KEY POINTS:
One of them wants more space, privacy and orderliness; the other wants more help with the housework and a greater degree of appreciation. So far, so predictable.
At first glance it's your standard, albeit somewhat outdated, Kiwi couple scenario. Only this one comes with a twist. Rather than
husband and wife, the couple conforming to the partnership stereotype just happens to be a mother and her adult daughter.
Meet Sarah Leota, 32, and her mother, Lorraine Owen. When she shifted in with her mum in Titirangi three years ago, Leota was pregnant with her second child, newly separated from her husband and in need of the moral support that only a mother can give.
After seven years living away from home, she says it took a great deal of soul-searching to make the decision to move back but today Leota, along with daughters Grace, 9, and Ruby, 2, are still ensconced there. "It is a good set-up," she says. "We do have our moments but for the most part there's been a lot of laughing and a lot of crying with laughter, rather than anger or sadness or anything."
With Owen working long hours and her daughter being the primary caregiver of the two girls, they've perhaps unwittingly fallen into their respective roles of breadwinner and housekeeper.
Leota cooks a meal most nights and Owen comes home to a house that isn't quite as immaculate as it once was. And, in moments of high tension, each woman expresses the frustrations borne of her particular perspective on the domestic situation.
"Mum can sometimes have a bit of a moan and say, you know, 'I'm tired of that shit lying in the corner'," says Leota. "And I'll have my say: 'I'd just really like you to give me a hand every now and again.' It is like any married couple, I think, except we're mother and daughter, not husband and wife."
In the 2006 census, just over five per cent of Aucklanders in their 30s were living within the "family nucleus".
Adult children return to the sanctuary of the family home for a variety of reasons. When a relationship or marriage breaks up, the prospect of being cocooned and healed by the love of your first family is often very attractive. And when times are tough financially it can make sense to pool resources and run one household instead of two.
In the existing climate of elevated food and petrol prices and an economy in recession, people are becoming more creative in finding ways to budget and cut costs. And for "empty nester" parents, who are often fairly well-off compared to their children, it can seem churlish to refuse help when adult sons and daughters are visibly struggling.
According to Maureen Baker, professor of sociology at the University of Auckland and expert on families, "the people who are in their 30s who are living with parents are probably people with financial difficulties or people who've had divorces or separations and are single parents and have come back for that reason.
Generally it's a solution for people who have inadequate resources for whatever reason. "My guess would be that there would be more women than men ... if you're a man you're more likely to want to be independent from your parents, you're more likely to be able to earn a living and you're less likely to be a single parent."
It was Leota's mother who decided she couldn't stand by and watch her daughter flounder under financial and emotional pressures. "We've always been an incredibly close family," says Leota.
"And Mum said: 'You know this is home and you can come home and raise your little girl'." For Leota, the biggest bonus of returning home is the adult company her mum provides. But the flip-side is that it cramps Leota's romantic relationships. "It's very hard to have a private life when you live with your mum," she says.
Leota also laments the fact that their current living arrangement, which she expects will continue for another two years while she completes a teaching diploma, is robbing her mother of the classic grandmotherly role. "My mum has struggled with the fact that she kind of lost her identity as a nana for my kids because she lives with them," she says. "Most grandparents are the good-time grandparents.
They can come and visit and take the kids away and feed them full of sugar and go home again. My mum doesn't have that." In fact, this particular grandmother, by sheer virtue of her domestic circumstances, is more likely to flop in a chair in the lounge after working all day and wonder why it's full of the trappings of childhood. "She lived on her own for five years and had her single woman candles out and things like that," says Leota.
"Now her living room's overrun by toy kitchens and bikes and I'm fully aware how difficult that is. You know, Mum raised her children and raised them well and they moved out. I don't think she ever expected that we'd come back."
Murray Cohen wasn't too surprised, however, when his 36-year-old daughter, Angela McNoe, recently took up residency with him in his Mangere Bridge home; it's a move that's virtually become second nature to this vivacious member of Auckland's music scene.
"Whenever the shit hit the fan it's always been Dad's place I've come to," says McNoe. "It's kind of like my backstop. Whenever anything kind of got difficult or anything, I'd just go home to Dad."
Her business, Groove Goddess, which arranges gigs and matchmakes bands with bars, is in its infancy and the income it generates is sporadic. She freely admits that the move back to live with her father was designed to take the pressure of her tight financial situation. "I just kind of called him up and said: 'How do you feel about having a flatmate?' He said: 'Oh well, so long as it's not for very long'." Cohen definitely calls the shots.
"I think he's the boss. I mean, it's his house and he's been living by himself and he's used to it, you know, and so I kind of work around with him," says McNoe. Her father's easygoing temperament imbues the relationship with a high degree of harmony. "He's real flexible. Otherwise it wouldn't work at all I'm sure. He's quite happy to let me do my thing."
So happy, in fact, that McNoe hasn't quite got around to paying board yet. "He has said that I can pay him a nominal fee, which I was quite happy with, but I just haven't. So I probably should at some time or other, before he kicks me out."
There isn't even any pressure for McNoe to help out with the chores. Her father, who broke his neck in a swimming pool accident on Christmas Day 1988, has a tag-team of assistants who take care of the household tasks in addition to his personal wellbeing.
