Intergenerational Learning

 

Right now I have the great privilege of running an intergenerational writing program for high school students and older adults (a.k.a. senior citizens). The program is a five-week series where participants work in pairs (older-younger teams) to create and share their life stories.

I was worried about getting youth to participate and so offered an incentive of a $100 gift card along with community service hours. In the first session, I could barely get any of the young people to speak. And I worried about the elders too. I feared that they would struggle to relate to the young people, perhaps feeling offended by their manners or their attitudes. But the older members of the group seem thrilled just to be in the space of the youngers. “I like the energy,” one said on our very first day.

Now we’re three weeks in and this intergenerational program is nothing short of amazing.

Each week we do some kind of team-building warm-up so the larger group can get to know each other. Then we break into pairs where dyads do some interviewing and some writing. Last week I had everyone line up by age without speaking. There are four teens and four elders. They dutifully did as asked and were surprisingly accurate in their lineup. In order, from youngest to oldest, they placed themselves against the counter along the side of the room — 14, 14, 15, 16, 68, 80, 81, 82.

For the next part of the activity, I invited them to choose the age they would choose to be if they could choose any age and reposition themselves in that spot along the line. The first fourteen-year-old said he’d want to be nineteen. He said he thought it would be a good age because he’d be older but still young. The second fourteen-year-old said she’d like to be twenty-two so she could be out of college and getting ready for real life. The fifteen-year-old girl after her wanted to be twenty-one and the last sixteen-year-old boy wanted to be twenty, “so that he could be in college but still get support from his family.”

The eighty-year-old woman in the elder group said she’d like to be forty. “Forty,” she said, “is when my real life began. It’s when I became truly independent.” The next elder to go was the sixty-eight-year-old. “You know,” she said, “I’d like to be exactly this age. I love being this age.” The eighty-one-year-old said that she’d like to be fifty because that’s when she felt like she was finally getting wise. And last to go, the eldest of the group at eighty-two, said, “I’d like to be thirty. When I was thirty I traveled the world. I’d like to travel the world again.”

“What a gift,” I thought to myself as I watched the younger participants listen to the elders. The kids could only imagine five or six years beyond their current ages but the elders had chosen a span of almost forty years. Forty years of wisdom. “What a gift for these young people,” I thought, “to hear this insight into what life can be like in the years far beyond their imaginations.”

Yesterday we did an activity where people shared things they liked or disliked about their neighborhood and the world. Every single elder said that they felt like their communities were too quiet. They missed the noise of young people— the laughing, the yelling, the wildness. And the kids complained about their own brand of isolation; they talked about feeling isolated, affected by crime or living far away from friends.

At the end of yesterday’s session, after a full hour of writing exercises, we closed the group as we always do with a circle where everyone shares something about their experience that day. The eldest participant shared a letter that she’d written to her partner, a fourteen-year-old girl. “Dear — — -,” it started, “the wisdom I have gained from talking to you today fills me with hope….” She read the whole letter talking about things she’d learned from talking to her young partner that day.

For his closing, the fourteen-year-old boy who’d shared his fear of crime in his community laughed to the group, “An hour is not enough time for this. We need a whole day.”

We still have two of the five sessions to go and three of the four youth participants have asked if they could do it again. My fear of engaging these young and old people together was unfounded, completely misguided. These pairings of young and old seem meant to be. They are like the Yin and Yang coming together to create perfect harmony. 

Learning to Fly Again

When COVID struck I had recently sold my business and was feeling newly liberated. I was intentionally aimless. I spent days by myself puttering around the house, taking walks, deliberately doing nothing. I did this by choice because I was tired of the rat race and I needed some peace and quiet away from it all.

When COVID reached pandemic status and I was forced to isolate and limit my daily activities I felt okay for a while. It didn’t feel that different to me. My teenage daughter was initially happy about the two weeks off of school. My family made lists and played games. For a little while, the forced isolation was okay. Then it wasn’t.

