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I was sitting in the chair, baby at my breast, toes curling in agony, and crying silently. What had I done to my life? I liked my life. I worked damn hard for over a decade to make it what it was—the huge circle of amazing, creative friends, the interesting work, the healthy, strong body. And now my insides were seemingly falling out of my vagina and my nipples were destroyed. I would never go to brunch again. I would never write another book. Wasn’t I supposed to be blissed out on hormones and instantly, madly in love with my baby?

This was 2013, and boy did I fall madly in love with that baby, but it took time, and a whole lot of developmental adjustment to catch up to the new shape of my body, the new shape of my brain, and most of all, the new shape of my life—its constraints and possibilities, its burdens and unparalleled delights.

I’ve been writing about this adjustment, in many ways, for seven years here at Examined Family and many before that at On Being, but it wasn’t until I started listening to Michael Feigelson’s awesome new podcast, Birth of a Parent, that I really understood how profound some of these shifts really were. Whether you’re a parent, or have struggled to understand your own, I promise Michael’s work is going to help you see it all in a new, more compassionate light.

Meet Michael…

Courtney Martin: When you look back at your own life, where do you see the seed of your passion for early childhood?

Michael Feigelson: It’s funny, but in 20 years of working on this topic, I’m not sure anyone has ever asked me this question and, now that you have, I don’t have an obvious answer. My gut feeling is that the seeds are somewhere in my adolescence. I struggled a lot in this period with insecurity and was always enamoured with people who seemed to be able to let their inhibitions go and just be themselves, especially musicians and dancers.

A few decades later, I would come to the conclusion that babies and toddlers are the most disinhibited people on the planet. Just last night, I was at the high school graduation party for a family friend. The playlist was a mix of cumbia and reggaeton, the strobe lights were going, but no one was dancing except for two little kids rocking out on the middle of dance floor. For most people that’s just a couple of cute kids, but for me, kids at this age are all rockstars and philosophers.

As Lulu Miller put it in one episode, “they have psychedelic minds” – deep, weird, curious and very funny. I love being around them for that reason.

The premise of the podcast is that we talk a lot about parenthood, but not enough about the ways in which becoming a parent transforms our identities. How would you say that the way in which you experienced this transformation when your daughter Mila was born contrasted with what you understood through the research?

The most striking contrast was that I could cite chapter and verse about what was going on in Mila’s brain, but knew almost nothing about what was happening in Melania and mine. The emotional and physical intensity of becoming parents put a spotlight on what felt like a massive blind spot for someone in a job like mine.

After coming to this realization (and also after Mila started sleeping through the night, which took several years), I became very interested in the science of the parental mind and body. I’ve since visited many of the research labs studying how pregnancy and infant care shape our biology as adults. I’ve also spent a lot of time sharing what I’ve found with parents and people who work closely with them like midwives, nurses, and teachers.

So, in the before times, I would have relied mainly on research from psychology and sociology to understand the transition to parenthood, but now I am inclined to see it also as a neurobiological and a metaphysical event. I’ve come to think of it as a developmental stage that lasts years, not months; a window of human development (not unlike early childhood and adolescence) in which our brains and bodies team up to help us learn at high velocity - so fast that we often can’t even register the learning ourselves.

What do you think we lose out on if we don’t fully embrace, explore, or acknowledge how transformational becoming a parent can be? Relatedly, do you think there are people who are not transformed by it -- like they don’t let it transform them?

If the transition to parenthood is an unrecognized developmental stage as the science suggests, then we are missing out on an enormous amount of unrealised human potential. Take early childhood as an example. We understand that supporting kids early can change their life trajectories and, when this is done at scale, an entire society. I would argue that the same is true for parents except in this case the potential is even greater because the impact on parents also increases the impact on their kids.

What I find very exciting is that we are just starting to understand what this under-explored developmental stage looks like in the brain and body. For example, one of the guests on the podcast, Susana Carmona, is pioneering the study of how pregnancy and infant care shapes the maternal brain. What she has found is that in the peri-natal period, the brain reaches a level of neuroplasticity greater than adolescence. This suggests the true story of mom brain is one of exceptional adaptation and learning, not of loss or deterioration.

The story for dads and other non-birthing parents is different, but follows a similar arc. The more we get involved in infant care, the more we see changes in our brains and bodies. In another episode, Lee Gettler talks about how infant care leads to reductions in testosterone and increases in prolactin and oxytocin in new fathers.

He makes the point that this is adaptive, citing his own experience taking care of a colicky baby night after night and thinking to himself that were it not for the shifts in his hormones, he would not have had the patience to handle it. Like Susana, Lee goes on to explain how the changes that came with parenthood show up in how he deals with difficult situations at work and with friends.

Half a century ago the conventional wisdom was “there is not a lot going on in babies brains,” but, with a little help from neuroscience, today we think about them as the fastest learners on the planet. With that change has come an infusion of interest and resources to figure out what they need to thrive. I think if we fully embrace the transition to parenthood as a developmental stage, we could see something similar happen for parents.

Imagine, for example, a shift from the cultural image of new parents as either naturally gifted or struggling amateurs, to the second fastest learners on the planet! A shift like that would also help foster recognition that during this period we develop skills that (especially with AI in the mix) are desperately needed in society at large - patience, negotiation, decision-making amidst uncertainty, perspective taking, coaching, compassion. But, just like with our kids, this potential only gets flushed out if we have the right kind of support. In a world like that, taking time to focus on childcare when kids are little would show up on a CV as evidence of advanced training in management plus a doctorate in philosophy, not a gap.

Of course, what I am describing is at the level of a culture change so it may feel big and out of reach, but I there is also a lot to be gained at the individual level right now. By letting ourselves fully embrace the enormity of this change and not trying to get back to the person we were, we give ourselves the space to evolve.

There is this paper by LA Paul, What Not to Expect When You’re Expecting, where she uses becoming a parent as the textbook case of what she calls “transformative experience.” She defines this as an experience that you can’t use rational decision-making to choose because after you’ve had it you will no longer be the same person. In my case, that transformation meant feeling more grounded, more capable of love, and more creative. Not at first - the first years I mainly felt tired and emotionally unstable – but eventually.

In terms of your last question, I do think many (maybe most) people resist, but the more involved we get in taking care of our kids, the more futile this resistance becomes. If you spend enough time with them, they will break you. What’s interesting is that in sharing the emerging science with parents, many express that it makes them feel more free to embrace the transformation. For some people, the scientific validation that this is an embodied process that has evolved over 100s of thousands of years liberates them to express what they were feeling anyway. It diminishes the need (or the desire) to resist.

What is your greatest hope for the podcast?

Most shows for parents are pretty practical. For better or for worse, this one isn’t. It’s more of an opportunity for people who are interested in parenthood to nerd-out and meditate on it from a wide range of perspectives - evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, ecology, management theory, storytelling, religion, etc. I get that this is not for everyone, so my first hope is that the show finds its people and that those people share it and talk about it together. For example, several people have told me they are using it in listening circles with other parents. In this way, I hope the show helps people connect.

My second hope is that the framing and ideas inspire other creators and practitioners to make and share things of their own. For example, an educator from Washington DC heard a few episodes and wrote me that she was going to start including content about the parental brain in workshops for the parents in her community. An artist (who also happens to be my wife) started making drawings on this theme that I’ve started including on my Substack. A colleague in India wrote that they’d like to adapt some of the episodes for a campaign to celebrate parenthood. These kinds of anecdotes are really exciting to me. I’ve started keeping a list, but my hope is that it grows so much that I lose count.

