About the Legacy Project:
Legacies Across Generations

The Something to Remember Me By Legacy Project is ongoing, with a variety of activity theme kits available at different times of the year (Mother's Day, Grandparents Day, The Holidays, Valentine's Day). The activity kits are for use by families, schools, community groups, and seniors groups/facilities. There are also contests run throughout the year to focus attention on certain themes and activities, and a series of workshops at sites across the country.

Each activity theme kit is updated and expanded annually (activities are added, information and resources are updated, and we incorporate feedback and ideas from across the country). The latest information and the newest activity kit are always available at www.somethingtoremembermeby.org. The website offers the free edition of each kit. There's a more complete, printed edition of each activity kit available through The Communication Project. You can also get the entire series of Across Generations activity kits with the Legacy Project binder. For more information on the printed activity kit editions and binder, as well as book discounts available as part of the Something to Remember Me By Legacy Project, contact The Communication Project (1-800-772-7765 or tcp@tcpnow.com).

This Mother's Day Activity Kit looks at family, fashion, and, of course, mothers and grandmothers. It gives you everything you need to celebrate Mother's Day -- from the true story behind the holiday, to a fascinating list of some famous and historical mothers, to meaningful and creative Mother's Day gift ideas.

The Mother's Day Activity Kit is being offered with a Mother's Day Contest for adults and children 8 years and older. The theme is "I opened the cedar chest and inside I found..." To enter, write about a special keepsake in your family. The contest runs until May 31.

The Something to Remember Me By Legacy Project Partners include The Communication Project, Parenting Coalition International, Generations United, Lane Furniture, Reminisce (a Reader's Digest magazine), Books Are Fun (a Reader's Digest Company), Geezer.com, Memory Makers magazine, Baskits.com, MyFamily.com, and IBM.

   

What Legacy is All About

To be human is to want to make meaning out of our lives and the seeming chaos of the world around us. Legacy helps us find our way in the world and decide what we stand for. It can be a compass that guides us. It is based on values and character, and also a sense of responsibility to each other, the past, and the future. Legacy is about making the most of life and living. It is about making a difference that not only brings meaning to your own life, but extends beyond yourself and your own lifetime.

The Something to Remember Me By Legacy Project explores legacy in the broadest sense. Exploring the idea of legacy offers a glimpse not only into human relationships, but also the human spirit. I believe legacy is fundamental to what it is to be human, and that a sense of legacy is largely what's missing today. Research shows that without a sense of working to create a legacy, adults lose meaning in their life.

The word "generativity" was coined in 1950 by psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. It is the second last stage of the eight stages into which he divided the human life cycle. He came up with the term because he felt words like "productivity" and "creativity" were too narrow to encompass all the ways we try to make our mark on the future. At its simplest level, generativity is about providing for succeeding generations. It's choosing to take an active interest in guiding the next generation. In its broadest sense, generativity is the desire to put your energy into things that will outlive you. It's a sense that your life is worthwhile and extends beyond yourself. Erikson called the life cycle itself "a system of generation and regeneration."

Erikson saw generativity as a stage of later life. More recently, researchers have treated it as a personality trait. In other words, the idea is that some people, no matter what their age, have more of it than others, or at least choose to be more conscious of it. Not everyone focuses on generativity. Those who don't tend to become absorbed in themselves. They may have gained material success, but find life boring and feel that something is missing, even though they're not certain what it is they long for. Neither education nor privilege seem to be connected with generativity, but successfully dealing with challenges faced earlier in life may. Women tend to score higher on measures of generativity, since they are still largely the kinkeepers in families.

People weren't very interested in Erikson's concept of generativity when he first proposed it. He was seemingly ahead of his time. With today's shifting demographics, we may now be ready. It is a rich and deep concept that has to do not only with nurturing the generations that follow us, but with creating legacies and leaving the world a bit better than we found it. In a time when so many people are searching for meaning, it's about creating something meaningful and lasting.

