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Augustine Garcia's mother couldn't afford to pay off her house, so she asked her daughter and her daughter's husband Donald to move in. Now in their mid-thirties, they're the ones who need all the help, and Mom is just really annoyed with the kids:
Augustine lost her $60,000-a-year job as a manager at a hardware store. Garcia, trained as an electrician's assistant, could find no such work following the collapse of the housing market, so he started driving a tow truck. Now he and Augustine, he says, owe money to her mother because they haven't been able to help much with household expenses. "It's hard because I've been living on my own since I was 17," Garcia says. "We went in like roommates — we wouldn't be in her business, and she wouldn't be in ours. She lived here alone for the last six years, and to have her son-in-law and daughter back — I'm sure it's been hard on her not having her own privacy."
"People were told and encouraged to put all their emotional investment into the marital relationship," historian Stephanie Coontz says in the scintillating article. Mistake! Now is the moment to push this trend piece to its inevitable conclusion — retirees moving in with their parents in hospice care. Is the hospice the new hospital? I'm sure the LAT will be happy to let us know.
"Fallout Shelter" [LAT]