In the first weeks of January, 2022, I confirmed that I was pregnant, and a few days later we drove north to my mother's home to spend the weekend with her, to recalibrate and celebrate.
Sitting around the table in the shabbat candlelight, all feeling deep excitement around the new life whose presence was already with us, our worlds changed forever.
We joyfully shared our plans of my husband, Seth, leaving his brick and mortar coaching business so that he could be more present day to day with me and our child. We shared how that life-design brief, to be present and have time together, was shaping the way we were structuring the new form of our businesses online, and making it possible for us to live wherever it made the most sense for us.
We didn't expect the conversation to turn to how she was thinking about and preparing for her own death, and how that was making her re-evaluate the amount of space she was occupying in my childhood home, a duplex.
We didn't expect her to offer to live even more like a Tibetan Buddhist nun in the Dharma Center she runs in the other side of the duplex, creating space for us to move into the space she left and welcome this new chapter nestled in her wild tropical garden and the home we’ve all lovingly maintained for so long.
The generosity of this choice is something I don’t think I’ll ever have words for, but the thing about generosity- especially intergenerational generosity, is that everyone benefits so much.
Just as I’ve been writing this, she texted me to ask if she could run a load of bulky laundry in our washing machine which is a bit bigger than hers. She also asked if I needed another round of medicine to help fight a nasty cold I’ve been struggling with for the last few days. She came over with her apothecary set and made up the same medicines she supported me with from my childhood, and we spoke about what I’m writing about here. I can hear her even now in the laundry room, and I can’t quite tell if the warmth I feel in my body is from the encapsulated oregano oil I just swallowed or from thinking about and feeling her presence.
About once a week, she’ll ask Seth to carry in a big 5-gallon bottle of water for her kitchen, and often will add a few questions of computer help, bluetooth help, moving-heavy-things help.
My mother and my husband love one another, thank god, but that doesn’t mean they think or operate or communicate the same. I’d be lying if I said it’s been smooth and painless.
The truth is we all trigger deep wounds, patterns, resentments, and discomforts within one another. There have been times it’s been very hard, and the hardest thing of all, in truth, has been for me to communicate my anger at feeling like I’m in the middle of them. One of the deepest and hardest and most rewarding tasks of this process, I think, is the two of them coming into their own ability to communicate their needs to one another, and to adapt in order to thrive together.
Communicating needs isn’t easy. There’s a reason there’s an entire methodology of communication (nonviolent communication) that’s whole point is to help people identify and then communicate their needs.
I’ve never had a harder time with this than in the weeks immediately following the birth of our child. The haze of hormones and healing and sleeplessness and tenderness and pain creates an experience beyond words. It’s an experience that requires tending, collaborative care, and both anticipation and communication of needs. This was really hard for me. I found myself frequently fantasizing about exactly what I needed, what my body needed, what I was longing for, but could not express it with words, even to those who loved me and knew me the best.
My mother, my husband, and my dear beloved friend Thais were all here in this home with me, eager to support me, and I didn’t know how to say what I needed. It was all too new.
Now, a year and three months later, reflecting on one full calendar year of intergenerational living, intergenerational generosity, intergenerational care, I can see how far we’ve come.
I see the absolute joy on everyone’s faces multiple times a day when we cross paths, when we hand off the baby, when we blow kisses across the garden.
I can see how much love flows between us all, and how much gratitude. I can see how the quality time our child spends with my mother shapes the commitment to equal quality time with Seth’s parents, who we spend at least one overnight with each month, and who we FaceTime each evening before bathtime. Their friends with young grandchildren can’t believe that they connect with him daily, but to us it’s as natural and essential as breathing.
As our baby becomes a toddler, the joy and experimentation he gets to experience in the garden with my mother is growing and expanding, as is the amount of mental bandwidth Seth and I have to distill the wisdom of our lives into practical, digestible material to share with others seeking to live, to partner, and to parent on their own terms.
We are blessed to have parents that understand and respect us as parents ourselves, and even perhaps when they don’t understand us, the respect is stable enough to allow us to move through things together well. Not everyone has that in their biological families. And even those who do, may not have the ability to live in proximity to their families to weave them into daily life. But I do know that there are elders who are worthy of our trust, and who would love to live interdependently with young families seeking to live in a deep and rooted way.
The intergenerational dimension of life is one that is sorely missing in our culture, a culture where elders are shut away and rarely honored, and where young families are left to cope entirely alone with a total absence of the kind of economic and policy support that every human being deserves.
And the intergenerational dimension of life is one which extends beyond the current living generations we are blessed to share this world with. It extends to our ancestors, and to the future-beings who have yet to enter this world.
Living, consciously living, within this dimension gives us such a stronger, more stable foundation from which to build a life. It gives us the kind of perspective that can only come from an expanded relationship with time. It gives us much more than we can ever say, but we can live it, we can honor it, and we can give thanks for it.
Now, as we close out this year, I want to settle into a moment of honoring the wisdom, the generosity, and the courage it has taken all of us to make this life work as beautifully as it does. And I welcome the lessons, the collaborations, the growth to come in this dimension of our lives in the year ahead.
And to you, dear reader, I am curious to hear- do you tend to the intergenerational dimension of your life? What does that look like? How would you like that dimension to grow or change in this coming year?