While I did not grow up in a financially prosperous home, there were other gifts: the extraordinary in the ordinary, celebrating the joy found in music, and embracing the self-esteem that comes from a hard day’s work well done. I can still hear my parents’ voices as they touched base in the kitchen after a long day, as supper was cooking. I can see my father laying out his wallet and keys on the kitchen table so he was ready the next morning when it was time to go to work. I can picture my mother in her chair, Bible on her lap, listening attentively to friends of mine, many of whom came from different religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, creating a haven for many.

I can also see my mother searching through coat pockets to find extra change so she could buy milk, tears in her eyes, and worry on her face. It was a rich home and a home breaking underneath the weight of scarcity, fear, dis-ease, and stressors produced by unhealed, intergenerational wounds.

I wear the impact of both. This dual-impact finds me weaving wholeness from the broken pieces, holding the tension of both, and creating a legacy that breaks some ancestral patterns and honors others. This is how my heart and spirit experience expansiveness.

While there is a preoccupation in our collective culture with creating intergenerational wealth, our mission here at HOME is to invite families to create intergenerational health. Intergenerational health is  

not about following 5 easy steps or listing out lifehacks heard on a podcast.  It is not achieved by scrolling through TikTok soundbites or Instagram’s latest mental health tips. It gets created and nourished through the rhythmic watering and feeding of these relational ways:

• Accepting that we are imperfect humans willing to be accountable and repair
• Encouraging emotional vulnerability instead of keeping secrets that eat away at trust
• Having practices that deepen receptivity, not reactivity
• Listening to learn instead of listening to influence, control, defend, and validate
• Cultivating gratitude instead of grasping for more
• Creating relational safety so children (all ages) do not choose sides or abandon themselves
• Healing instead of hustling for approval, performing for worthiness
• Expressing feelings intentionally instead of scorching the earth with anger and banishing people
• Alchemizing pain into a tender self-compassion instead of weaponizing our wounds
• Forgiving ourselves for missteps made when we were doing our best before we knew differently
• Accompanying others and walking beside instead of rescuing, fixing, or managing

When you start to focus on creating intergenerational health, some people in your family may criticize and reject you. Some may blame, shame, or weaponize the silent treatment. Others, the fortunate ones who walk beside you and/or who come after you, may take your work for granted; they benefit from it so deeply— it is simply all they know.

And, it’s what you, in the daily trenches of doing the work, also know. You know what an honor it is. How hard, gratifying, impactful, steadying, sacred, tiring, and elating it isYou are the “repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in” (Isaiah 58:12). You become the medicine. You are the chain-breaker, the answer to a prayer your ancestors whispered tenderly in their longings.

Intergenerational health is created one moment, one conversation, one changed pattern at a time, day in and day out, as we learn to gently carry what is ours to carry, and put down what is not ours. As we do this intentionally and consciously, we give our ancestors the chance to exhale and our descendants to walk into their future more lightly.