What is the last great lesson that Mila taught you?

How to be in a relationship of asymmetrical love.

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Listen to the pod here. (By the way, it was produced by indy producer and mom of three kids, Sabine Jansen, and I think she did a tremendous job!) Follow Michael’s Substack here and take a look at the work of his foundation here.

Have you ever considered how much your brain changed when you became a parent (if you did, of course)? What was the last great thing a disinhibited toddler taught you?

1. This song helps us understand that death is a door:

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A pastiche of what made last week so beautiful:

More to come…

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Here’s my pattern: I have a personal experience of disjuncture, confusion, heartbreak, surprise, and then I start tentatively, at first, and then with more vigor, asking around: “Everybody else seeing this?”

Sometimes people say, “Yes, we see this. But it’s just how it is.” (I don’t like this answer. Ever.)

Sometimes people say, “I hadn’t thought about it quite the way you’re describing, but yes, I see it and I think it’s messed up, too.” (This is better.)

Sometimes people say, “Yeah, but what could we possibly do about it?” (This one really puts fire under my ass.)

I start researching. I start reporting. I start obsessively discussing the issue with anyone nerdy enough at the cocktail party to pair up with me. I pitch stories to whoever will take me. I mostly get rejected. I sometimes get a big, fat YES from the exact right editorial partner.

That’s what happened to me with the except of the article I am about to share which went live in The Nation this week.

Ever since discovering that my dad’s memory care community is worker-owned, I’ve been convinced that it is a huge part of the reason that it is such a humane place in a sea of more and more inhumane elder care. So I started digging and discovered that there is a small, but growing movement of worker owned elder care providers. That’s right! The person who provide the daily care in your home to your auntie with dementia who loves murder mysteries is not only the one that reminds her when the new Matlock is on and makes her a delicious dinner to eat while watching it, but decides (along with her colleagues) how much care partners gets paid, how long their work hours are, how much vacation time they get, what the nature of the hiring and training process is etc. etc. In other words, they are caregivers, but also leaders and experts. Duh.

It’s a win-win-win. The care partner wins because she’s treated with dignity and agency. The person being cared for wins because she gets better care because her caregiver is fairly compensated and respected. The family members of the person being cared for wins because they know their loved one is in skilled, respected hands. And wait, there’s one more win! The rest of the medical team, if they’re smart, win if they listen to the insights of the care partners who know the most about the day-to-day quality of life of their clients.

You can read all about it in this meaty, reported piece. Thanks to my incredible editor, Emily Douglas, who brought both a skilled editorial eye, but her whole heart to the collaboration, and special thanks to all the amazing people I spoke with for the piece—every last one of whom left me more informed, more hopeful, and more aware to the deep origins of this growing movement (so many of these are generational stories). I can’t wait to hear what you think…

When she was 33 years old, Clara Calvo came to New York City from the Dominican Republic. Along and looking for a foothold in her new country, she took a job at a garment factory sewing cotton T-shirts. Her mother, a skilled seamstress who had raised 12 children, had passed on her sewing skills to Clara—skills that would help her earn more than the base salary of just over $4 an hour.

When Clara went to collect her pay after her first two weeks on the job, the floor boss told her she was owed for only one week. She remembers staring him down across the table that separated them. Her fellow workers had told her that the company owed them money too but that they were afraid to press the issue. Many of them were undocumented; what if the boss reported them to immigration officials? “Mantén la cabezabaja,” they told her. Just keep your head down.

From her mother, Clara also inherited a lack of tolerance for bullshit. When the boss continued to insist that she had miscalculated, she pushed the table into his belly and said, “I want my money today or I’m going to call 911.”

She left with what she was owed and vowed to never come back. But finding better work proved difficult. Stints dyeing women’s hair at a salon in Staten Island—where the sharp smell of ammonia made her feel sick—and working in the unbearably hot confines of a food truck weren’t long-lived. Things at home were eroding too; she and her new husband fought a lot. One night he hit her in the face and became violent with her young daughter. She was determined to leave him but needed a dependable job. But how?

In 2001, her friend recommended she check out Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. “You could be a home attendant,” her friend explained.

Clara was hired and took to the work at CHCA immediately…

Read the rest here. Or in the print September issue.

And if you are a family member or a client looking for care (especially in California, Washington, New York, and Wisconsin, where there are particularly robust hubs of worker-owned care), take the time to try to find such an agency to support your family.

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There is a scar on my right thumb that I enjoy lying about sometimes. Because of the nature of it—right across the entire bottom of the digit—I tell little kids that I once chopped off my own thumb with an axe. The truth is much less dramatic. I got a small wart surgically removed when I was a girl and, for a reason I don’t fully understand, it left this rather significant scar.

As I was listening to someone make a distinction between curing and healing the other day, my gaze dropped to my scar and I realized how much affection I have for it. If I could erase it, I wouldn’t. It has been a part of the landscape of my body for so long, somehow connecting me, not just to that wart, but to all the “warts” of my childhood, to my little girl self, to pain and growth and the rest of what comes after.

Midlife has been a real education in healing, as opposed to curing, for me. In fact, I’ve come to believe that it is the incurable things in our midst that teach us the most about being alive.

My dad’s dementia is the most obvious case in point. It is incurable, of course. But is it in-healable? I don’t actually think so. I have found it healing to find community—my support groups where people say out loud what has felt unsayable in other circles, a memory care facility full of quirky elders and dedicated professional caregivers, advocacy groups like Reimagining Dementia that are doing the cultural work to make the disease less invisible.

I have found healing through inhabiting new stories while honoring old. The dad I grew up with no longer exists. But just like that scar on my thumb, I carry that guy with me—the one who was exuberant philosophical, who helped me feel calm on an anxious day, who bragged about me and my brother to anyone who would listen. But I also don’t cling to that guy. I try to be present and in my body with the new person he has become—a mostly silent person, a person who drums his hands to music, a person who kisses me on the forehead, a person who may be going blind (hard to tell). The ability to hold the old story alongside the new story is what allows the continued connection. If I only lived in the past with him, I would no longer be able to spend time with him each week. But if I only lived in the present with him, I would be lying about my grief and what I need to carry with me forever in order to honor us both.

It also heals us—me and my dad—to acknowledge how much is unknowable. I don’t know what it is like to be him anymore. His fantastic doctor doesn’t know exactly what medication regimen he should be on, and that isn’t a failure of hers, it’s a reality of the disease, its idiosyncratic nature in our idiosyncratic bodies, and the lack of collective scientific understanding on it all. The more I acknowledge and paradoxically explore and accept the unknown, the more healing seems possible.

If I look for cures, I suffer, and I think he does, too.

Turns out, this applies to my parenting as well. When I try to cure my kids of what ails them—the heartbreak of losing a friend, the excruciating wait for something they want, the tension between two very different sisters—I sometimes create temporary relief for them, but in the long run enable greater suffering. They can’t develop the muscles of healing if I don’t give them space and time to hurt, to grieve, to tolerate the incurable.

We just adopted a rescue dog a few months ago. She’s four years old, so she’s lived a lot of life before we got her. There is no curing her of the trauma she’s had and we will never know the exact nature of it. Like my dad, my dog Della is a deeply embodied, but silent partner in healing. There are clues—she’s missing one of her front teeth, she barks savagely at men on bikes, she has likely had a litter of pups the shelter reports. We will move forward, without much reliable insight, from here—trying to heal her nervous system from what has distorted it, loving her each day and reassuring her that she is now safe, understanding her limitations because of the unknowable life she’s led.

