I Bought a House, Yes Alone, But That Doesn’t Mean It’s a Commune for Your Family
Anna stood by the window, pressing her cold coffee cup against her lips. The drink had long since cooled, just like everything else that once felt warm. The yard outside was overgrown with weeds, a discarded jacket lay on the porch, and nearby—sneakers that weren’t hers.
My dream home, she reminded herself from a year ago.
A house I fell for at first sight, like an infatuated schoolgirl who has a crush on a senior.
But at least back then, the schoolboy didn’t unexpectedly show up in her bed claiming it was now his room too.
Meanwhile, Oleg rummaged noisily for his keys in the hallway. He wore a stretched sweater that had once hugged a toned physique; now it revealed only remnants of late-night snacks and home-cooked cabbage.
“I asked!” Anna glanced at the sneakers. “For no one to wander in uninvited! This is MY house, Oleg. MY. I’m the one who paid for it. I alone signed the mortgage.”
Oleg, displaying a forced tiredness in his voice as if coming home from a grueling night shift, which at most included just two Zoom calls a day, replied, “Anya, why are you overreacting? It’s mom. Should we really kick her out in the rain? She’s exhausted. Her foot hurts. And you know, with her it’s like with politics: doesn’t heal, but she discusses it every day.”
Anna set her cup down and turned slowly toward him. Her gaze was filled with everything: hurt, despair, two years of marriage, and thirty years of disappointment in men, who perpetually stood “between mom and wife,” like trees caught between a lumberjack and a carpenter.
“It’s not her foot that hurts. It’s her ego that’s swollen. She just needs to be the main character everywhere.”
“Why are you saying that?” Oleg threw his hands up. “You know she’s old school. She’s used to controlling everything. Her house was her castle. She just wants to help…”
“Help?” Anna interrupted with a sharp laugh. “Yesterday she painted the kitchen walls. GREEN. Want to know what she said? ‘A noble shade, unlike your dreary gray, which looks like a morgue.’ I chose that color for two months, and she just waltzed in with a bucket of paint.”
Oleg retreated towards the coat rack, as if hoping to hide behind a coat.
“Well, we can’t just throw her out…” he muttered again.
Anna wasn’t shouting. Her voice was low, like the quiet before a storm. The type of quiet that sends shivers down a normal person’s spine.
“I didn’t invite her. She comes, takes off her sneakers, and considers this house hers. You know what she told Andrey yesterday? ‘Well, if Anushka leaves, the house will stay with Oleg. He won’t let it fall apart.’”
“Oh, that’s just talk,” Oleg dismissed. “You’re taking everything too personally.”
“Because you’re too detached!” Anna exploded. “Oleg, they think you are entitled to everything. And so do you. You haven’t even invested a penny.”
“Wait,” he frowned. “I supported you emotionally. We chose this plot together, remember?”
“Emotionally supported?!” she laughed, genuinely, loudly. “So while I was gathering documents and running around banks, you ‘emotionally’ lounged on the couch, deciding between ‘Dream Cottage’ and ‘Let’s Talk’?”
He fell silent. Just then, footsteps echoed on the stairs.
“Oh, here comes the queen,” Anna muttered, staring at the ceiling. “Now we’ll have the morning briefing with orders.”
Tamara Petrovna, age 67, wearing a leopard print robe and an expression resembling that of a teacher who’s just been called to a staff meeting, entered the kitchen.
“Anna, dear, I made you some porridge. Oatmeal with water. Just like you love it—tasteless and boring, just like your decor.”
“Thank you, but I prefer to have breakfast in silence.”
“Ah, of course,” the mother-in-law smiled, her smile appeared only at funerals, and even then, it was reserved for the neighbor. “You’re the hostess now. Everything is as you wish. The house is yours. The husband is yours. But the atmosphere in this house is somewhat… like a bachelor pad. It seems as if you’re living alone.”
“Funny,” Anna retorted, looking her in the eye. “Because that’s exactly how I feel.”
The mother-in-law plopped onto a stool and unfolded a newspaper.
“I called the notary today,” she said, as if discussing the weather. “I asked about the shares. After all, Oleg is my son. He lives here. I’m his mother. And you’re technically, of course, the owner… but the family is a collective.”
Anna opened her mouth, then closed it. She approached the kettle, turned it on, filling it with water with a sound like the beginning of a battle.
“Tamara Petrovna, I have something very simple to say. Are you ready?”
The mother-in-law feigned finishing a joke.
“Uh-huh. Just don’t yell, I have high blood pressure.”
“I’m changing the locks. Today. If you want to see your grandchildren, meet them in a cafe. Or at the circus. That fits your style of interaction perfectly.”
