Nesting Narratives, Bed Invaders and the Grown Son Who Won't Back Down

Is divorce nesting good for the kids or just a reconciliation waiting to happen? Should a child ever end up in the marital bed? And when your grown son and your husband cannot be in the same room, who actually comes first?Party's Over returns to the TCL Chinese Theater, a building made entirely of image, perception and performance, and turns to the parenting and lifestyle choices people judge quietly and rarely say out loud. Sandra Lena Silverman and Veida Horn have a great deal to say about all of them.They open on divorce nesting, where the children stay in the family home and the parents rotate in and out. Veida's verdict is immediate. She calls it psychobabble that somehow stuck, and argues it is unhealthy for the children, for the people in the marriage, and for anyone new who walks into it, because it sells the kids a false narrative about a family getting back together. Sandra brings the version she lived. She was seeing a man who had already moved out and whose divorce was already final, and then he announced he was moving back into the family home because the kids wanted to nest. Veida's read is blunt: the children do not know nesting exists, the entire point is to prepare them before the split, and what Sandra was describing sounds like a reconciliation waiting to happen. They also name the cost to the adult, because going back into the old house means going back into the old routines and the old energy, and a parent who divorces when the children are two is looking at sixteen more years of returning to a home they were supposed to leave.Co-sleeping gets the same treatment. Veida is against it on every level, from suffocation risk with an infant to boundary problems with an older child to a marriage that quietly starves because there is no time alone left anywhere in the day. Sandra pushes back with her own years of sleeping in a child's room during a period of anxiety, and Veida draws the distinction that settles it. Exiting the marital bed to go to your child is not the same thing as bringing your child into it. If they are sick, you go to them. They do not come to you. On separate bedrooms, Veida allows the exceptions and names them plainly: snoring that costs you a real night of sleep, illness, an early flight. Then fix the snoring and come back.On posting children online, both are adamant. A private account with a small circle is fine, and grandma can like the photo from Disney World. A public figure posting a child in real time is something