Curing is so often whitewashing, redacting, pretending, repressing, perfecting, purity, delusion. It requires you to pretend to know exactly what should happen, to remove, to run away, to erase.

Healing is wabi sabi, reflective, representative of reality. It is about groping towards what is truly possible, and not always knowing what is truly possible. It is about witness, accepting acknowledging limitations and portals and endings. It is about the freedom that comes from telling the truth.

I think I spent too much of the first half of my life looking for cures. I came by it honestly. We live in a country obsessed with cures, a nation that creates so much suffering because we refuse to tell the truth and let it be a portal, because we are afraid to heal honestly, which is to say messily and with a lot of uncertainty about how it is all supposed to unfold. Healing is such a destabalizing, surprising journey, while curing promises control and often leads to blame.

My husband’s scoliosis wasn’t cured as a kid and so one of his shoulders is noticeably higher than the other. Whenever I end up behind him, walking somewhere, I see the slant and am reminded of his vulnerability, of who he was as a child, of all that has gone unsaid and unsolved. And I don’t wish him symmetrical. I love him even more for his specific, imperfect body. I know it as a home. Usually he’s holding one of our daughter’s hands. Usually the day is long. But we all curl up together somewhere in the house when night falls, our lids eventually grow heavy and breathing eventually slows, and I wrap my arm the closest creature, that scarred thumb healed by the proximity of all these inevitably irreovocably broken bodies and hearts.

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Stella turns 10 years-old tomorrow. A decade of Stella is a lot of Stella, and of course, I can’t wait for as many more as life will bless me with. She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met, with some star trails of various family members (dead and alive). She’s a real Leo—confident in her talent, magnanimous and charismatic, and very emotional. Thanks for making me wiser, my girl…

1. Completion is for suckers. The measure of how worthwhile something is should not be whether you finished it. In fact, who says what’s finished? We don’t even know if death is a real ending. Why would we keep doing something once it stops being fun and alive for us?

2. Fluidity is where it’s at. If you worry less about defining yourself or other people, you have more time to respond in the white hot moment to what you feel, what you want to wear, and who you want to crush on. Stella hasn’t read Octavia Butler yet, but damn if she doesn’t live like “the only lasting truth is change.”

   

3. Feel your feelings and move them along. Stella loves feelings. She has feelings posters taped on her wall, a wheel of emotions in her room, and notebooks filled with original love songs, dreams, and secrets. When she gets mad, you really know it. When she’s sad, it permeates the room. And then it’s gone—moved on through her body because it had a chance to be exercised, expressed, acknowledged.

4. Apologize genuinely and quickly. Stella can be hurtful, but she also registers when she’s hurt someone and is very quick to apologize—usually in a handwritten note slipped under the door. She doesn’t seem to be hampered by a grand theory that she doesn’t or won’t hurt people, like some of us; she knows she will and she’s explicitly sorry when she does.

5. Laughter really is the best medicine. I’ve never met anyone who likes to laugh, who pursues a laugh, more than Stella. And it’s not only fun, but it’s been healing for our family on so many different occasions. She’s a midwife of laughter.

   

6. Start your day with a surprising question. Do pigs eat sandwiches? Who is that Jesus guy everyone is always talking about? What is suicide? What is a dog…to you? Why do people cheat on each other? Does getting your period hurt?

7. Create your own way of speaking with the divine. Stella has a invented polytheistic spirituality of her own and distinguishes between God Wishes and prayers. She likes church because there are a lot of other kids there to have fun with, but it doesn’t define or mediate her relationship with God(s).

8. Dogs are gods.

   

9. Crush a lot. Stella pays a lot of attention to people that she either wants to be with or wants to be, and doesn’t necessarily worry about distinguishing the two. It’s like admiration overload, but there is never too much. She revels in the giddiness, the pursuit, the animal magnetism that some people have for her.

10. Always seek out and root for the underdog. If there is a room full of people, Stella is going to find the quiet one, the lumpy one, the slumping one, the one that often gets overlooked, and she’s going to joke around with them until a light comes back into their eyes. It’s a very relationally rewarding way to live.

    

    ---

What is something a great kid has taught you?

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As always, thanks so much to our wonderful community here for commenting, subscribing, and sharing these dispatches with your own beloved. You can feel it all radiating out through your big, resilient hearts. I don’t take it for granted.

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Yesterday, my 9-year-old kid asked me: “Is it hard to be a parent?”

We were driving and we’d been enjoying an easy silence for awhile. I have no idea what led her to ask this, but it sent my thought trains down a few different tracks immediately.

Part of me felt like letting out a big delicious laugh. “You haven’t noticed? Yeah girl, it’s hella hard.”

Part of me felt like focusing on the wonderful aspects of parenting instead of answering her question uncensored. I don’t want her to feel confused about whether she is “to blame” for the hard stuff. I grew up with that kind of confusion sometimes and it was heavy. We so easily transmogrify adult complexity into kid logic and wear it uneasily for the rest of their lives.

Part of me felt like going down an existential rabbit hole. Is parenting hard? Is co-existing with people with different kinds of brains and tendencies and desires hard? Is being a person hard? Is living on this planet at this time in relationship to other humans hard? Is change hard? Is love hard?

Instead I just said, “It can be, but it’s also amazing. I think I’m a pretty good fit for parenting because I like to take care of people and make them feel safe, and I love getting to know people. And there’s really no experience of getting to know people that’s more interesting than getting to know your own kids over time. Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering,” she said. “Sometimes it seems fun. And sometimes it seems hard.”

“That’s about right,” I said. “I think you’re seeing it accurately.”

My kid has inexplicably gotten really into the idea of being a teenage mother. She has invented two characters—Lily and Finn, a baby and her teen mom—and she likes to talk to me for long stretches about their schedule. “Finn has figured out that if she puts Lily in her car seat next to her pool, she can swim laps in the morning and get her exercise without needing a babysitter,” my kid tells me.

Finn is somehow a nurse and a waitress, who also goes to school full time, while her kid is at “a few hours” of daycare. She also lives in a mansion and eats a lot of açai bowls. I can tell that what appeals to my kid about this imaginary world she’s built is all the ways that Finn has strategized how to get through the day when other people underestimated her. Finn is her underdog. (And seems to have been born through a Roblox roleplaying game called Berry Avenue.)

I remember playing at overwhelm and exasperation as a kid. For me it was through Barbies, not online role playing. But all the same, it felt deliciously adult and important—look at me, keeping this very detailed appointment book! Look at me, running late for everything because I am so important and so busy! Look at me, being torn in a million directions! What significance!

These days, I am trying to learn to be less significant. I don’t want to be overwhelmed or busy or have a full appointment book or run late. I want to feel the summer sun on my skin and wonder what time it is. I want to pay attention to the moment when my dog, snuggled up against me, gives the big breath that signals she is totally and completely relaxed. I want to read Little Women out loud to my 12-year-old and take a bath with my 9-year-old while they’ll still let me. I want to get way too serious about a sandwich making competition with my brother-in-law and be genuinely light about my paid work, which miraculously involves good words and good people.

If I never had to look at another spreadsheet about pick-ups and drop-offs, that would be fantastic, but since that’s not possible at this point in my life, I guess I just hope not to mistake the spreadsheet for my life, or my competence, or most of all, my relationships with my kids.

