Evolving Together
Illustration by Andrew Gillespie
BY JESIKA FEATHER
Transitions happen slowly in my house. We are a bumbling mass: not sleek, graceful or efficient.
A day trip to the coast, an hour and a half away, requires an extravagant motivating force (there’s always someone who doesn’t want to go). Once we’ve navigated the motivational issues and then packed for sustenance, warmth, hydration, and safety . . . we might as well stay for the week.
Our family has an uncustomary structure. We consist of two moms, two dads, and four adolescents. The parents are all in a relationship together, and we parent the four kids as a team. We also live in an intentional community, so there are people living in this household who orbit our nuclear family, similar to aunts and uncles. We all live together and have dinner together every night.
Two of my kids are starting high school next year and the other two are going into the 7th grade. Teenagers are like toddlers in many ways, the noise factor being one of them. Each of my teens has their own signature sound. One of them makes a noise in the back of their throat that carries an eerie kinship to Chewbacca. And the other does a high-pitched yodel. My 12-year-olds are still in their experimental phase.
Another similarity to toddlerhood is their wild, erratic body movements. But now they are the size of adults (three of them are bigger than me). Despite being a community, our house isn’t very big. There are many rooms, but the rooms are small. So the kids run into things. Often. With each collision, they make their signature sound. Sometimes they run into each other, and then it’s a cacophony of pubescent caterwauling.
Can you imagine transitioning in the midst of all this? Every day of our life looks like the packing scene in Home Alone, right before they ditch Kevin and leave for France.
Needless to say, we don’t go on a ton of day trips. But right now, my family is working pretty hardcore on a soul-based journey. We are barreling toward the next phase of our life. My family is evolving.
I realized I just used the word barreling. The 8 of us barrel toward something like a crowd of clowns crammed into a golf cart trying to fake-it-till-we-make it on the interstate. We barrel in our own way. With a lot of frenetic energy up and down and side to side, and occasionally, a tiny bit forward. We are fervidly puttering through career changes, social changes, and priority changes.
Obviously, we’ve all evolved immensely during our lifetimes, but this is the first time we’ve all changed so dramatically together. From the 12-year-olds to the 44-year-olds, we are reinventing ourselves. The kids are becoming adults, and the adults are becoming . . . mega adults? I can’t, for the life of me, hone in on the right word. I actually googled “midlife crisis” to see if Google could lend me a more positive synonym. Google suggested: “The change” and “menopause”.
That is not what I’m trying to say.
I’m trying to say . . . the parents in this house are re-evaluating what we’re doing with our lives and who we want to do it with. As communal-living humans, we’re accustomed to dwelling and working socially. But we’ve experienced some hardship in the last few years.
We don’t want to become bitter. We idolize elders who've kept a zest-for-life glinting behind their eyes. We want to be like them. This means we have to reevaluate what we love about this human experience, and how to keep seeing beauty. That takes time.
Also, logistically, teenagers require more energy than preteens. You’d think that their emerging independence would equal less work for parents. But they aren’t independent . . . yet. This is the period where they take awkward stabs at adulty things, mess up often, and then need us to be present for their tortured expressions of anger and sadness. We have to help-but-not-help. It’s the most confusing thing I’ve ever done in my life. I think I’m probably doing a lot, but there is no clear evidence that I’m doing anything.
At the end of each day, after all my quality morning advice has been run through the pubescent filter and either ignored or badly orchestrated, my teens are often still dismal. Their life skills . . . still up for debate. I listen to the evening renditions of everyone’s soap opera, and then I practice the life skill I’m working on: letting go.
I’m pretty janky at letting go.
This transition feels so slow. It’s hard to identify movement when I don’t know what the goal looks like. Who are we all becoming?
When I imagine this process visually, I see us all holding hands walking forward in a horizontal line. We take up a lot of surface area. We are not aerodynamic. Each setback that occurs individually: a failed math test, an uncomfortable work confrontation, they press against us all. We’re like a giant foosball rod with eight soccer players on it. When the universe decides it's time for one of us to encounter the ball, we all get flipped backwards.
This ripple effect occurs because, as each of us transforms, we adjust our personal boundaries. When one person shifts a boundary, the people connected to them must shift their boundaries in response.
Here’s an example:
One of my kids has decided to start cursing. They aren’t ridiculously obscene. They aren’t over-the-top defiant. But, because it’s new, it’s jarringly apparent.