My partner and I acclimated. We found ways to be grateful for the quiet of our new life. We often relished in the lack of social expectation. We’d been buzzing around in the world for half a century and a little rest was just what the doctor ordered. But for my daughter this isolation was not welcome; it was torture. I watched the flicker in her eyes slowly fade; it was as if a chrysalis was forming around her budding wings. Her essential adolescent desire to fly was stripped away and she lay listless in her room for hours on end.

During those long months that turned into years, my daughter’s mental health was my greatest worry. I masterminded efforts to have a friend spend the night in warm sleeping bags on our deck, bringing meals and water and games outside for them. I bought heaters and umbrellas and a fire pit to encourage outdoor gatherings. Last summer brought us a little respite and my daughter and her friends finally gathered freely, without the help of their parents, without the fear that had plagued them in the winter months. They fluttered around the city, exercising their broken wings for a delicious few months.

Things have slowly gotten better and I’ve seen my daughter come back to life. But she’s not the same. That flicker in her eyes that dimmed during the first year of the pandemic has still not come back completely. And maybe it never will.

I hear stories every week about teenagers who are suffering — stuck in the listlessness that afflicted so many young people during the first year of the pandemic. Some kids haven’t gone to school in months and many, including my own daughter, have lost the academic musculature to stay the course with the school expectations that used to feel so normal.

I see it in my work too. Even though we are partially back to in-person, it’s so easy for people to call in and say, “I was exposed” or “I have a sore throat.” This will mean a few days working at home until they can get a test, easily a full week of isolating away from the team again. The ability and inclination to go into the shadows are ever present now. It’s easy to stay hidden. Isolating is what was required of us for so long that reverting back to this way of being feels easy now.

It doesn’t serve me to wish for things to go back to how they used to be, especially because I don’t think that the “used to be” busy-ness and frenetic lifestyle was the right thing either. But I do wonder how we recover. I wonder how we help our kids recover.

My priority is still my daughter’s mental health. I just want to keep her wings active until she flies off to college. Whenever I see a spark in her eyes or hear enthusiasm in her voice I am right there, cheering her on, interested, excited, encouraging. I want to remind her of that muscle, the one that engages in life. I want her to keep working it, strengthening it enough so that when I’m not here to cheer her on, she’ll still be able to fly.

WoWoWo Wordle

 

Wordle, our country’s newest trend, has definitely swept me up and in. Wordle is the first brain game I’ve been able to stick with. It’s finite enough that it doesn’t overwhelm me. It makes me use my brain in a different way from my default everyday activities, which, as I get older, feels like an important investment. It feels good to solve a puzzle every morning and I look forward to the next day every time I’m done.

Last week I was on day 78 of my Wordle streak. I was getting used to the idea that I would never miss a word. I was improving — getting words on the third try compared to my norm which is the fourth or fifth. But then, on day 79 I missed. I had gotten so cocky, so sure of myself. I envisioned my skills becoming so refined that I’d regularly be able to get Wordle on the second or third try. But in my rapid-fire word choice, I’d grown sloppy and lost!

Wordle is one of the first things I do in the morning and I know why. Getting the answer, solving the puzzle, winning the game is an immediate, palpable burst of dopamine. It starts me on a good path — one I feel like I can succeed on. And it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.

On that day when I missed my first Wordle, I felt sunken and demoralized. How could this happen when I was getting so good, performing better than I ever had?

I recommitted myself. I would work harder, think more carefully about my first word, and not be so impulsive on deciding to use a subsequent word that wasn’t the most strategically sound. The next day I got Wordle on the fifth try. Not my best, but at least I got it. I didn’t have the same surge of dopamine I’d been getting when I was on my winning streak, but I felt like I was recovering, coming back from the penalty box.

But the next day I missed Wordle again. And this time the blow was even greater than after my first loss. My success rate dropped from 100% to 98% and I felt rotten, like the true loser I really was. The dumb me came out of the shadows and swallowed up my confident, sharp, wordsmith-y self. It was a dark day.

I’m back on a streak — 3 days. I still do Wordle every morning but I’ve slowed down. I know that every line is a potential step closer to losing or winning. Knowing this, I take my time, contemplating all the possibilities before jumping into a word. I no longer rest on the laurels of my past success.