I’ve been bothered by a nagging worry since my kid started telling me these “Lily and Finn” tales: Have I modeled something for her that makes the second and third shifts seem like a game women have to be inexhaustible and inventive to win? Did I inadvertently make it look virtuous to “do it all?”

Ugh. Probably so. I do get pretty jazzed when I feel like I am running on all cylinders…until I crash into some kind of peri-menopausal wall of resentment and dread and then I am zero fun to be around, much less pretend to be. Some nights 8pm rolls around and I feel like all the magic has gone out of me, like a snow globe with no snow. I crawl into my bed and pretend I can’t hear them yelling from the other room, “Mom? Moooooooooom? Moooooooooooooooom?”

They find me anyway. They always do. And they need to know where the retainer was left or what time the Scouts meeting is tomorrow, or they need to make an airtight case against the other sister whose behavior is always entirely unexplainable, or they just want to curl in bed beside me, and this, the last scenario, is the only one that will do. “You can be here as long as you don’t talk,” I bark at my beautiful child, and she says okay and opens up her graphic novel and sometimes laughs to herself but remembers not to tell me the joke because I don’t care and will no longer, at this hour, pretend to.

Is parenting hard? It can certainly be relentless. And sometimes it’s way more responsibility than I can actually shoulder. But it’s filthy rich with meaning. And never stops surprising me in a world that sometimes feel very boring and predictable. It’s heavy and messy and impossible, and delightful and sweet and sacred. It will destroy and remake you if you let it. It will break you and keep you motivated to become more whole.

The older my girls get, the more I am aiming for the ease beyond the difficulty, a parenting parallel to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ simplicity beyond the complexity. Parenting becomes, every day more and more, about witnessing who my daughters are becoming and not interfering with it. Sure, I have to keep them safe, but mostly I think that involves doing the administration (scheduling, reaching out, asking) needed to strengthen their connections with a wide range of people—aunties and teachers and friends and mentors. Sure, I have to keep nourishing the foundational sense of trust between us, but that’s an art, not a science, involving a lot of listening and letting go and, to be honest, non-verbal communication. Sure, I’m scared as hell many days about how fast they’re growing up, but it’s balanced by such a deep admiration I have for both of them. What wonders! What weirdos! What beauties!

In other words, my girl, it’s nothing you could ever imagine your way into, even though I get why you try. Every parent-child relationship is truly different, shaped by their chemistry, their psyches, their time. You and me are a pair unlike any other, but every child and parent—on some level—feels that way. That’s the magic. And the torture. And the magic.

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As promised, here is Dani McClain’s beautiful essay, “Renovations and Rebirths,” from the new anthology, Living, Together.

The house where I grew up had been my mom’s childhood home before it was mine, the place where my maternal grandparents raised their eight daughters. I had lived with my mother in apartments in Cincinnati before moving as a toddler to the ranch home in Camp Dennison, a community of a few hundred people located northeast of the city. Built in 1928 by my grandfather’s maternal grandparents, the four-bedroom, two-bathroom house had always felt like home, even when it was a destination for weekend overnights and holiday parties. My aunts, uncles, cousins, other extended family, and neighborhood kin had gathered there long before I was born.

When I was eight, my Aunt Pam joined us. My grandmother had recently died at fifty-eight from lung cancer and my grandfather had been gone five years, killed at barely sixty by a heart attack. The grief surrounding their early deaths hung heavy in the rooms I shared with my mother. When my aunt came, she brought with her a lightness, a sense of possibility. Together, she and my mom set about the work of creating an updated, contemporary version of the house that reflected who they were and aspired to be as women in their thirties. They painted the spacious front room and dining room in a pale lemon yellow and put down similarly colored rugs, choices that reflected a sleek sophistication and their relentless commitment to spotlessness. They bought new furniture, including a white couch, for the living room and painted its brick fireplace white, further elevating the space from its cozy but lived-in feel. One of the four bedrooms was transformed into a family room with a cream-colored tiled floor, a wall of windows, and a skylight. Off that sunroom they built a deck overlooking the spacious backyard and in-ground pool. Two single professional Black women in-vested their time and money in their family home, and in doing so achieved a Black elegance much like what the Huxtables brought to the TV world every Thursday night. And they accomplished it all without a husband in sight.

This was the two-parent family with whom I lived until I was eighteen, and who I claimed as my innermost unit of blood relations until my aunt’s death in 2015. Growing up in a house with two women at the head shielded me from a patriarchal domestic framework and provided me with a different model for adulthood and family making. I remember very little tension in that home. There were no displays of domination, only expressions of sharing power. The culture was collaborative, respectful, and kind. I learned over the course of that decade how two people can join efforts to create a refuge for themselves and each other. They did yard work together, planting flowers and mowing the lawn in the warm months, and raking leaves and shoveling snow when the temperature dropped. They cleared the gutters when it was time to ready the house for winter. They vacuumed the pool, vacuumed the floors, dusted, cooked. Domestic work wasn’t gendered. I picked up some chores as I got older, but mostly I was encouraged to focus on my school-work and the extracurriculars I got involved with over those years. I knew I could expect to see my mom and aunt at my soccer games and track meets, the school plays and awards ceremonies. I never lacked the assurance of their love and support.

Twenty-five years after departing this often-idyllic childhood home for college, I came to know it in a new and different light. Late in the morning of January 12, 2021, I picked up my daughter from preschool and drove her the half hour from central Cincinnati to that house in the suburbs, as I did most weekdays. When I arrived, I found my youthful and athletic sixty-seven-year-old mother col-lapsed on the floor of her bedroom, unresponsive. The paramedics took her to the nearest hospital, and it was there I learned she had suffered a brain bleed and would need to be airlifted elsewhere for an emergency surgery to relieve the pressure in her skull. It was not clear during these fear-filled hours whether she would survive the operation. She did.

Thus began the long road of my mother’s recovery from a hemorrhagic stroke that nearly claimed her life. She would stay in the neuro ICU for just shy of two weeks and then move to an inpatient rehabilitation program for almost a month. In those frigid January and February weeks, I shuttled between the apartment where I lived with my child and those rooms where my mother mostly slept, suspended somewhere between this world and the next. I made the commute between my home and her temporary homes, places where first a ventilator aided her labored breathing and then where she began the arduous tasks of learning again how to speak and how to move through the world without full use of her left limbs.

On February 19, my mother went home. Or, I should say, she came home to my daughter and me. In the weeks following her stroke, I made arrangements to move from our apartment into her house, where she’d lived by herself since my aunt’s death. The lightning-fast consolidation of two households into one was chaotic and grueling. It could not have happened without the support of family and friends near and far who packed and moved boxes, organized and brought meals, provided childcare, and gave of their time and resources in ways I still haven’t understood how to properly ac-knowledge. Perhaps there is no appropriate expression of gratitude. But I now know that mutual aid is real. Selflessness is real. Community can be real, a set of actions, not just a buzzword. My mother, daughter, and I survived those winter months because we are loved, and that network of beloveds formed a circle of warmth and support around us while the winds of circumstance whipped about, threatening to undo us.