I’ve taught high school and middle school. This ain’t my first rodeo. If I tell them, “Absolutely, under no circumstances, can you say the f-bomb,” they’ll do it anyway. To be honest, I’m surprised it’s taken them this long. The adults all curse like sailors.
So, here we are. Our kid is making their new boundary known: They will say whatever the fuck they want.
I don’t care much about cursing, but here’s the ripple-effect: I realize that my kid is truly growing up. That’s their intention, right? They want to be seen as an adult. Someone who is accepted into the fold of those who can proudly shout “What the fuck?” and not be scowled at or asked, “Why are you up past your bedtime?”
That’s fine. But the reality is, if you’re old enough to tell dirty jokes at the dinner table, and curse whenever you want . . . you’re definitely old enough to reorganize the densely packed kitchen cupboard. You’re old enough to dump the compost and then clean the sludge from the bottom of the bucket. You’re old enough to wipe around the base of the toilet. Because that’s what adults do.
If one kid gets away with cursing, I can promise that my house is about to become a new hub for the Urban Dictionary. And I’m not the only parent whose boundaries are adjusting. Somebody else might not be ready for the f-bomb. Even if it includes bathrooms that smell better. So that’s a whole new round of boundary negotiations.
Whatever. I’m up to the challenge. We all are. But the point is . . . it’s a landslide of boundary shifting and self-discovery. If you are standing on a mountain when the rocks start to slide, standing still is not an option. You have to run. So we’re all running down this avalanche of change and we don’t know where we are going or how long it will take.
So . . . how does one stay sane through this?
I had to find a symbol. A physical manifestation. My symbol is our deteriorating garage. One wall of our garage is pretty dramatically bowed due to rain damage that we failed to notice until it was too late. There is even a legit hole in the wall, with some inner wall parts sticking out. There is no choice but to fix this problem or lose the garage.
This house has held not only my family but an entire community, for fifteen years. I haven’t counted. But I would imagine that (plus or minus) 60 people have lived here since we bought the house.
There have been births, and two members of our community have passed on. We’ve housed people who’ve had nowhere else to stay. Thanksgiving and Pi(e) Day were often attended by up to 75 people. There were musical events. Part of a movie was filmed here. We’ve hosted busses of travelers, and people who wanted a few days to experience communal living. And through the whole thing, we’ve cooked, and had hard conversations, and loved and held each other. This house has held A LOT.
And just like the rest of us, it’s ready for a release.
This garage problem is scary because no one who lives here is a professional builder. We are smart, and we can figure things out by watching YouTube, but we have full-time jobs and teenagers and healing to do . . . and we don’t want to learn how to fix a whole rotting garage.
I don’t know if we will be able to find a contractor. But I do know that nothing can be fixed yet anyway. First . . . the art supplies, the costumes, the ceremonial accouterments, the fog machine, the seal spine, the saddle, the cooler full of fermenting fish sauce, and all the other leftovers from 60 community members, have to come out. So right now, we are cleaning.
Every weekend we work together to pour through all these years of our life . . . of other people’s lives. And, mostly, we are (lovingly) letting it go.
I have no idea how the “fixing” part of this garage is going to happen. Just like I have no idea what my family will look like in two years. But at least I have something to do. Something I can see and touch, allowing me to release the old patterns and create space for the new.
I’m going to hope that when our time arrives, we will have prepared the space. My partners’ business plans will come to fruition, my kids will initiate their own homework and showers, and they will bike across town safely. I will find somebody with the skills to fix our garage.
Shifting as a family, a community, or a globe is slow work. There are just so many parts. For every centimeter forward, there are miles of side-to-side: leveling everyone up, so we can all make the shove forward together. Then we reevaluate the boundaries and start again.
Often there is pressure for change to happen quickly, and sometimes that need is real. But I also know that families, communities, and cultures must learn to value the side movements just as deeply as the forward. It takes longer. It requires patience. But a family stepping forward with hands held . . . that’s power.
JESIKA FEATHER lives with her family of eight (including four adolescents) in a small, intentional community in Eugene, OR. She is a writer and a substitute teacher. With a tempestuous brood of teenagers forging their diverse paths toward adulthood, her family dynamic (currently) feels ever-changing. She manages this uncertainty by conversing with herself on long walks up steep hills. She uses writing to find novelty in the mundane, and humor in the sadness. She’s also just a compulsive over-communicator. She generally writes about parenting, family, and beautiful-yet-quirky social interactions. Her writing can be found in Communities Magazine and on her blog: jesmamasmusings.blogspot.com.