I’m grateful for the two Wordle losses. What they taught me is to think like a beginner, to always be trying my hardest, and not assume that, just because I was good at Wordle for three months I will always be good at it.

I can feel my brain trying harder, thinking about every possible word that ends in “m” instead of just choosing the first one that comes to mind. In not assuming I’m going to win Wordle every time I’m getting more out of the game. I am working harder, giving my brain a better workout. I’d call that a win every time, even when I lose.

Habit Stacking Ain't so Bad

 

I recently read Atomic Habits by James Clear. I didn’t enjoy reading the book — too directive and not contemplative enough — but I did learn a lot and I got some good ideas out of it. One of the ideas was habit-stacking, the process of starting small, manageable habits and adding other small, manageable habits onto those. Clear suggests making tiny lifestyle adjustments and keeping with them. This process invites significant long-term change.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been a seeker — always trying out new ways to make myself better — yoga, meditation, writing. I’ve taken loads of classes and read countless books espousing strategies for living a more balanced life. And I think I’ve been successful. At 53 I mostly feel balanced, nourished, and healthy. I’ve developed good habits that have stuck with me.

For me, balance always starts in the morning — whether it is a walk before everyone wakes up, doing a yoga class, meditating, or writing in the early morning quiet of my dining room table. At the beginning of 2022, I started a new set of morning rituals. They evolved organically, one leading to another until I had a stack of five. My ex-Catholic partner calls these morning rituals my “ablutions.” I didn’t know until I heard James Clear talk about habit stacking that this is what I’ve been doing.

Every morning I wake up to my dog Freckles sneezing and bark-moaning. Somehow he’s learned that sneezing followed by a few quick whiny barks will wake us up. Freckles’ desperation for his breakfast starts at random times, sometimes as early as 2:30 am. If we’re lucky he will delay his breakfast pleas until 5:30 am or 6:00 am.

I’m a natural early riser so I don’t really mind Freckles’ wake-up calls and I look forward to my morning ablutions in the kitchen. The first habit is to not look at my phone until after I meditate.

When I walk into the kitchen I turn on the coffee pot so that, by the time I’ve fed Freckles, I’ll have a pot ready. After Freckles eats he’s calm again and goes to his downstairs bed where he promptly starts snoring. I take my coffee to the tiny couch under the kitchen windows and read from my book of poems, a compilation of poems about kindness by various authors. I read the poem from the page I left off the day before a few times and then I close my eyes and meditate.

Often an image or idea from the poem guides me somewhere behind my closed eyes and I follow that until either it leads somewhere else or my meditation feels complete.

My next habit in the stack, and reward for not looking at my phone before meditating, is Wordle. After my meditation, I get my phone and open Wordle. Usually, there’s an idea from my meditation that’s floating around in my brain and I try to think of a 5-letter word to encompass that idea so I can use it to start my Wordle. Sometimes I get no letters but sometimes I get two greens or three yellows. On those days I feel affirmed that everything in the universe is indeed connected. I love Wordle — it’s a short sharp burst of dopamine to start my day.

My last habit, the one that completes my morning stack, is a one-minute plank. One of my high school friends turned me on to the idea and now I do it with my mom and one of my sisters every morning. I’ve just finished Day 26 and still, it’s not easy. I actually don’t enjoy it at all. But it’s a good challenge and pretty much the only time I engage my core or upper body so I’m going to stay the course.

I didn’t know, as my habits evolved from not looking at my phone to reading a poem to meditating to Wordle to plank, that I was creating a stack. But I see now that this is exactly what has happened. I get it. My tiny little habits have morphed into significant change. By the time my stack is over and I have to prepare for work, I’ve already had a full morning on my little kitchen couch. I’ve taken care of myself before I venture out into the world and spread myself too thin. Habit stacking. I’m a fan.

Too Much for One Suitcase

I remember the day my daughter Lucia was born. I felt an enormous wave of surprise and then joy. I was sure Lucia was going to be a boy because my mail carrier Denise always said that I was carrying a boy. She was so sure that it made me sure. “When you can’t tell you’re pregnant from behind, it’s a boy,” she said, “because girls steal your beauty.”