Once those winds died down a bit, there we were: three generations in a house that had held my family for three generations prior. It had provided refuge for my recent ancestors and now it would provide refuge for my mother, my daughter, and myself. Because the house is one level, it was accessible to my mother, who was confined to a wheelchair in those months before she learned how to walk with the help of an orthotic brace and quad cane. A carpenter friend and his architect father donated their time and built a wooden ramp to the front door, allowing my mother to bypass the several steps from ground level into the house. In addition to that external modification, we made small changes inside: Grab bars were installed in the bathroom and at the entryway to the sunken kitchen. My daughter’s daybed, which had been my own as a child, was moved into a larger bedroom to allow more space for her to play. A display cabinet filled with antiques was emptied and transported out of the house to make room for my daughter’s play kitchen. My mother had new required accessories as well. A bedside commode made using the toilet easier. I stored her shower chair in a corner of the smallest bedroom, which is where two of my mom’s sisters stayed on and off during those first months as we struggled to find and orient to the new normal.

I decided not to sleep in that smallest bedroom, a choice I knew would not please my mother. For one thing, my aunts who stayed overnight to help were in their seventies and needed a comfortable place to rest. But there was another reason behind my decision. The three bedrooms were clumped together in the back of the house, and I felt strongly that when the day was finished, I needed as much space around me as possible. Once I had my daughter and my mom tucked comfortably in their beds, and I had cleaned the kitchen and taken care of whatever final tasks needed tending to, I needed to be alone with my thoughts and my TV shows and my phone calls and my scrolling. I was desperate for whatever privacy I could find in that hour or two or three before I went to sleep and then got up and did it all over again.

So when that same friend who also built the ramp agreed to help move my bed from my apartment to my mom’s house, I had him assemble it in her living room. I took over that spacious front room—the jewel of the house that I’d watched my mom and aunt transform with its pristine lemon-yellow and the white brick fire-place over which hung a signed, original Gilbert Young graphite drawing. I moved into storage the white couch and the tchotchkes that had long lined the room’s glass shelves. I made space for my queen-size bed, a desk, two bookshelves, my own photos and knick-knacks, and a folding screen that did little to shield my makeshift bedroom from the sight line of anyone entering the front door. I didn’t care. It was what I could do to create my own little apartment within this house to which I’d returned under less-than-ideal circumstances.

My mother and daughter resting on the other side of the house, my endless to-do list paused for the night, I could try to return to myself as a woman in her early forties, the me who had been a writer and thinker in the midst of what felt like a fulfilling career. If I needed to stay up late working or get up early to sit at my laptop, I could do so without fear of disturbing either of my charges and losing what little I could cobble together of the precious silence. I could return to myself as someone with friends I could call and a life outside these domestic and caregiving demands. I could peruse the apps and try to reclaim the me who wanted to date, or binge prestige or trash TV. I could dream of writing another book. I could simply catch my breath. I knew my mother hated that I’d taken over a room that she and her sister and their own mother before them had deco-rated with such pride. But I felt I deserved it. And so I enjoyed what little solitude I created there.

My mother’s recovery remained at the center of our joint efforts, but other aspects of our lives were in progress. There were new routines and practices to establish, existing ones to tweak given the new environment. I was, after all, parenting a four-year-old. Making sure her life was filled with joyful, rich, and developmentally appropriate experiences was a priority as well. After six months in our new home, she started kindergarten. Overall, the transition seemed to be smooth for her. She’d had overnights and weekends at the house since she was a baby, and it had long been a second home to her, just as it had been for me before I moved in as a toddler.

I became mother to a school-age child just as my workload on the domestic front morphed into something new and significant. I had been the only adult in our rented two-bedroom walk-up since soon after my daughter’s first birthday. Now I was the only able-bodied adult in a hundred-year-old house on a quarter acre lot. The house had many demands, including a raccoon that had nested in the attic for the winter, a significant plumbing issue, a washer/dryer that needed moving from the unfinished basement—which was only accessible from outside—to the ground level of the house. I’d grown up watching two people collaborating to take care of such things. Now, here I was mostly alone, although my friends were there to chip in when I called on them. One drove down from Yellow Springs to clear the gutters with me that first fall. I’ve had help raking leaves and shoveling and salting walkways. But it has largely been me, urging my mom toward decisions and marshaling forces, placing calls and managing plans.

That first year, friends would comment on how commendable I was, and I’d stare at them blankly, unsure what to say. I just did the next thing in front of me, the thing that had to be done. At forty-two, I felt firmly middle-aged but also too young to be faced with the challenges of caregiving. Two years after my mom’s stroke, I read a New York Times Magazine article headlined “The Agony of Putting Your Life on Hold to Care for Your Parents” by Jaeah Lee. The story echoed some of my experience and placed it in a broader con-text. In it I learned that my “sandwich generation” experience was less unique that I’d thought. In fact, “the share of caregivers who are under forty-five quintupled over the past two decades, to nearly 66 percent from 16 percent,” Lee writes. Our boomer parents are living longer, but with more disabilities and less financial stability than their own parents.

Like me, the woman profiled in the article was a single mother living with her children and her father as she helped him recover after a traumatic event. Like me, her career felt tenuous as caregiving moved to take a central role in her life. Like me, she spent her days doling out medication, monitoring blood pressure, ferrying her dad to doctor’s appointments, and peppering clinicians with questions. The article and its comments section, full of the testimonies of exhausted and overwhelmed caregivers, filled me with anxiety as I came to better understand the structural failures that shift the work of tending to ailing elders and disabled kin to family members. The health insurance system offers little support, and many of us can’t afford professional caregivers, who are themselves underpaid and vulnerable to exploitation by employers. But reading the article also highlighted the ways I wasn’t quite so bad off as the thirty-four-year-old Cleveland woman who had let the reporter peer into her family’s life.

For one, my mother is a homeowner, and I moved in with her, not the other way around. In doing so, I stopped paying rent and utilities. I covered groceries and picked up other household expenses. Some of these have been significant, particularly in the early weeks and months when my mother was still convalescing, her brain too fragile to do much beyond repair itself. I also paid the aides who cared for my mom in those first years so that I could get time to work or otherwise be away from the house. It would be nice to receive pay for the caregiving I provide, and I know such an arrangement is possible in some circumstances. But I haven’t pursued compensation. My mother and I have had a loving relationship, and I’ve felt it’s been my duty to show up for her. Perhaps more importantly, the arrangement isn’t ruining me financially, and I am likely breaking even. This adds to the feeling that my mother and I are supporting each other, a faint echo of the support I watched my aunt and her offer each other.

My daughter and mother were thick as thieves in those infant and toddler years before my mom’s stroke, and I believe my daughter’s presence has hastened my mother’s recovery. I’ve seen it in the way my daughter has insisted on rambling, fast-paced conversations in spite of the aphasia that often makes my mother’s words falter. My child is undeterred by the verbal stops and starts, motivated as ever to laugh and joke with her grandmother. I’ve seen the healing potential in the way they cuddle in my mom’s bed, and I’ve watched my mother strive to gain more mobility so she can be present with my daughter. They can no longer go on lengthy walks, or take drives together, chase each other around the yard, or roll around on the floor. But even the ability to walk into my daughter’s room, to sit beside her bed, and to read with her brings my mother joy. She is rarely so happy as when on the sidelines at my daughter’s soccer games or in the audience at her dance recitals. As we near four years since that January day when everything changed, my mom can again care for my daughter while I’m out or otherwise engaged. I never expected we’d be here again.

