I heard stories a million times during my childhood that we lived in our own apartment thanks to my mom’s parents, even though that wasn’t true. Yes, they helped make the very first renovation there, but the apartment itself came to my dad from his grandmother. So, in fact, the apartment belonged to Dad and was recorded in his name.
Over the years it had already been redecorated several times-even my nursery had been replaced twice with new furniture and wallpaper, so there was nothing left of my mom’s parents’ repairs anyway. But Mom was still trying to cling to that when, after I was eighteen, Dad told me that he had already signed the apartment over to me. It was such a gift from him and an investment in the future, because one day I would have a wife and child, and then my parents’ apartment would become my family’s apartment.
This news was the beginning of an argument between my parents. My mother trusted me completely, but clearly did not want me to bring a girl and, God forbid, a child into our two-bedroom apartment any time soon. He and my father were only forty, they also needed somewhere to live, and my father, without consulting me, had rewritten the apartment.
I wasn’t planning on getting married anytime soon, much less evicting my parents, but my mom’s discussion of the apartment was bubbling up and getting hysterical. When my father told me that I was their child and that they were obliged to provide me with a place to live in the future, my mother found a thousand excuses. The division of their shared apartment led my parents to divorce after twenty years of marriage. Because of me and the house they had to live in for years…