Tamara Petrovna set down the newspaper and stood up.
“Are you out of your mind?! You want to kick us out?! Us—the family of Oleg?!”
Oleg lifted his head:
“Anna, you’re overdoing it. This is going too far.”
“No,” Anna stepped closer, holding her gaze. “This is my limit. Enough. I dreamed of a home where no one shouts, interferes, or teaches. But you came here as if for a vacation and assumed that everything is now yours.”
“This is ingratitude,” the mother-in-law hissed. “We accepted you, and you…”
“You didn’t accept me,” Anna interrupted. “You decided that now I’m part of your communal living.”
She walked into the room, slamming the door behind her. A moment later, she heard Tamara Petrovna speaking to Oleg:
“I warned you. Women with ‘I can do it all by myself’ in their eyes end up crying at lawyers.”
“Oh, come on…” he mumbled. “We’ll figure it out.”
Anna sat on the bed and, for the first time in many months, opened the tab for ‘real estate lawyer’ on her phone.
And for the first time in many years, she felt not like a wife, a stepdaughter, or a convenient woman with investments, but simply—herself.
Yet she felt an anxious sensation in her chest: ‘This is only the beginning.’
In the morning, it rained. Not a romantic rain that makes one want to stand barefoot and cry in a movie, but a regular, nasty Moscow rain—sticky, dirty, with streams running down the glass like tears on an accountant’s face on December 30th.
Anna woke up early. So early that even Tamara Petrovna didn’t manage to catch her in the hallway like the floor monitor in a dorm.
In the kitchen, there was a smell of dampness, cheese, and someone’s audacity.
The kettle was boiling. So was Anna.
Outside, the old thuja, planted by her mother-in-law “in honor of the new chapter in their lives,” was getting soaked. Unlike people, it held firm.
Anna stared at her laptop screen. An open window displayed a site for a lock service. A man named Anatoly, with a face that suggested he had divorced twice and changed locks both times for someone else.
“So, three front doors?”—his voice was like that of a hotline operator for “Sobriety is a Normal Life.”
“Two. One on the porch, but it’s nailed shut,” Anna replied shortly.
“Ideally, you should replace everything. New cylinders, new handles. Best Italian. With our mom’s culinary attacks, only that can withstand.”
She smirked. She already liked Anatoly.
“When can you come?”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
Exactly an hour later, an old Fiat the color of “a divorce in the ’90s” pulled up. A balding man with two large bags stepped out. He glanced at the house, the address plate, and then at Anna.
“Is anyone else living here besides you?” he asked for clarification.
“They are. But temporarily. Very temporarily.”
He nodded. No questions. A professional.
Twenty minutes later, the front door lay without a lock, like a fresh canvas ready to be painted—except for yet another visit from Tamara Petrovna.
“Now for the main door,” Anatoly said, looking at her with a slight smirk. “You won’t need ‘Sherlock’ here. Looks like someone’s already been tampering with it.”
“She tried to set her own code,” Anna said. “She claims people did that in their dachas back in her youth.”
“Uh-huh, but back then, they also set their conscience alongside the locks.”
While he worked, the intercom rang.
“Oleg.”
Anna looked at him and didn’t respond.
Half an hour later, he pounded on the door from the outside, like a spurned husband in a Brazilian soap opera.
“Anna! What have you done?! Why won’t you let me in?!”
“Because this is now my sanctuary, Oleg,” she shouted back. “And your regulations won’t get you through the door.”
“Did you change the locks?! Without my knowledge?!”
She opened the window.
“What are you—the housing authority? I didn’t conduct any meetings for approval. I set about saving my home.”
“Mom wants to talk!”
“Let her go to the notary. He loves listening to nonsense; they pay for that!”
Tamara Petrovna appeared below, in her coat over the robe, holding a food container.
“This is borscht!” she yelled. “You aren’t even eating properly!”
“I eat in silence on a schedule,” Anna cut her off. “I won’t allow neither toxicity nor bleach in the borscht.”
Oleg rolled his eyes: “Anna, you can’t do this! This is our house!”
“Yours?” she snorted. “Oh great. Then show me the document. Where’s your signature? Where did you take out that mortgage? Where were you talking to the bank when I was given seven percent over thirty years?”
He fell silent. Tamara Petrovna continued her tirade. She was like an old newspaper: still rustling on.
“We’re family, Anna. You can’t just kick us out. We’ve been around all this time.”
“You’ve been around. Only around. Not with me. Not on my behalf. Just near. And now you will be—behind a fence.”
“You’ll regret this. A house doesn’t make a family. You’ll wither away here alone,” the mother-in-law spat with resentment.
Anna looked at the windows, the clean windowsills, the walls that were once again gray, just as she wanted.