This intimacy benefits not just them but me as well. While I am often hungry for privacy, I rarely suffer from loneliness or feelings of isolation. I enjoy the simple but comforting ritual of eating dinner together most nights, and the stress-reducing practice of sharing expenses. But the biggest benefit of living with my mom over these years has been that it’s given me a front row seat as she’s clawed her way back from the brink of death. I have gotten to watch the woman who guided me as I learned to walk, talk, feed myself, and venture out of the house on excursions learn again how to do these things herself. I have been given the opportunity to watch—and perhaps even midwife—a rebirth.

I understand that I am one of the lucky ones. For many caregivers, their loved one’s health and well-being could be represented by a line that generally trends downward. My mother is aging, of course, and there will be more decline. But these past few years have also been marked by significant improvements. She has committed herself to physical, speech, and occupational therapy. Her words come more fluidly now, with less halting as she scans her mind for what she wants to say. She works tirelessly to build strength in her legs and improve her gait.

She is steadfast and determined, and has gained more independence than I thought possible. When my resentments run high, I remember this: I am learning to see the honor in providing care, understanding that it costs me relatively little to open that jar, retrieve that fallen object from the floor, sweep, rake, shovel, arrange the refrigerator so she can find what she needs—all things she would love nothing more than to be able to do on her own. She is and has been working doggedly at recovery. I help and observe and learn. Meanwhile, my daughter gets to grow up in a family that is rooted in collaboration, respect, and kindness, just as I did.

Buy the anthology that this wonderful essay it is featured in, along with so many other great meditations on imaginative living. Check out my interview with the anthology’s editor. Buy Dani’s book, We Live for the We, here. And read more of her work here.

And by all means, tell us about your multigenerational living seasons in the comments below. When did non-nuclear parenting benefit you? When did health crises lead to more interdependence? How did you struggle and benefit from it?

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If you’re struggling with something, chances are the answer in some way, shape, or form is community. Or at least that’s been my experience in my 46 years on this too often lonely planet. When I got confused about where to send my kid to school, I found a rag tag group of parents all over the country that were committed to being a force for integration. When I fell down the hell that is our elder care “system,” I found solace in day programs, support groups, and all other manor of collectivizing. And when I was pregnant and in my late 20s, trying to figure out how to be a grown-up, you better believe I jumped on the chance to live in intergenerational, interfaith cohousing with some intentional community veterans. I lived there for over a decade and it completely transformed how I understand abundance, cooperation, and, yes, the many uses of homegrown kale (true to stereotype).

So of course I am over the moon about a new anthology, Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection, just out from Beacon Press (who also published my book, Do It Anyway, back in the day). Living, Together features a few of my favorite contemporary thinkers on interdependence, including Rhaina Cohen (author of The Other Significant Others) and, as mentioned, Dani McClain.

I will be publishing Dani’s gorgeous essay about multi-generational living on Friday. In the meantime, here’s an interview with the anthology’s editor, Samantha Paige Rosen…

Courtney Martin: You begin the book talking about your own pleasurable experience of living with your parents as an adult—something that grew out of crisis, but has become a choice. It seems that in the case of multigenerational households, part of the challenge, is rewiring adult relationships and not falling back into early conditioning. How did you do this re-wiring when you all lived together as adults?

Samantha Paige Rosen: For me and my parents, I think a handful of different things occurred. First, some of the re-writing began before I moved in with them. I lived with them for nine months when I was 24 after I returned from the East Coast and was considering a career shift. I stayed with them during the summers I was in graduate school for the next couple of years, and I did the same for most of my college summers. All that time, they were seeing the adult I’d become and I was seeing them with emerging young adult eyes. I think this cemented the adult-level friendship between us so that by the time I moved in at 29, after which I ended up staying for six years, we could build off of the re-wiring we’d already done.

Another piece is communication. I love talking about my feelings and my perspective, and I want my loved ones to feel comfortable doing the same. So as much as my mother likes to joke that I talk everything to death—and I know I have to pick my moments; not everyone is receptive at every moment—I attribute the way we understand each other as adults to my communication skills and my parents’ openness to that, much of the time. What that meant was that when there were instances over the six years I lived with my parents where my mom doted on me like she did when I was young, or my dad was a little too opinionated about my whereabouts, I could remind them, thank you, I love you, and as an adult, I’ve got this! If they’d make an assumption based on how I acted when I was younger, I’d call them out on it, nicely, and let them know that the thing they’re saying isn’t true of 30-something me. Of course this goes both ways, and I let my parents know they could call me out too. I worked hard to make sure I was seeing my parents as the fully-realized adults they are and not just my mom and dad.

At the same time, I’ve always said that neither of my younger sisters could have lived with my parents as adults, but I obviously could. I don’t always need to be in charge and I don’t mind a little doting! My sisters prefer to run the show and feel strongly about their independence. So perhaps there was an element of luck, personality-wise, too.

For readers who live in multigenerational households and have the difficulties around re-wiring, I’d say tell and show your loved ones the ways you’ve changed—and often—and ask them to do the same. Communication is everything (and when that doesn’t work, demonstration is). And are there minor aspects of falling back into early conditioning that wouldn’t be so terrible to embrace?

It seems like one of the biggest barriers for so many people to live more creatively and interdependently is cost. Cohousing, for example, is notoriously expensive to create and is still too elite a movement, as a result. What did you learn about the role that finances play in our ability to, as the subtitle says, reimagine community.

I relate to feeling priced out of communal living. I remember my college friend, Francesca, sending me this article about cohousing when I was at my most overwhelmed and depressed living alone, about six months before I ended up moving in with my parents. I had never heard of co-housing; she saw I needed communal living before I did. I remember feeling enraged, honestly, because she was like, “this is what you need!” and I felt like, why did you make me aware of something I clearly needed but couldn’t afford?! The subtitle of the article was literally “Where Responsibilities Are Shared And Life Is A Little Less Lonely,” and I was so lonely, overworked, and just kind of crushed by the weight of life.

But a few weeks into living with my parents, I realized I was living communally, just in a different way. And now, I live alone in a townhouse and my parents live across the parking lot. We have dinner at least twice a week, we share groceries, we pet sit for each other; I take my cat there in a backpack every day to play with their cats. Some people might say I live alone, and in some ways I do, but I can still reap some benefits of communal living in an informal way and that I can afford.

I’m not going to pretend that finances don’t offer access, or at least a wider ability to reimagine community. But only a few of the stories in Living, Together feature forms of intentional community that can have a high price for entry, like cohousing. That’s by design: I wanted readers to feel like they had many different models for getting their needs around communal living, and even community outside the home, met.

In the book, Amanda E. Machado and Rhaina Cohen both share stories of renting homes with friends, and Amanda’s essay, in particular, talks about the cost sharing element of that approach. Essayist Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom lives in a separate space above their parents’ house, and Dani McClain shares the house she grew up in with her mother and daughter. Gabrielle Korn has a house with an attached studio apartment she rents out, and also offers for free to writers seeking short residencies. Suanne Carlson shares a glimpse into the nomadic life, which I think more people are going to be forced to do if this housing crisis continues; for Suanne, living out of a vehicle is a choice that allows her to travel, feel at home in nature, and get together with other nomads who see home and community the way she does. Tiffany Harris writes about how she made a career out of how much she liked having roommates by supporting programming for Jewish people in their 20s who want to share living space and traditions with other young Jewish people. Simone Gorrindo writes about having an interdependent relationship with a neighbor when they were both new military wives and were incredibly lonely.

