Full House
Family Circle, September 2006

At 6:30 AM the Flannery family of Los Angeles is well into their daily routine. Diane Flannery, 50, left for her office at UCLA at five a.m. so she can be at her daughter Maya’s school by three. Seven-year-old Maya has been awake since six. She began her day as she always does, snuggling in bed with her grandparents. Then she practiced her Chinese lessons while her grandmother, Sally, cooked breakfast. Now Maya’s racing to finish eating so she’ll have time for a game of Crazy Eights with her grandfather, Bud, before Sally drives her to school.

Maya says, counting the cards in perfect Mandarin. "Now you say it, papap," she instructs her grandfather. "Yi…er…san,"Bud repeats, stumbling over the pronunciation.

"You aren’t the best at Chinese," Maya tells her 82-year-old grandfather sympathetically. "You don’t really understand the words as well as I do. That’s why you have to keep trying."

For the first four years after she adopted Maya from Chengdu, China in February of 1999, Diane Flannery, 50, raised her daughter as a single mom. Diane got much-needed practical support from friends, from other adoptive families, and from the Chinese neighbor who taught Diane to cook, fix Maya’s hair, and celebrate holidays in the Chinese way. But she still struggled with the day-to-day juggling act that stresses so many full-time working moms.

"The best part of my life was Maya," Diane says. "And the hardest part of my life was balancing work and parenting. I didn’t get to be the co-Director of a UCLA research institute by leaving work early every day. But once I had Maya I tried really hard to do that. I hated shuttling her from one caregiver to the next so I could to stay late for meetings. I was anxious toward the end of every workday, wondering if I’d get to her in time."

Diane was also stressed by living three thousand miles away from her family, all of whom lived on the East coast. Diane worried about her parents growing old without her. "A lot of their friends and relatives had passed away, so they were all alone," Diane says. "It was getting harder and harder for them to navigate their lives. I tried to help them, but there was only so much I could do long-distance."

Diane longed for Maya to be surrounded by the kind of extended family that Diane knew as a child: a grandmother who was a powerful force in her life; lots of cousins and aunts and uncles at every holiday table. But Diane’s brother, sister-in-law, and niece and nephew lived back east, too. The distance was as painful for Maya as it was for Diane. "From the moment Maya and I stepped off the plane from China, she adored my family and they adored her," Diane says. Maya begged constantly to go visit her grandparents, and wore a jacket her grandfather had given her until it fell apart. Diane and Maya flew back and forth as often as they could. But the older Maya got, the harder it was for Diane to keep disrupting her own schedule and Maya’s.

Two years ago Diane proposed a solution: she asked her parents to move to California to live near her and Maya. "A good friend of mine had lost her mother and father in the space of two months," Diane explains. "I realized that I was blessed to still have my parents, and blessed that my daughter had a chance to know them at a deeper level than most kids these days get to know their grandparents."

Sally and Bud took the idea right away. "Diane was working," Bud says. "By the time she got home and put dinner on the table, it was time to put Maya to bed. We thought we could give Maya some quality family time."

"Plus, it had gotten to be kind of a lonely life for Bud and me," Sally adds. "It was time to do something about it."

The original plan called for Bud and Sally to live with Diane and Maya only until they found a place of their own. But buying two houses in Los Angeles would have cost more money than they had. And running two households would have added hassles to Diane’s life instead of making their lives easier. Since living together was working so well and living separately would have presented such financial and logistical obstacles, Diane, Bud, and Sally decided to make the arrangement permanent. They pooled their resources and bought a big house with a wing for Bud and Sally, a wing for Diane, and plenty of space for Maya to run in between.

Since they moved in, Bud and Sally have helped Diane keep the vow she made when she adopted Maya: to nurture Maya’s Chinese identity. "Some people who adopt children of other identities are hesitant to embrace their children’s culture," Diane says. "They want their kids to be just like them. I want Maya to know who she is. I feel really lucky that my parents embrace the Chinese part of Maya, too."

