The mood that first Thursday evening in early January was bleaker than the cold outside. Surveying my four children’s stricken faces, I worried we’d made a terrible mistake. My youngest, exhausted from her longer-than-ever school commute, sat pleading through tear-stained cheeks: ‘When can we go home?’ My teen and tween jostled for dining table space to do their homework; my third whispered in my ear that the shower door had just broken off. ‘Let’s keep that between us for now,’ I whispered, as my eyes scanned over to my mother-in-law, jabbing at her laptop to no avail. ‘Still no internet!’ she lamented. Thanks to my husband Will’s insistence that we ‘upgrade’ his parents’ internet connectivity, despite their protestations, the internet had been down for the better part of a week. Of course Will had escaped to work at 6am each day, leaving me to face the music. It had been him who’d got us into this mess in the first place, too. Planning a loft conversion and further renovation work that would make our house in Wandsworth, in south-west London, uninhabitable, he’d argued: ‘We don’t have the spare cash to rent, and the children will love seeing so much of their grandparents... It’ll only be four months – five at a push. How bad could it be?’ And so we became part of the millennial boomerang generation. The two of us, plus our four daughters, aged 14, 12, nine and seven. All cooped up together with my in-laws, 72 and 80, in their four-bed, four-storey Georgian-style house near Waterloo, central London. Yes, their home would be able to physically accommodate all eight of us – no easy feat – but I worried our big personalities and emotions would prove harder to contain. I’m aware many would consider our living arrangements hell on earth. Whenever I happen to mention my circumstances to friends, I get one of two responses. A sharp intake of breath, followed by something like: ‘How can you stand it? I wouldn’t last a week living with my mother-in-law.’ Or stunned silence, facial features involuntarily expressing horror and disgust. (And most of them don’t have the added cultural angst of being an American living with Brits. I’m a New Yorker, my in-laws are English... very English.) But for all the potential issues, moving back in with the parents is increasingly commonplace among my generation, now aged from 30 to our mid-40s. A new survey found that nearly a quarter of parents with adult children have had them move back in after initially leaving home, over a fifth of those returning to their parents’ house are aged over 30. There’s no shortage of reasons: saving cash, needing support after a break-up, a rising housing market and rental costs, even couples moving in with parents in the hopes of securing some free childcare. This is particularly true in London, which has seen the fastest growth of adults living with their parents in the past decade. One in four London families has an adult child at home – and not all of them are unhappy about it. One study found that the mental health of young adults improved after moving back home with parents. As a society, we may be embracing the idea of a lone 30-something moving back home, but a family of six moving back in feels like an extreme case of boomeranging. And it’s not proved plain sailing. At the best of times, relationships with in-laws can often make us feel like strained performers trying to fit into a role we don’t suit. So imagine living with them. I’ve always felt self-conscious about being too much – too loud, too emotional – while also worrying I’m not enough. Since raising four children can feel like the opposite of living in a civilised way – the mess, sibling squabbles and noise – I worried about how significant an imposition we’d be. I couldn’t quieten the voice blaring in my head, warning that if we messed this up, the fallout would be disastrous. And we certainly committed plenty of household faux-pas in those early days. My heartbeat still quickens recalling the look on my mother-in-law’s face after I accidentally put a silver fork in the dishwasher in the first week. It’s hand-washing the family silver all the way now. And don’t mention recycling – an enduring battle which contains all the drama and intrigue of a scene from Phaedra. Determining what exactly can be placed in the wicker recycling basket in the kitchen, in accordance with Southwark Borough’s recycling scheme, is complex, to say the least. Yet my in-laws abide by the rules to the letter. I’ve read the accompanying leaflet cover-to-cover but I’m sure they think I’m incompetent when really it’s my husband who keeps shoving illicit plastic in the bin. I may be a 42-year-old mother-of-four and wife of nearly 15 years, but around my in-laws, I still feel like the anxious 25-year-old who impulsively moved across an ocean to shack up with their son 18 years ago. At the time, it stung a little that my in-laws had reservations about the speed and intensity of my romance with their son, though now I’m a mother myself I completely appreciate their perspective. I first moved to the UK in 2002 for my Modern Languages BA at Oxford University, where I met Will, who was at the same college. Our friendship didn’t turn romantic until after we left university, which was as painful as it was beautiful because my mother had died a year earlier. Following a mental health crisis, she took her own life when I was 23. My immense grief and fears of abandonment made me particularly prickly and oversensitive in those days, especially when it came to interactions with my future in-laws. I convinced myself they believed I wasn’t worthy of their son. My upbringing as an only child of a single mother couldn’t have been more different to Will’s, one of four brothers with three older half-siblings. I never felt I was lacking anything as a child because my mother loved me so devotedly, but I was missing something pretty significant: my father, who never lived with us or raised me. It was only after my mother died that I started to fantasise about how appealing a large, bustling family might be. Within the space of a couple of years, Will and I were living together, engaged, parents to a bulldog puppy (which his parents had actively discouraged) and had a baby on the way. Thankfully, they were far more positive about the latter. Some of my fondest memories of our burgeoning relationship happened in the same basement bedroom we’re now sleeping in. Back in the day, we’d chat and giggle all night, stuffing our faces with junk food and watching trashy reality TV shows together. Being back there has had a rejuvenating effect that’s far more invigorating than twice-annual Botox. I