The first night that Una LaMarche and her husband spent together in their Park Slope brownstone, they had to sneak past her parents, sleeping downstairs. Two decades later, LaMarche doesn’t have to sneak around. A lot has changed — LaMarche is 45 now, not 23, her son sleeps in what was her teenage bedroom while she and her husband took over her sister’s — but some things haven’t. Her mother still sleeps downstairs. On the morning we spoke, LaMarche forgot to bring her keys to school drop-off. “I had to call my mom to let me in,” she says. “It’s great, but I’m also like, Am I 12? ”
Moving back wasn’t always the plan for LaMarche, but her mother, Ellen, steered things in that direction. She had bought the house with her now-ex-husband for $260,000, in 1991, and spent the years after LaM