The Quiet Return

I just want to hang out with my family

My grandma sat in the corner of the living room, laughing out loud at cat videos she didn’t know were AI-generated. I scrolled through my phone while gossiping about a friend’s on-again, off-again relationship. “I don’t disagree with you,” I said, “but it’s her decision to stay, not mine.” My mom nodded, still listening, as she got up from the couch to prepare our 5 p.m. dinner.

Dufner, my married name, is foreign to my grandma’s native tongue. “DOOF-ner, right?” she asks at the dinner table for the one hundredth time. “How do you like your dinner, Mrs. DOOF-ner?” Despite her teasing, she’s pronouncing it right. The first half really does sound like the doof in doofus. (To make it easier on restaurant hosts, medical assistants, and the like—I say “DUFF-ner,” like childhood icon Hilary Duff.) Tonight, my mom serves filet of miso cod, coconut rice, and garlicky broccolini. “Not bad,” my grandma says in Chinese, pulling apart the meat with her chopsticks. What she really means is “the meal is delicious.”

When we’re younger, family is the group we want to escape. We beg to leave the house, negotiate curfews, and eventually go off to college or chase a first job. But for many millennials now in their thirties—grappling with financial instability, delayed milestones, and performative online lives—something shifts. Coming home starts to feel like a privilege, not a chore. Time with family becomes less of a mandate and more of a refuge. It’s a quiet return, but a meaningful one.

I applied only to out-of-state schools and ended up in Boston, across the country from my hometown in Southern California. I went back for the holidays but spent summers on campus, enamored with my East Coast life. After graduation, I moved to Los Angeles, then abroad to Japan and South Africa. I loved my family, but they weren’t top of mind. I don’t remember being homesick once. In Tokyo, whenever I felt lonely, I’d walk to the nearest McDonald’s and eat a Big Mac alone amid the chaos. (God, that sounds somber in hindsight.) But I didn’t yearn for family.

Today, living in San Francisco, I find myself thinking about home a lot more. Though the headlines are compelling—another bomb drop, another stock dip, another technological breakthrough—my attention drifts toward my family instead. Group chats I merely graced with my presence when I was younger, I am now an active member, writing updates, sending photos, and asking questions like, “What are you guys up to today?” or “Did the sprinklers get fixed?”

I asked friends if they’d noticed themselves returning to their roots. Most said yes, though their reasons varied—from learning to embrace imperfect family dynamics to savoring time with aging parents. “I optimistically have, like, 50 more times seeing them left in my life,” said an East Coast native living in the Bay Area. “I had a pretty rough-and-tumble relationship with my parents. It wasn’t until I moved far away, healed on my own, and shifted my perspective that I began to reconnect with them.” A friend from college echoed the sentiment: “I think I resented a lot of the choices adults in my life made when I was younger, but now that I’m a still-figuring-it-out adult, I have more grace and understanding.”

My mother divorced when she was 32—the age I am now. I used to resent not having the kind of parent I saw in movies or among my peers: the one who wore beige linen, baked cookies, and helped with homework. My mom raised her voice, brought home boyfriends, and ran late picking me up from piano lessons. Later, she climbed Mount Everest, checked into Ayurvedic treatment centers in India, and drank schnapps in ice bars while I cranked out essays in my dorm. It wasn’t until my thirties that I understood she was doing the best she could at the time. How would I manage an eight-year-old daughter?

The irony is my mom is now the version I always wanted but no longer need. She cooks three meals a day, looks after my cat, and insists I text her when I’ve arrived at my destination. When I’m home, I sit in the kitchen long after breakfast, watching her peel apples, tend to stew, and examine mason jars of pickled vegetables. She repeats the same stories. Sometimes I stop her. Often I don’t.

At some point, my grandma meanders in and hands me her iPad, demanding to know why a brand is sending her emails or what the word parabolic means. She urges me to eat more organic blueberries, then asks if I want a kiwi or a “honey crispy apple” or an avocado or a Brazil nut. When I say no, she rounds up my age and tells me I’d better start taking care of my health. “I’m not kidding you!” she warns. Then she reminds me that I’m old and asks when I’ll have a baby.

Familiarity was another common theme among my friends. One living in New York City speculated that he lost touch with his values in his twenties as he entered the workforce, started earning money, and gained independence—and that returning to family helped him relearn what he believed in. “No one understands you more than your family,” another friend told me. “There’s this homesickness that kicks in.”

Of course, not everyone I spoke to felt the same pull toward home. A Northeasterner now in Los Angeles said it depends on how well one relates to their family. “My dad and I have nothing in common, so we end up disagreeing or fighting,” she said. A friend I grew up next to lived with her family in one capacity or another until she was 31, so there hasn’t been much time to create longing. Still, she said living in a different state is especially hard now that she’s pregnant with her first child.

A craving for home may rush in as people face the on-ramp to starting families of their own. I remember thinking the December before I got engaged: this might be my last holiday at home as a “kid.” In San Francisco, I cook, clean, sort through mail, and make decisions. In Newport Beach, I’m cared for, cleaned up after, and told to go upstairs and rest if I appear even the faintest bit fatigued. Maybe the quiet return is a subconscious grab at the last threads of childhood.

Or maybe there’s a simpler, more practical reason for going home: it’s nice there. “Before 25, I made minimal effort to go back,” my college best friend from a small town in Pennsylvania told me. “But recently, I’ve thought about getting a seasonal place so my kids can experience it. I don’t think I could appreciate it fully as an insider.” As much as I love rotting in my raggedy plush robe, free of household responsibility, yapping about the same politician, celebrity, or news cycle, there’s no denying that where I grew up is idyllic. It’s warm, dry, and full of free parking. I don’t worry about my car getting broken into or witnessing a drug crisis in plain daylight. The drive is long and grinding, but there’s always dinner waiting.