Sylvia's Journal

We had a physical-distanced-in-person cocktail gathering at our beach yesterday, which remains nicer than a Zoom one, although those are easier to organize and execute. Our friends are isolating as a family pod, two sons, a daughter and their mates and a gaggle of grandkids of about the same age. 

There is something very comforting and smart about the idea of three generations living together. Of course it stops being comforting and smart if you don’t have a large house or a farm. Three generations in a two bedroom apartment in a city would be hell, especially now.  

Margaret Mead, who herself grew up in a three generation household, as so many of our parents did, recognized the enormous value of such an arrangement. ‘Her hypothesis,’ according to David Cooperrider, ‘was that the best societal learning has always occurred when three generations come together in contexts of discovery and valuing — the child, the elder, and the middle adult.’ 

It is not just the formal learning (think homeschooling now), but also learning to play, to deal with conflict, to listen, to apologize, storytelling, and other social skills that are hopelessly missing when I watch the news.  Our daughter Sita has always known this, possibly even more than we did. Maybe because she has befriended members of the Bateson clan. She has been sending us real estate ads for large houses or wide open spaces that would allow us to live together yet not on top of each other. It does remain an appealing vision.

And so, in the spirit of intergenerational possibilities, I was thinking about inviting our daughter, husband and two kids, to move in. We have all been in isolation longer than we can remember, so we should all be clean and could help each other out. Having the grandkids would do us good, real hugs instead of virtual ones; having us around for childcare would help our kids do their day jobs, the envy of working parents with kids now. The large yard, a driveway for biking, and the beach for exploring Rachel Carson’s world, would do our grandkids good. And we could make music together.

There is of course a downside to this joyous three generations togetherness, giving our particular space. There would be the permanent chaos; coats, boots and shoes scattered in the entry hall, the enormous amounts of toilet paper that we would use (it would make us toilet paper hoarders). Faro would constantly getting his shoes, socks and pants wet by straying into Lobster Cove, and we would have to watch endless reruns of Shawn the Sheep. And the parents would not be happy with us indulging the grandkids, especially when it comes to sugary things, so we’d get into scrapes with them.

But what stopped me extending the invite, more than anything listed above, was the realization that our quiet morning and evening routines of meditation, yoga, exercise, blogging, music practice, knitting, and reading would be severely disturbed. It took us a while to get into those routines and having to alter them would be hard. So, we’ll go for the intergenerational living as a future vision, and in a limited virtual manner for now.