Family, Space, and Privacy--or the Lack Thereof

As usual issues of space and privacy are never very far from my mind, especially after returning from a 9 day visit to our families. C and I are in an unusual position regarding our families; our parents, my brother, his brother and his family, and his sister all live in the same town, while we live about 1200 miles away. Needless to say this makes trips "home" difficult. (On a side note, I put "home" in quotations because while ostensibly that wonderful east coast city is where we both grew up and ideally where we'd like to return some day, after living away for 8 plus years, it feels less and less like "home." If I were, however, to express that feeling to our families I would have a lot of explaining to do.)

Last summer, after 5 years of marriage, we thought we solved the problem of going back and forth between families almost every day by planning a trip that was long enough for us to spend 5 consecutive days with each family. It worked surprisingly well, although it did have a few hitches. This trip we tried the same approach, but since C's dad is battling lung cancer, there were added complications. C was expected to be with his family everyday, even days we had arranged to stay with my family. In the end, I felt we didn't spend enough time with my family together--and we spent a lot of time traveling back and forth between families. So while I could vent about this, I would rather write about the lack of space and privacy that comes with a family visit.

In the typical 19th-century home, several generations lived under one roof, and each generation/family was afforded their own space, to some degree. Generations shared communal spaces such as the kitchen, dining room, and parlor--incidentally, it only now occurs to me that communal spaces are also typically seen as feminine spaces. Married daughters living with their parents had their own private spaces within their parents home, and the same was true for married sons living with their parents. Of course, my generalizations apply primarily to middle and upper-class families. I can rattle off a list of novels where this model applies--Iola Leroy, Contending Forces, and Little Women all come to mind. In The American Woman's Home (c. 1869), Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe even discuss the importance of the guest quarters in the typical American home, going so far as to diagram them and to discuss precisely how far they should be from the family rooms to ensure everyone's privacy and health.

This respect or relative respect of privacy fascinates me, especially in light of my own familial circumstances. When C and I go to visit family, we are afforded no such privacy. With his family, we have to displace someone else in order to have a place to sleep, and with my family, we sleep in the office, which grants us a bit more privacy at night but not during the day. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, especially in light of sociological and architectural differences between the 19th and 21st centuries. I could just chalk it all up to the advent of the nuclear family and the suburban home, but I think there is more to it than that. I've been pondering the changes in how people view privacy for a long time, and I believe key things have happened in the last 100 years or so that have dramatically changed our perceptions of privacy. Privacy, at least in my experience, is highly valued, but not often given or respected. I have often theorized that the tabloid nature of our culture makes privacy difficult to come by, but then, that doesn't explain why privacy is no longer valued among family members. Perhaps the architectural divisions that typically exist between families does have something do to with it. Since we rarely live with our parents beyond our college years, do they feel they have a right to know things about us that previous generations would never have known? Is therapy and the need to discuss everything ad nauseum to blame? Or are our families just particularly nosy? And here's the question that has been bothering me the most: will I be like our mothers and demand to know everything about my child?