feel I’ve gone back in time and am in a pseudo-teenagehood. I creep around the basement in joggers, sneak chocolates and sweets into my bedroom, stay up watching TV too late under the covers... living here has broken up any marital monotony we might have been feeling and offered up new challenges, as well as reminders of the teenagers we used to be. We’re more affectionate as a result, communicating with knowing glances because we no longer need words. The bedrooms are spread across four floors, with my in-laws at the very top. My eldest, Diana, 14, is right below, her temporary room doubling as a giant sports locker which houses our (many) cricket and golf bags. My nine-year-old, Stella, the trickiest sleeper of the bunch, is on a cot bed in the office-cum-makeshift bedroom, next to the printer. Ada, seven, and Liv, 12, are in the bedroom next door to ours in the basement. This arrangement means five of us share the downstairs toilet, which nearly buckled under the pressure of it all last weekend. It’s still preferable to having my in-laws witness the vast quantities of shower gel and loo roll we power through on a weekly basis. We’ve been buying things separately, though occasionally it does feel a bit like a university house share as I’m always grabbing household essentials for all of us, like extra loo rolls and dishwasher rinse aid. Though we eat separate meals, we often gather together in the kitchen, chatting about our days while cooking side by side. The trickiest thing has been mastering a busy morning commute as a family: my kids have only ever walked to their primary and secondary schools, so had to learn how to navigate trains and buses. I take my youngest two in each morning, and I’ve felt shattered watching my daily step count climb to 20,000 (in the early weeks, I’d also often meet my older girls at the station to help them carry sports kits home). As trying as cohabitation can be, though, it’s lots of things I never expected. Harmony. Intergenerational connection. Sparks of joy. Bizarrely, I think this arrangement might be doing good things for my marriage, too. Will seems to have shed some of his customary gruffness, his personality softening with each week spent back in his childhood home. Watching him interact with his parents, it’s clear a part of him needed this arrangement for reasons beyond the obvious financial ones. It’s an opportunity for bonding as an adult while also nurturing the inner child that always fought for attention as one of the middle children in a big family. Perhaps it’s because I know our situation is temporary, but I can’t help marvelling at the idyllic family scenes I’ve witnessed these past weeks. Like how Diana watches the news and the cricket on the sofa with her grandparents, bombarding them with questions. Or the way Liv hunches over the crosswords at the dining room table next to her granny every Sunday evening, both wearing identical expressions of intense concentration. Stella has transformed from an amateur to avid knitter in this house, her needles clacking into the night as she makes scarves for her dolls and bow hair ties for her friends – something she picked up from an auntie who lives a few minutes away from us here. Ada, who used to cling to my legs incessantly, now sits reading aloud with her grandfather. Occasionally, she’ll pause to ask: ‘Grandpa, are you being pesty?’ with a cheeky giggle, co-opting his teasing expression. So on the whole we are a happy, harmonious bunch, the eight of us – plus whichever sibling/niece/nephew/furry pet happens to be visiting on any given day. There are 29 of us when we’re all here at the same time. There’s something else, too. Chatting with a group of mums last month, I found myself admitting: ‘It’s been so nice having a parent to care about me again.’ Until the words tumbled out, I hadn’t quite realised how emotional this has been, 20 years after losing my mother. It’s the little things: my in-laws picking up a newspaper and reading an article I've written with enthusiasm, or even them telling me off for picking my skin (I’m trying to stop, I promise). Since living together, we regularly check-in by phone or WhatsApp when apart. Is it ridiculous that this makes my heart feel close to bursting? Maybe, but who cares? This is what love feels like, and I can’t help it if a WhatsApp asking me to pick up some dishwasher tablets from Tesco on my way home puts a smile on my face. There are several things that have helped us keep the peace. My in-laws never contradict me if I need to reprimand one of my brood, though, thankfully, the girls have been remarkably well behaved so far. Secondly, we don’t rely on my in-laws for cooking or childcare. Our nanny, Karen, helps us out a few afternoons a week and has had a nostalgia trip of her own since this house also happens to be the site of her first-ever nannying job for Will and his siblings more than three decades ago. So, when we do need the odd favour, like a lift, it feels less of a burden and more of an opportunity for everyone to catch up mid-week. There’s no doubt we’ve all forged a deeper, stronger and more enjoyable connection in these tighter quarters. We feel like a big multi-generational family – one in which we can all be our eccentric, quirky selves, instead of worrying our every move is an irritation. My husband and I have concluded this is because any final shreds of formality, or emotional walls that may have existed between us, have disappeared along with the physical ones. Being under the same roof has helped me appreciate how dynamic, sociable and cultured my in-laws are. They continue to make the most of London living by regularly visiting exhibitions, attending plays and parties or having meals out with friends mid-week. I haven’t quite decided if it’s hilarious or depressing that my husband and I are in bed by 9:30pm most nights, which is when my mother and father-in-law typically sit down to dinner on the evenings they’re home. As gracious and relaxed as my in-laws have been, however, I won’t pretend they won’t be relieved when we move out. I know they’re especially keen to get their sitting room back, which my husband has taken over as both a work-from-home space and home-gym. We’re looking forward to getting back into our own space, too, but the excitement is tinged with wistfulness. I never knew six could be a lonely number, but I wonder if it might start to feel that way, so we’re busy filling our diaries with in-law dates for the coming months. Emotional as I’m feeling about this whole experience, though, I have no delusions about what I’m most excited for when I get home: machine-washable cutlery.