It seemed at times like we were falling all over each other in our bungalow on Clarence Avenue: Six kids, four of us born in the first six years of our parents’ marriage. I was the oldest, followed by four sisters, and then a brother, 17 years younger than me.
Day and evening, this crowded, energetic home churned with productive and creative activity. Mom was there all the time. We lived a block from school. We’d often walk home for lunch and Mom was ready with sandwiches, fruit and milk.
Dad worked at a printing company on the lakefront. We’d eat dinner around the table, then do homework or watch TV, parents and kids often chatting together about what we were seeing. We’d play records on the stereo that Dad had built in the living room.
Dad had a workshop in the basement. Next to it, he built a darkroom for my sister to encourage her photography. We practiced the piano on the upright in the dining room. In eighth grade, I rehearsed in our basement with our rock band, “The Velours.”
We had one bathroom. You waited your turn, yelling through the door, “Hurry up!”
Privacy was found by reading on a corner of the couch or maybe in your bedroom. I had my own room. The sisters at first had one in common, until after I moved into the enclosed back porch, and later, the basement.
A lot of work, play and learning happened at home in spaces you couldn’t help but share.
Later, Maureen and I raised our four kids in a house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then for 16 years in a Victorian on Elmwood in Oak Park. All the lots and homes were bigger than the old place in Berwyn.
We had offices away from home, but the nature of our work — teaching, writing — allowed us to do some of it in the house. We split the tasks of home management.
I didn’t build stereos and darkrooms like Dad, but I grew a lot of food out back in beds or on terraced hills that I landscaped. And I did most of the cooking. We tried to keep family dinners a regular thing.
The Elmwood home was busy: a kid might be practicing a violin, trumpet, sax, or clarinet. Homework took place around the dining room table. TV and video games were viewed, played and discussed energetically in a finished attic.
With more room than we had as kids in the bungalow, a lot of work, play and learning took place in our Oak Park home as well. It was dense, often fun, and productive.
Now we’re the grandparents. Of the five grandkids, three live locally; two are in Iowa.
The pandemic changed the relationship between work and home. Four of the five parents in our kids’ homes can work online, at least part of the time. The grandkids are young, so there isn’t much homework yet. But there’s plenty of play, teaching and learning taking place, with tummy time, chasing, rollicking and breathless, hands-on management.
Maureen and I change roles as the grandkids’ caregivers, part-time. I’m retired. She’s still teaching and going to meetings though many of the latter now take place on Zoom. Some she attends from our living room.
I do more of the home management and cook dinner. The little ones have been to our condo a lot. We Facetime with the Iowans. Car seats in our vehicle are permanent fixtures. There’s a crib, stroller and toy box in the guest room, and a fold-out sleeping couch in Maureen’s office for occasional overnight stays.
As I look back on these various homes, from the Berwyn bungalow to the Oak Park Victorian to our condo and the kids’ current domiciles, I see the adaptive, creative uses of our evolving habitats. Our shifting practices across different eras enabled adjustments over time to the redefined, developmental needs of young and old, reknitting family bonds.
And then there’s the redesign of my inner home: Now a grandpa, I see that as my outer homes changed over the decades, my understanding of who I was evolved as well. Little did I know at 12 that at 45 I’d be a dad and professor growing food in the yard, cooking it for the family, and then going into the home office to prepare the next day’s public policy class.
Along with my outer domiciles, my inner house has been recast over the years; my understanding of my manhood has diversified, while my soul’s energy surges over it all in an awakened, teeming and transformative inner space.
The work of family continues, inside and out.