All of these forms of communal living have pluses and minuses. There’s no perfect way to live and when you’re interdependent with others, there will always be friction. If you want the kind of communal living where you have completely separate space from other people, then yes, it could be more expensive (although not necessarily: tiny house communities? Fourplexes? Accessory dwelling units? Separate apartments on the same floor as loved ones?) But there are so many other ways to live communally if you think outside formal intentional communities and realize you can…make up whatever you want!

[Here are some resources on making cohousing more affordable FYI.]

You really wanted the anthology to disprove the notion that communal living is something only hippies and religious folks do, and you succeeded wildly. Was it hard to find such a diverse range of voices for the anthology? Is there any theme or kind of person that you were hoping would be part of it but you just weren’t able to land?

I’m really touched to hear you think I succeeded in this area! I was so intentional about it. Yes, it was incredibly hard to find the diversity I was seeking. For probably a full year, I kept my eyes and ears open no matter where I went. I also did tons of research. And I crowd-sourced: “Hello, acquaintance from college! You live in X part of the country. Know anyone nearby who could speak to Y living scenario?” It was a fun challenge—a game, really. Just how many perspectives can I offer and how can I think of unique avenues to find them?

I wish I had an even broader array of geographies, identities, experiences, and living scenarios, but I’m still proud of what I was able to achieve. Across 15 essays and six Q&As, we have 22 contributors ranging in age from 25-91, from 14 states and every region of the country. Contributors highlight topics including loneliness, aging, friendship, chosen family, illness, parenting, intergenerational relationships, artist community, colonization, immigrant community, relationships between neighbors, the challenges of being in the sandwich generation, polyamorous living and parenting, queerness and queer community, financial hardship, the natural world, sibling relationships, and, of course, housing.

Because I wanted this book to be easy to access (not too long or cumbersome to read), there were living scenarios I couldn’t include, yes. I was interested in featuring a community land trust, which has to do with land ownership, governance, and affordability, but it ended up not making sense for this book. I didn’t get the perspective of friends who purchased a home together, although we have friends who rent together. I don’t have a co-op—again, the distinct form didn’t matter as much as the story that was being told about the experience—or a tiny house community, although Mary Anne Adams talks in her piece about plans to build one. I was also interested in people who live intentionally in a fourplex, perhaps seniors who plan to take care of each other as they age, a young person living with a senior in a home sharing arrangement (perhaps reduced rent in exchange for helping with household tasks), and people who deliberately have apartments on the same floor of a complex are interdependent.

What was the biggest surprise of working on this anthology?

Working on the anthology further broadened the way I defined communal living.

I really have come to believe that communal living is any way a person is regularly interdependent with others around their home base, sharing time, resources, and offering a sense of safety.

Maybe it’s several generations of a family living within walking distance to one another, or neighbors who deliberately make time to see each other most days, share groceries or meals, and offer rides to doctors’ appointments. But to me, communal living is less about the roof you have over your head and more about how intentionally interdependent you are with others.

Reading the Q&A with Hank Gamel and Fran Biederman in Living, Together, where Fran, who is 91, talks about all the different ways she and her neighbor support each other got me thinking about this. So did Kristen Arnett and Simone Gorrindo’s essays. Kristen’s friends, her chosen family, all live within a short drive from each other. They celebrate every milestone together and jump at the chance to offer help, like inviting those who don’t have power during hurricane season to the house of whoever does. Simone’s neighbor taught her how to drive and helped Simone furnish her house. For a period of time, they had regular dinners, watched each other’s kids, and Simone even slept at her neighbor’s house on anxious nights while their husbands were deployed.

What is one thing you have changed in your own life because of reading this book? A new tradition with your parents? A new way of using space?

I’ve become more flexible about the way I think about home, community, and my own future. As I write in my introduction to the book, I bought pretty hard into the American Dream as a kid, including the idea of a “forever home.” I think I was seeking a feeling of safety, and the finality of a “forever home” seemed to offer that. But reading my contributors’ stories, seeing their openness to different configurations of housing and home, and the way those changed as their needs did over time, has taken the pressure off of finding that one ideal living scenario.

I no longer feel like I’m searching for a place to settle; I just feel more settled within myself.

And it couldn’t have happened at a better time, because home and housing is so tenuous now for so many of us.

It feels freeing to have my attitude be that right now I live in a two-bedroom townhouse across the parking lot from my parents. It meets a lot of my needs, but not all of them. And when I’m missing having people in my immediate space, or there’s another reason this doesn’t work as well anymore, I tell myself that this living scenario can be for me until it isn’t. When my needs change, I can adapt to them. Someday, I hope to live close to a bunch of artists who also raise kids communally, in whatever form of housing that takes. But not today, and that’s fine!

I’m so curious: what is communal living to you? How do you live now and how do you dream of living someday?

And stay tuned for Friday’s essay. It’s a gorgeous one and we are so lucky to reprint it here. Buy the anthology here—it’s full of goodness, including a fantastic essay from my former neighbor in cohousing, Kate Madden Yee.

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Becca and I were actually introduced through an Examined Family reader, . Thank you for this massive mitzvah, Arielle!

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I was a pretty worried little girl. I remember lying in my canopy bed in Colorado Springs in the dark and praying to my dead grandfather, who everyone called Cork. I wanted him to protect my parents, first and foremost; their death was my biggest fear. I wanted a cat. And a hamster. And a Day-to-Night Barbie. I wanted peace in the world—that sort of thing.

Perhaps I mapped God onto my grandfather because of the larger-than-life stories that I was told about him—he was a football player for the University of Nebraska, known for not really knowing his own strength, like when he accidentally twisted the entire neck off of a beer bottle thinking it was a twist-off cap. He was a traveling salesman who had my grandmother sew a white button-up shirt with tear-away velcro so he could pull the shirt apart dramatically and shout, “I’ll give you the shirt off my back!”

Perhaps I mapped God onto Cork because he died when I was in utero—like we were two souls destined to be interchanged on this earthly plane. My mom adored her father and felt most understood by him. Losing him early and suddenly was a shock to her system—a system I happened to be floating inside of, just taking shape. I started life, then, marinating in the sacred cycle of loss and birth.

Did my grandfather ever answer my prayers? Well, despite all my worry as a child, my parents have lived relatively long, blessed lives. My rescue cat Licorice was with us until right before I went off to college; my Siberian dwarf hamsters had just a brief life with us, as I left the top to their cage open and Licorice had her say (I can still feel the wave of regret and shame). And Day-to-Night Barbie saw a lot of drama in the mid-80s!

Peace on earth, of course, remains elusive.

What also remains elusive is my relationship with my ancestors. I thought about this recently when my friend David told me about the idea of a “crowded cosmos”—the notion that we are often surrounded by ancestor spirits, mystical advisers, angels, ghosts, you name it. He asked me if I’d experienced that sensation, and though I so wished I could have said yes, the truth is that I’ve more often felt a sort of ancestor hunger. I think that’s why I prayed to the grandfather I never met.

It’s also why, at 21-years-old, I devoted a couple of years to researching the life of my paternal grandmother, Maryanne, who I only met a couple of times; she longed to be a writer, but instead became a brilliant, unfulfilled wife and mother, prone to migraines, probably bipolar, sometimes suicidal. I learned that I had preposterously walked in some of her same footsteps without knowing it—during the World’s Fair in Queens, New York in 1939, she had staying in the Barnard dorms, where I would one day go to college feeling like no one in my family had ever been so far from home. Learning about Maryanne left me feeling the opposite sensation to crowded—vacant, deserted, empty. She didn’t leave behind one shred of writing. Not a journal. Not a word.