I remember being kind of appalled by that statement, but I was fond of Denise and decided to simply accept her prophecy and disregard the rest. I was in labor for forty-three hours. This was in the days of flip phones and fewer cell towers so we were not in touch with the outside world every second. While I labored in the hospital, no one on the outside knew what was going on.

Finally, in a fit of energy that came literally from the depths of my loins, I stood up, leaned on the extra bed in my room, and squatted Lucia out. “It’s a girl,” the midwife declared, and as I stood, legs trembling, they bundled her up and gave her to my partner to hold while I hung out a while longer to deliver the placenta.

When I finally held Lucia I felt like I knew her, like somehow she’d always been there. I was elated, comforted, that this little being would be familiar to me — I had been a baby girl once and worked my way through the stages of girlhood into womanhood. I would be able to understand and comfort this precious being. I would be a good mom to her.

Now Lucia is seventeen, at the edge of womanhood, the precipice of independence. I still remember as clear as yesterday the moment I first held her, first understood that she would be my daughter. It’s been hard lately. I’m the heavy, the rule-maker, the line-drawer, the boundary-setter. In the eyes of a young woman who feels ready to launch, I am a major spoiler.

Last week in a hangover of mother-daughter conflict, I was walking along the lake and I had the image of a suitcase, an old brown canvas suitcase with Naugahyde trim and silver buckles, stuffed with wrinkled clothes and too many shoes. The suitcase was too full to zip up and clothes were squirting out from all sides. This suitcase is Lucia’s life right now. She is bursting at the seams and I am trying to tuck her in, squeeze all her parts into the suitcase so I can zip it up and keep her contained. It’s not working. 

I’ve been thinking about that suitcase, about how it would feel to Lucia to be stuffed into a place she no longer fits. I’ve been there. I faintly remember the days when I didn’t understand why my parents had rules; I remember thinking the demands they made were arbitrary and controlling. The curfew, room cleaning, and nightly dinners made me mad and resentful.

A few days ago I caught Lucia in a big lie. She tried to cover it up but ultimately exposed herself and got busted. The suitcase was exploding before my eyes. While I waited for Lucia to come home from a friend’s house I panicked about how I would respond to her. My partner talked me through it —  she reminded me that Lucia needs guidelines and consequences, she coached me to stay calm, and reinforced the reality of the situation — that Lucia is still Lucia, she’s just being seventeen.

When Lucia got home we went upstairs to talk. “Do you want to say anything?”, I calmly asked her. Sitting on my bed, legs hanging over the edge, she looked at me and told me the truth about where she had slept the night before. 

We talked for a long time — about what a better option would have been to retain trust in our relationship, about what’s going on with her at school, about how she feels tired and overwhelmed in her life right now. I’ve imagined how insane it must be to be Lucia — school every day, a job both weekend days, homework, friends, college prep. It’s a hamster wheel of responsibility in a body that’s still figuring out what it means to be in charge.

The feeling I got from Lucia, even though she’d just been busted, was one of relief. “I just feel so tired Mom, like life never stops,” she moaned while lying on her side, perched on her right elbow. “That’s a message,” I told her, “and you have to listen to that. You have to set some limits for yourself so you don’t feel so crazy.” 

I understood at that moment that right now, as much as she wants to, Lucia can’t hear her own signals. There is too much noise and distraction and expectation. She’ll keep going, maybe until she’s in trouble. So for now I need to help her know her limits.

The conversation went far better than I had hoped. I felt, for the first time in weeks, that we’d truly heard one another. Shortly after we talked I went to sleep. The image that came to me was of Lucia floating in a large plexiglass box across the universe, swishes of stars all around, a beautiful dark sky, a great expanse. I imagined Lucia floating within the box, traveling somewhere. And in my mind, I knew that she needed to stay in the box to stay safe. 