"Because he's a quadriplegic, he has home help, so they do all of it," says McNoe. "I do my own washing, that's it." She believes the trauma of her father's horrific accident, when she was 17, has created a particularly close bond between them.
"You do realise that, actually, this is my dad and this is who he is - and he's a really special guy," she says, before proudly telling how Cohen taught himself to paint with his mouth and now has a prolific output of landscape paintings, which often feature pohutukawa trees. McNoe is realistic about the fact that her father has graciously agreed to accommodate her - as opposed to actively wanting a housemate.
"It's funny because people keep saying to me 'he must be so pleased that you're there'. And I'm like, 'nah, I don't really think so'. I think I'd be stretching it if I'm still here at Christmas. I might be pushing my luck a little bit."
And if she thinks about it all too hard, doubt tends to creep in. "I must admit I felt a bit odd about it ... having employment and moving back," she says. "I did have that sort of 'oh, my god, I'm 36 years old and I'm living with my father. What the hell is my life all about?"'
When Jake Morrison returned from four years working in Australia, he moved in with his mother, Dinah Bradley. Her architecturally-designed townhouse was too good an opportunity to pass up. "She's in the heart of Ponsonby, got a really cool place, there's a spare room.
It was all just too easy, really," he says. Thirty-seven-year-old Morrison had expected to stay for only a couple of weeks but, thanks to a busy new job and a tight rental market, it took him almost three months to find a pad of his own. He thinks any friction resulting from their living situation was more perceived than real as age-old patterns of mother-son behaviour emerged.
"I love Mum ... she is cool, she's groovy and everything but the problem is I'm a grown man and she's my mum," he says. "I don't know anyone who doesn't, in the nicest possible way, wind up their parents and vice versa." "It's the difference between what people say and how you interpret it. Like if there's some salad in the fridge and [Mum] wants it eaten up. She'll go, 'Hey, have some salad' and I interpret that as, 'Eat your greens'."
Morrison paid a weekly market rent of $200 in order to "buy a little bit of independence" and so he didn't feel he was his mother's houseguest. While his friends didn't give him any flak for living back with his mother, he'd still feel self-conscious about it occasionally. "I'd make jokes about it," he says.
"It's not exactly a good look. You know, 37-year-old creative director of an advertising agency bloody living at home ... It was always just a bit of a joke because the thing was I always knew that it wasn't like I was some kind of sad loser."
Morrison has now shifted out; he lives just a 10-minute walk from his mother's place. IN MOST cases of adult kids returning home, it is the child who needs support from the parents. But for some it's the other way around.
An Auckland 31-year-old and her husband moved in with her parents in June to ease their financial pressure. Struggling with redundancy and a downturn in business, her parents would have had difficulty making mortgage repayments on their house without such help. While acknowledging it will save her and her husband money as well, the woman, who doesn't want to be named, says they are all very clear about the fact that they did this as a favour to her parents.
"The older I've got the more I really like my parents as people and that made the decision to move in quite easy because we all get on really well," she says. To give certainty to both couples, they've agreed to live together for an initial two years. If it's all still working out at that stage, they may decide to continue the arrangement. So far, there have been no power plays or instances of one couple trying to assert authority over the other.
"Mum and Dad are very respectful of the fact that we're adults." Household expenses are split pretty much evenly and everyone pitches in willingly with essential chores. "The best bit, and this is, I guess, quite selfish, is that I get, three of my favourite people all together and I don't actually have to make the effort to visit Mum and Dad anymore." They've found the lack of privacy and couple "alone time" to be the only negative.
"If Mum and Dad go out it's like: 'ooh, they're going out. We have a night to ourselves'. We don't have that time together that we used to have."
It's the ultimate goals and the big picture that make the compromises and inconveniences along the way worth it. Leota has her eye fixed firmly on achieving her dream of becoming a schoolteacher and McNoe hopes to eventually run her own music festival.
And, in the case of the 31-year-old woman, her altruistic reward comes through the knowledge that she and her husband have almost certainly prevented her cash-strapped parents from losing their house. Sociologist Baker believes that while multi-generational households have traditionally been the norm for some cultures, it's not a set-up likely to gain wide acceptance within mainstream New Zealand.
"I think most people do not find it a desirable model ... And it certainly goes against the values that most young New Zealand people, especially Pakeha, would have about what the desirable living situation is," she says. "You don't want to live with your mother and father and have them telling you what to do when you're in your 30s."
And indeed, many adult children back living at home express an underlying sense of unease, if not a touch of outright guilt, that they've taken the soft option and - no matter how sugar-coated the experience of returning home has been - essentially encroached on their parents' territory.
Leota, for one, puts herself in her mother's shoes and empathises with the fact that she finds living conditions in her three-bedroomed house somewhat cramped these days. "She works a pretty hectic full-time job as well, so I can imagine sometimes she just wants to come home and relax - which is hard when there's a 2-year-old in the house."
To help alleviate any cabin-fever Owen may be experiencing, Leota regularly arranges a week or two away for her and her daughters to give everyone a break.
"So it gives Mum a chance to miss us," she says. And where do the trio take their time out? In the nearby suburb of Glen Eden - at Leota's father's house. Where else?