Lori Sweeney
I’m not sure when I realized that the generation raising children today needs our time. Not just our resources, but our time, our patience, our gravitas. And we need their joie de vivre, silliness and technological skills.
I learned we could create a win-win-win for three generations when our 40-year-old friend’s ex-husband died unexpectedly last year. She-who-runs-an-organization struggled to find a child-free time to walk and talk as we’d always done. Suddenly it dawned on me. Our only son was headed off to college and we were already exhausting the Netflix library and wondering whether couples’ yoga was going to be enough to keep us from wandering around the house waiting for the dishwasher to finish so we could empty it. Certainly we could do one night of babysitting. It would be something to plan, someone’s hair to brush. Even if we’re both still working.
I offered—okay I offered my much-more-flexible husband—to pick up Amara, bring her to our house for dinner and an overnight and for said patient husband to take her back to school the next day. My friend Laila about fell over on our walking path, both from surprise and relief. We are the steady, always-show-up-early types, unlike the gaggle of babysitters she’d tried to employ, and we would have time to work on Amara’s reading skills. And we would commit for a year. She weakly asked “Shouldn’t we ask Jeff?” Well okay.
My husband Jeff lumbered down the stairs upon our return and when I got halfway through the request, he finished my sentence by stating “…and I could drop her off at school the next day so Laila has a full 24 hours!” I could have kissed him. Laila definitely did.
We plotted how to make Tuesdays with Amara fun. I settled on one of my favorite tenets: have a theme. Amara helped me make a list, including a wide array of unique topics: bugs, unicorns, orange, circle and Moana. Forty-eight Tuesdays a year is a lot of themes.
A theme means that we have a focus each Tuesday. I always hide a little gift or project she has to find. She’s sewn up a French flag, put on lip gloss, perused a website to find out how to help bugs thrive. A welcoming sign outlines the daily plan, questions to answer and books to read. (Our local library has books on any theme and the most understanding youth librarian alive.)
Jeff has dutifully hula-d in a grass skirt, read to Amara about latkes and made thick, orange jello hearts for her snack. I’ve braided her hair, found a spider headband and decorated pumpkin cookies. We go to bed at 8:15 on Tuesdays, because that’s when Amara settles in, and frankly, we’re exhausted anyway.
And we have stories to tell, jokes to make and something interesting to talk about when it comes to our empty nest. Amara figures into the Christmas letter and accounts for 70 percent of the pictures on our phones. Laila has trumpeted the arrangement to all her friends and her grief support group. Our emptying-nest friends are amused or aghast or congratulatory. We’re planning our holidays around Tuesdays and scouring sales racks for items like unicorn lip balm.
Purposefully living inter-generationally means exactly that, hurling ourselves out of our comfort zones, eating Hawaiian food in the den, and laying out a dinner spread of only orange food. We’ve met Amara’s 1st-grade teacher, her friend Grant in his Flash costume and some ridiculous stuffed animal named Poonicorn (which looks like a unicorn turd, I kid you not). She’s learned about the frontal cortex, what “Bon Voyage” means and why the hide-a-bed folds up if Papa Jeff sits down too soundly for bedtime books.
We need—and find—each other every Tuesday.
Lori (and Jeff) Sweeney were “mock grandparents” for 1 ½ years, until COVID hit, and they decided it was better to head for the hills and move to High Prairie. Tuesdays with Amara is one of the highlights of their lives—and a darn good reminder of what it means to come alongside the younger generation instead of sprinting the other way.