“Maybe I’ll be alone. But at least not with a circus.”
They left. Slowly. As if they’d lost an election.
Anna remained in the silence.
After an hour, a message from her lawyer arrived.
“Summons to court. Tamara Petrovna filed for recognition of cohabitation and shares in ownership through family ties.”
Anna placed her phone down. She sat back. Pressed her lips together.
Thus began the real show. Not a series—a court case. Real. Grandmother against daughter-in-law. A game without rules. But the outcome would be different this time.
And she was ready to go all the way.
To the last brick. To the last word.
The court was held in an old building with peeling walls and the smell of cheap paper, coffee from a vending machine, and the bitter scent of divorces. It reeked of broken dreams and lawyers charging by the hour.
Anna sat on the bench, her eyes fixed on the plastic clock above the door. 09:57.
In exactly three minutes, the hearing would start, where she would officially become the “ruthless daughter-in-law”, who shattered the sacred: the Russian tradition of everyone living together in a house where no one has anything, yet all have rights.
Next to her sat her lawyer—a young woman with a sharp nose and the tone of an algebra teacher.
“Are you sure you don’t want to settle?” she quietly asked, adjusting her folder.
“I’ve been settling for ten years. Now I want to live,” Anna replied without turning her head.
In walked Tamara Petrovna. Like she was at a funeral. Only without flowers.
She’d swapped her robe for a strict suit colored “humiliated truth,” holding a neat packet of documents and photos of herself cutting salad in the dacha kitchen.
“Here,” she declared upon entering, addressing the judge, “this confirms that I lived there! Here I am—next to the fridge! Here—on the porch! Here—cleaning my floor!”
The judge, a sixty-year-old man with a weary face, glanced at the photographs.
“Did you live there or help clean?”
“I helped! But I also lived! Sometimes spent the night, cooked, tended the garden!”
“Gardening in a mortgaged house?” the judge raised an eyebrow.
“But we’re family!” she refused to back down. “It’s ALL OURS!”
Anna clenched her fists.
“Can I say something?”
“Yes, Anna Sergeyevna, you have the floor.”
She stood.
“Only I was registered in this house. I bought it, arranged the loan, and paid for everything myself. My mother-in-law came… uninvited. Without permission. With the key my ex-husband gave her.”
The judge examined the documents.
“It is stated here that there are no kinship relations between you and Tamara Petrovna.”
“That’s right. The connections are only emotional. Kind of ‘you’re like a daughter to us,’ but in reality—I’m a tenant without permission.”
“I’m her mother!” Tamara Petrovna barked. “This is family! Everything is common for us!”
Anna turned to her:
“With us? Tamara Petrovna, we’ve never had an ‘us.’ Just your son, who remained silent all the time. You, who ruled in another’s home. And me, pretending that everything was fine.”
The judge sighed wearily:
“Well. Property rights are not established. The claim is dismissed.”
Anna exhaled. Tamara Petrovna lifted her head:
“What do you mean it’s dismissed?! I planted a flowerbed there!”
“Flowerbeds don’t constitute grounds for real estate ownership,” the judge replied with a slight smirk. “Next case.”
They exited the courtroom in complete silence. In the corridor, Oleg stood, wringing his cap in his hands like a teenager in front of a principal.
“Well, congratulations,” he muttered, avoiding her gaze. “You won. Happy?”
Anna turned to him.
“Do you really think I did this for the win? I just wanted to breathe. Without your mom’s borscht, without ‘now our furniture will go here,’ without the daily ‘who do you think you are in this house.’”
“And me?” he asked bitterly. “I also deprived you of breath?”
She remained silent for a long time.
“You just stood beside me. You didn’t hinder. But you didn’t help either. That was even worse.”
Oleg huffed: “You’ve changed. You’ve become too confident.”
“And you haven’t. You still hide behind your mother.”
Silence hung in the corridor. Then Tamara Petrovna hissed:
“You’ll end up lonely in your own house. No kids, no husband. Alone, like a fool.”
Anna stepped up to her closely.
“But without you. And that’s already a holiday.”
When they left, she stood alone. In the corridor, which smelled of legal cynicism. Then she walked outside. The sun was shining.
This could be where it ends, but life isn’t a series. Here, the endings aren’t accompanied by fanfare, but by bags from the grocery store in hand.
Anna took the bus home. On her lap was a fresh copy of the court ruling.
She settled into her favorite chair by the window. Took off her shoes. Turned on the kettle.
On the phone screen, a new message popped up.
“Hi. It’s Vlad. Remember we met at Natasha’s anniversary? If you’re free, maybe coffee?”
She smiled.
And sent back a short reply:
“Now I’m definitely free. Does Friday work?”