easier. We found another way.

The money came from our savings, a small loan, and what Mama got from selling Daddy’s van. Winston sent something too, in the end. We wrote down who put in what. My husband thought that was cold. I thought it was necessary, and I still do, because one day Mama will not be here and that flat will still be standing on our land, and I do not want my children and Winston’s children having a quarrel at a funeral.

Now the living. This is the part nobody told me.

The first three months I checked on her too much. I would hear her door and go to the kitchen window. I would walk over with a plate of food she had not asked for. One evening she said to me, very quietly, “Carol, I did not move here for you to watch me. I moved here to be near you.” I went back inside and cried in the bathroom, and then I understood. She had given up her whole house, her street, her church sisters who lived five minutes away. What she had left was her own front door. If I kept walking through it, I was taking that too.

So we made rules, and I am not embarrassed to say we wrote them on a piece of paper that is still stuck on my fridge. She knocks, I knock. She cooks for herself on weekdays and eats with us on Sundays. If her curtain is not open by nine I can come and check. The boys take her rubbish out on Tuesday and Friday and she pays them in grater cake, which they pretend is not a good deal.

There have been quarrels. She does not like how I discipline my younger son, and she has an opinion about my hair. I do not like that she lets the gas cylinder run completely empty before she tells anyone. We had a terrible week when she fell in the shower, not badly, but enough to frighten us both. The seat and the rail are why it was not worse. I tell everybody that now. Whatever you think your parent needs in a bathroom, put in more.

But there have been other things too. Last Christmas my older boy, who is sixteen and speaks to me in single words, spent a whole evening in Mama’s front room learning to play dominoes. I heard them laughing through the wall. My husband, who never knew his own grandmother, calls her Mother now, and I did not ask him to. On bad nights, when my own marriage has its moments, like everybody’s does, I can walk twenty steps in the dark and sit with somebody who has seen worse and survived it.

I think often of Ruth telling Naomi, “Where you go, I will go.” People like to read that at weddings, but it was spoken by a daughter-in-law to an old widow with nothing. It is a promise about staying close when it would be easier not to. I am not as good as Ruth. Some days I am tired and short with Mama and I wish I had my yard back. But I do not regret one block.

If you are thinking of doing this, my advice is simple. Build for the parent they will be in ten years, not the one they are today. Talk about money and what happens later before you pour the foundation. And give them their own key, and then leave it with them.

— Carol, Spanish Town

Editor’s note

Carol’s letter shows that the bricks are only half the project. Two things stand out. First, she planned for her mother’s future body, not just her present one: level access, a shower seat and grab rail, a door placed away from the roof run-off. Second, she wrote down who paid for what and talked early about what happens to the flat later. If you are building on your own land for a relative, getting proper approval and asking an attorney-at-law how contributions and future ownership should be recorded can save a great deal of grief. And her mother’s words are worth keeping close: being near someone is not the same as watching over them.

This article is general information only and is not financial, legal, tax or other professional advice. Please speak to a qualified professional about your own circumstances.

Reader letters may be edited for length and clarity, and names and identifying details are changed.

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