Sally and Maya take lessons together on the gucheng, the Chinese string instrument that occupies a prominent place in the family’s living room, and she and Bud attend all of Maya’s Chinese dance performances. Diane has taken Maya to China twice; both times, at ages 75 and 76, Sally went with them. Bud reviews Maya’s flash cards with her when she comes home from Chinese class. At age 83, he’s learning to speak Mandarin. "I call papap ‘my treasure,’" Maya says, "because my Chinese book says an old man that’s very wise is a treasure."

Bringing Bud and Sally into her home "gave Maya two more parents," Diane says. Although Diane adopted later in life, and her parents became grandparents later in life, they all took to their new lifestyle readily. Instead of getting phone calls and photos from their granddaughter every few weeks, Bud and Sally are there every day: when Maya wakes up in the morning, when she brings a new friend home from school, when she learns a new Chinese phrase. "It feels totally normal and right," Diane says, "for the people Maya loves and needs the most to be living under the same roof."

Maya agrees. In fact, she’s already planning the same arrangement for her own children. "When I’m older," she announces, "I’m going to take over this house. I’m going to have Mom’s room, and Mom’s going to have my room. And Mom’s going to take care of my daughter."

Although Diane and her parents have always been close, living together has brought new intimacies and new challenges. Along with her challenges as a single mom, Diane has become responsible for many details of her parents’ daily lives: driving them to doctor visits, helping them negotiate the Internet, doing all the heavy lifting. There were differences in their childrearing approaches to work out, too. "I spent five years giving Maya good eating habits," Diane laughs, "and now she and my dad like to go out and eat French fries together." What makes it all work, Diane says, is that Bud and Sally respect her parenting style, and her authority as Maya’s mom. So Diane has no problem letting go of what she calls "the small stuff" in favor of the riches that Maya reaps from living with Bud and Sally.

"It’s never easy to live with your parents as an adult," Diane says. "My mother still drives me crazy sometimes, and for my parents, there’s a loss of independence. But Maya is thriving in a close daily relationship with her grandparents. And I get to spend my parents’ remaining years with them."

Sally says that living with her daughter and granddaughter has helped her get to know them–and herself–better. "Maya gives Diane and me a way to discuss what kind of mother I was, and how that’s different from the kind of mother she is," Sally says. "One day Maya told Diane, ‘Grandma has a voice and when she uses that voice I don’t like it.’ Diane said, ‘I know that voice.’ We all had a good laugh over that one."

Her eyes tearing up as she speaks, Sally describes the creature comfort that Maya provides. "She clings to me whenever her mother’s not around," Sally says. "There’s this warm, sweet little girl who didn’t used to be in my life, and now she is. I wouldn’t trade that for anything."

Sally believes that for her and for her husband, Maya is literally a life-saver. "She gives me a real purpose in getting up each morning," Sally says. "I think she’ll add a few years to my life. I know she's already added a few to Bud’s."

Bud nods his agreement. "Maya gives me the best moments of every day," he says. "In the morning she sits and plays cards with me after she has her breakfast. When Diane brings her home from school, she runs to me and tells me all about her day. We read together–I read a page, she reads a page. And when it’s time to go to bed she comes down the hall, shoots me a kiss and I shoot her one back."

As if on cue, Maya scampers into the room the room and plops into her grandfather’s lap. She bounces up and down, eager to have her say. "Before my grandma and papap came I was wishing they would. And since they’re here I don’t have to worry about anything," she says. "They take care of me when my mom isn’t here. They play fun games with me. They’re gentle and sweet and they love me a lot. All of them."

Bud strokes his granddaughter’s glossy black hair. "Before we moved in with Diane and Maya, I had a tendency to sit by myself and do boring things," he says. "Everything I do with Maya is exciting."

Since her parents came to live with her and Maya, Diane worries less about the two things she cares most about: her family, and her job. "I make it a priority to leave work early enough to spend time with Maya at the end of the day," she says, "but if I can’t, I know she’s at home with my parents and I know she’s fine.

"I honestly think that Maya’s brought more to our lives than we’ve brought to hers," Diane says. "There’s a spiritual connection between all of us now. She’s really made us into a family.