Only when she got to her destination could she safely push open the walls of the box and explore. If she pushed one side of the box to open it before her destination, red lights would flash and a great siren would blare to alert her that she was entering the danger zone. 

As I drifted off to sleep I felt a sense of calm I haven’t in a long time. This teenager parenting gig momentarily made sense to me. Right now I’m the red lights and siren. I have to be the warning signs until Lucia gets to her destination (whenever and wherever that is); until she learns to listen to her own signals. 

I understood that the suitcase I had been trying to squeeze Lucia into was too small and confining. It was too dark and closed and stuffy. 

The image of Lucia in a more expansive galaxy helps me remember that Lucia is going somewhere, maybe somewhere far away. To get where she’s going, she needs to be able to see, to look around, to experience life. There is still a part of me that wants to zip Lucia into a suitcase and release her when her pre-frontal cortex is fully developed, but if I did that we’d both be miserable.

For now, I just have to stick with the idea that for the next little while, as Lucia travels across the universe of adolescence, I can help her by signaling the danger alarm for her. In not too many years I know that she’ll be old enough and wise enough to signal it for herself. 

Tunnel Vision

 

Parenting is a dark tunnel. They don’t tell you that the moment your baby is born. And even if they did there would be no way to believe it. The glow of amazement is too saturating; no darkness can permeate that moment right after your beautiful baby is born.

But adolescence is another story. A teenager’s job is to travel away, to move outward, following the umbilical cord of life away from one’s mother and towards the great wide open plains of life.

I parent in a way that I wasn’t parented, which means that I over-parent. Throughout my parenting life, I have been over-involved, over-engaged, and over-invested. I love being a mother. It’s one of my greatest accomplishments and constant delights. I never get tired of my daughter Lucia, even when she is impatient and irritated with me, even when she throws her clothes on the floor and leaves her bathmat in a wet, mildewy pile. I’m like a loyal golden retriever, always at the ready for some action. I pant for joy when I see her and lick at her heels for attention when she passes by. 

For many years this worked. My loyal, abiding presence was welcomed by Lucia when she was a baby and a toddler, and even a pre-teen. But now that she’s seventeen it’s an impossible equation — loyal dog and jet-setting traveler. 

Lucia is normal — school, work, friends, shopping, sporting events, parties. She’s living her life to its fullest, and that’s her job. And I am still here, lying in my dog bed, tennis ball in my mouth, ready to play. 

I know what I am experiencing is a universal experience for parents of teenagers. There is a natural grieving as parents watch their children leave the nest. The healthy thing for our children to do is fly away. 

I am working my muscles of patience and faith, trusting that this phase will evolve and Lucia will come back. Intellectually I know this truth, but emotionally it’s hard to be a lonely old dog. And scary. The unknown of Lucia’s life as she forges her own path is terrifying for me. There are days when I am filled with worry so fierce I have to close my eyes and count my breaths until the grip in my chest dissipates.

What came to me a few weeks ago as I meditated one morning was the image of a young girl at the end of a dark tunnel. The tunnel was like a coal mine, dark with a dead end. The girl was me as a nine-year-old. She (I) was far away, maybe 200 yards into the tunnel. I could see her and I wanted her to come closer so that I could take care of her, comfort her.

Since that morning, when I meditate, the same image appears to me. As I’ve tried to make sense of this vision, I realize that the girl in the tunnel is me, but it is also Lucia. Lucia is far away and I want to draw her nearer to adult me, to the light at the opening of the tunnel. I want her to come closer. I want to know Lucia, to understand and comfort her. 

But I am also the little girl. The feelings of fear, darkness, the unknown, are mine, not Lucia’s. My irrational parenting fear is that Lucia is lost at the end of the tunnel because I do not know her, do not feel her, or understand her right now. But I’m wrong. Lucia’s not in that tunnel. She’s in the light, her own light. 

Lucia is fine. She is finding her own glow of amazement out in the world. And that’s what she should be doing. She’s not lost. She’s glowing. She’s living her life without a drooling dog nudging her shins to throw the ball. It’s what I want for her. 