I know people often encounter the “crowded cosmos” during psychedelic experiences. I haven’t had one yet, but I’d like to. I also know people create their own “crowded cosmos” when they need it most. Recently I devoured Anelise Chen’s inventive memoir, Clam Down, in which she pivots from a divorce into trying to understand the life of her reclusive father. Chen writes:

But sometimes we do escape fate—each generation altering their path, in part, in response to the one that came before them. My grandmother didn’t get to be a writer and here I have become one; I was hellbent on it long before I consciously understood that was anyone’s thwarted dream in my own bloodline. I am trying to raise my girls with more literacy and less stigma about their own mental health challenges and unique, beautiful brains. There was so much shame shrouding my grandmother’s brain, her trauma, her life.

On the other hand, some things do feel like generational cycles that I have no control over breaking. My mom lost her dad just as her daughter was being born, and in many ways, I had the same experience. My dad’s dementia really took hold once my youngest daughter—who he called “the little one” instead of her name—came into the world. It’s a hell to lose a beloved father earlier than your peers, and it’s heaven to have felt so deeply connected to a father that it feels like hell to lose him.

The “crowded cosmos” is not just a personal experience, but also a political one. I recently learned from another friend, Eric Liu, co-founder of Citizen University, that the ancient Roman Tacitus defined patriotism as “praiseworthy competition with our ancestors.”

I can’t stop chewing on that idea. Praiseworthy competition with our ancestors. I certainly don’t feel in competition with my dead grandmother…more like I got to run the luckiest leg so far in the relay race.

I crave to be more radical, creative, and in greater integrity than my ancestors appeared to be when it came to their core values. You’ve likely seen a Black American wearing a t-shirt that says, I am my ancestor’s wildest dreams. What is the parallel slogan for a White American woman? I am my ancestor’s worst nightmare? Trying to be vocationally fulfilled, break free from martyrdom, avoid hoarding resources, and raise children within radical, relational villages. That was definitely not the American Dream my grandparents were raised on. I am devoted to not being on adulting automatic pilot, letting my life be dictated by a broken society’s ideas about what risk, responsibility, or success look like.

We are all fractal. Our individual stories are really family stories and our family stories are really nation stories, and on and on, like the Eames’ Powers of Ten.

Maybe that’s, ultimately, my aspiration—not to receive advisement from a “crowded cosmos,” but to break from the crowd and think and live as awake as possible, in this particular and very brief moment in generational time. I am not a self-made woman, far from it; as Chen asserts, I am the sedimentary layers of many, many lives, full of suffering, transcendence, love, and pain. Some of what my life will write will be echoing tragedy beyond my control; some will be verse more alive and aligned than anything my ancestors could imagine. If I look backwards and forwards with clear eyes and try as a I might to be honest about what I see, what I feel, what I can heal, what I can’t…well, that’s a whole lifetime’s work right there.

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Do you feel like you live in a “crowded cosmos?” What generational fates have you avoided and which ones have you endured? Tell us about it!

Happy Father’s Day to the real ones out there.

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Speaking of being human, I’m going to take a couple of weeks off. I’ll be popping up in your inbox again on July 8th. Be well.

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A couple of months ago I was grateful to be at the Skoll World Forum, reuniting with old friends and making some new friends, and learning, learning, learning. One of the topics threaded through many of the conversations was, of course, artificial intelligence (which one speaker argues is better named machine intelligence).

Are you intrigued, scared, confused about the role that this new technology is and will play in our lives and the lives of our families and communities at this fragile time? Me too! Here are some of my learnings and hunches after listening deeply. I wanted to share them with you so we can keep learning together:

• We are living through a moment of punctuated evolution. The world marches along sometimes, and then other times it races. We are in a fast-paced era of violent change. There is so much tragedy and possibility—norms, people, technologies, ecosystems dying and being born minute-by-minute. It’s dizzying and de-stabalizing on so many levels, so if you’re feeling that, it’s real and you’re not alone.

• Machine intelligence is decent at connecting people to life-saving information when they need it (think about a teenage girl who doesn’t feel like she can talk to any adults in her life finding out about contraceptive options via a chatbot created by Girl Effect, for example); it is much more dynamic and potentially perilous when it’s used for relational purposes (think of AI-assisted suicides among young people).

• One of the dangers of the relational uses of AI are the ways in which it parrots the human interacting with it. This leads to reinforcement of one’s worldview, whether you’re talking about your spouse or your president. We always need authentic and nuanced feedback about how we think and how we impact others, and we are at a particular moment when we are more politically and culturally polarized than ever. Being reinforced by a machine designed to keep us hooked is not supportive of our personal or collective evolution.

• Some are saying that AI is the end of storytelling, that writers like me will be out of a job in no time. But I actually sense the opposite. I wonder if we will become even more attached to and supportive of the human artists that we love, their weirdness, the lived experience they bring to their creations, their embodied intelligence, and society will experience at artistic resurgence where we really understand the value of human-made art again.

• Machine learning can be useful in cutting down on our administrative load as caregivers and engaged citizens. This is exciting, when one things about caregivers having their cognitive load reduced so they can spend more time with their loved ones having fun and less time arguing with insurance companies. But, as one expert I sat next to at the conference pointed out, if AI is integrated into our already and still broken systems, like healthcare, they might just make immoral systems more efficient. What’s the good in that? Imagine an AI-powered process that helps caregivers connect to respite support faster, but then there aren’t enough people actually providing the respite or funding to support the program; in this case you are moving caregivers faster towards wait times and learned helplessness.

• As machine intelligence becomes ever more integrated into our lives and the systems that run through them, natural and human intelligence will become ever more instructive and sacred. We will crave to have embodied experiences. We will crave being together with other bodies, other spirits, other vibes.

  

• The reality is, this technology is here and it’s not going anywhere. One speaker claimed that 1 out of 3 people globally is already using AI for mental health support! There is no putting the genie back in the bottle, which means it is urgent for us to befriend and influence that genie! I’m left wondering how historically marginalized people can shape large language learning models and machine intelligence so that the AI of tomorrow is more just, more culturally-relevant, and more helpful to those who need to access power and accurate information the most? And how do we make sure the climate impacts are contained and don’t become one more area where already marginalized people are further marginalized by a resource rich people are using?

When it comes to power and safety, there are SO many valid questions around machine learning and we desperately need wiser, slower, more collectively conscious people in discernment and decision-making positions around its roll-out. I think the Center for Humane Technology has some of the best explainers on what the dangers are and what we can do about it. I’ve often felt like the guys in Silicon Valley currently leading the AI charge need a major dose of big sister energy—someone who can help them take seriously how much this technology can impact humanity and our shared future. Just last Friday, Anthropic’s latest model was suspended by the Trump administration because of national security concerns.

In my own life, I will tell you that I’ve vaccilated between avoiding AI altogether because I’ve heard about the climate and data security risks, among others, and trying to play around a bit with it so I am not so uninformed that I can’t form questions around it for myself. Most of that play has happened with a protocol called Librarian Aiden Earl Grey, created by the collective behind those two books I shared my takeaways from here. I have asked it for support around familial relationships, information about care systems and funding, travel recommendations, dog training, recipes, and up-to-date information about editors that I might pitch on elder care.

Okay, your turn: How are you using AI in your own family life—if at all? What are your fears and questions? What systemic organizing are you paying attention to?