The truth is my fear is not about her, it’s about me. It’s the fear of the loss of my daughter. It’s the fear of change in my role as a mother. The dark tunnel is real. But it’s my tunnel, not Lucia’s.

When I meditate now I try to envision an open tunnel, one with sunshine and light on the other side, a tunnel that leads somewhere exciting and wonderful, glowing golden fields leading to rivers and mountains and towns and cities. I imagine Lucia running towards the light, out of the other side of the tunnel. My heart smiles as I imagine her running free, finding great adventures and happiness on the other side of the tunnel. 

I Remember You. But I Don't Remember Me.

 

Last weekend I spent two days with my twin sister and three of our high school friends. We’ve only seen each other a handful of times over the years because we live all over the country in four different states and it’s hard to get together, especially as a group. To my surprise, everyone was able to coordinate their busy lives to make the weekend happen.

It’s been more than forty years since we became friends in a tiny high school on the south side of Chicago. We’ve lived all over the country and the world. Some of us have been married and had kids. Some of us have been divorced. We’ve lost parents and siblings. We’ve gone to college and graduate school. We’ve had jobs we’ve loved and jobs we’ve hated. We’ve each lived over half a century. The opportunity to come together and connect as older women was thrilling.

It was also slightly daunting. My twin sister told me that she almost texted us all that she had COVID on Thursday so she wouldn’t have to come. Another of the five said her daughter had to really egg her on so she’d follow through. I myself hemmed and hawed about getting on my 6 am flight after a long week of work.

But we did it. The five of us gathered at my mom’s house outside of Phoenix. We decided to hold our reunion at my mother’s house in part to offer her a distraction from the recent passing of my stepfather. I’ve been worrying about Mom being alone after over forty years of partnership. I thought bringing the old crew back would be healing for her. What I didn’t realize was how healing it would be for the rest of us.

We spent a total of forty-eight hours together. We drank coffee on Mom’s patio, hiked, shared meals, went thrift-shopping, and laughed. We sat outside in the sun or on couches in the living room drinking our coffee or our wine, sharing stories of our current lives and retelling stories from our high school days. We laughed until we peed. After a few hours, it felt like we were in high school all over again.

It was hard to believe that forty years had passed since we’d first become friends. It was obvious from the outside that we’d all aged, but energetically everyone felt fundamentally unchanged. As I watched and listened to these old friends, they felt utterly familiar — the dry sense of humor of one, the squinty-eyed cackling laughter of another, the overflowing curiosity of a third, and of course the life-long knowing of my twin sister.

They were all so familiar to me, yet as I thought back to myself, to what I was like at that age, I couldn’t place myself. It was as if I was a ghost. I wondered if I’d been like I am now — anxious and chronically planning, directing, taking charge. I wondered if my friends felt the same familiarity with me that I felt about them.

Why couldn’t I remember myself as a teenager? At age fourteen or fifteen or sixteen, I was so focused on the outside that I couldn’t connect with what was on the inside. I observed and studied my peers —  how to dress, flirt, eat, dance, and interact with my parents. I learned how to be from watching others instead of from feeling myself.

I thought back to how I was in high school. Our sophomore year I spearheaded a service group to help us bolster our college applications. In our senior year of high school, I planned our spring break trip. I booked the hotel, bought the plane tickets, and wrangled the troops to get us all from Chicago to Sanibel Island, Florida via Newark, New Jersey on People’s Express Airlines. I was the one who took more than the mandatory science and math classes because I thought it made me seem smarter.

And looking back to my younger years, I could see that I am still very much like I was in high school. I still plan the trips and organize the events. I still take on too much responsibility. This is me. This has always been me. When I was a teenager I felt too self-conscious, too different, to embrace this identity. But now I’m older. I’m wiser. I feel okay about who I am.

Over the course of the weekend, we all laughed with (and sometimes at) each other. My friends and sister playfully teased me for my over-planning and bossy approach. They grew irritated by my insistence that we create a shared album of the weekend on our iPhones. But it was okay. I could laugh with them because I wasn’t looking for my identity outside of myself anymore. Finally, after all these years I could see myself clearly. I could just be me.