A meaningful, lasting legacy may take many forms -- children, grandchildren, a business, an ideal, a book, a home, some piece of yourself. At its core, a real legacy is that piece of yourself that makes a difference in the big puzzle of the universe. We all have a piece to contribute. It's up to us to fashion it and put it into place. It may be a big piece. It may be a small piece. But each piece matters.

   

We Are Family

One of the ways many people create a legacy is through their family. What is family? We are all grappling with this question -- with questions of connection, self-definition, meaning and history-making. Ultimately, family is what we decide to make it.

The family, as the oldest and most deeply rooted human institution, has been the primary context through which we learn who we are, where we come from, how we fit into society, and what kind of person we might become. Connections across generations in families have been the glue that bonded families, giving information and identity from the past, which created depth and meaning in the present, which in turn again supplied a resource for charting and securing the future.

Social and demographic changes of the past century have profoundly affected families. We face many issues and stressors in our lives, both as individuals and as members of families -- sparse economic resources, fewer societal and governmental supports, family members spread across the country, increasingly complex relationships with extended, blended, and single-parent families, and greater demands in the workplace to name just a few. As well, life expectancy has increased and fertility has decreased around the world. The shape of the family structure has changed as people live longer and have fewer children. For most of human history, the structure of families looked like a pyramid, with few older members at the top and many young members at the bottom. Today, families are shaped more vertically, like a beanpole, with a more equal number of members in each generation. With more generations of family members alive at the same time, people spend more years in family roles and relationships.

The quality of the intergenerational exchanges in families affects the quality of the lives of individual family members across their lifespans. As individuals age, families are carried along with them in the aging process. Aging touches every generation. Let's look at a hypothetical family today, focusing on the maternal links. The 95-year-old great-great-grandmother has outlived her husband, her siblings, and many of her friends. She faces the last stage of life with its losses and physical limitations. Her 75-year-old widowed daughter is dealing with caring for her 95-year-old mother and her own aging. She is worried about finances, about how much longer she will be able to drive her car, and about the burden she is placing on her daughter. Her divorced 50-year-old daughter, in turn, is trying to help her own children establish and support themselves, helping her 75-year-old mother as much as she can, and planning her retirement. The 25-year-old daughter is looking for help to buy a house, as well as caring for her small children. Finally, the young children in the fifth generation watch the intergenerational dynamics and quietly take in the profound life lessons being played out across five generations.

The multigenerational family is in many ways more complex than it has ever been in history, which adds yet another layer to our already complex lives. These multigenerational families must explore new balances in obligations and responsibilities to one another. These families can also add to the richness of our lives. They are an opportunity to reconnect with a legacy base.

Unfortunately, in our highly individualized, therapeutic culture, the concept of family has often been degraded. We are eager to assign blame -- real or imagined. We tend to blame our families, and often specifically our mothers, for all the problems in our lives. We're very hard on family members, quick to judge and exclude. It doesn't seem to be enough to make our own choices in life; we reserve the right to hold family members responsible for our failures. Evelyn Waugh offered a pertinent reminder: "Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son [or daughter], and it is just possible that you may take after them."

Life isn't always fair or easy, so why have we placed such high expectations on families to be perfect or we discard them? It's not that everyone in every family is wonderful. It's that families give children identity, a foundation, and the good, complicated network you can work with across the course of your lifetime. Buddhists say that families are filled with ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows. Dodie Smith described family as "that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever wish to." Families are complicated. They are not always easy or straightforward. Oddly enough, life is exactly the same.

Family: A Celebration of Humanity is a stunning pictorial journal that cuts across race and nationality to bring to life the intimate moments and emotions shared by all families. In its introduction, writer and musician James McBride comments:

It is the absurdity of family life, the raggedness of it that is at once its redemption and its true nobility. It is that raggedness that binds us, and we must not allow it to slip away. Life's not a perfect thing. It is a raggedy, funky experience, full of awful timing, sisters who tattletale, brothers who tease, horrid songs by distant old relatives, daddies with bad breath, moms who eat leftovers, smelly old grandpas led to the bathroom by reluctant young charges, alcoholic aunts, cigarette-fouled rooms, pissed-off wives, boys with pockets full of string, laughing cousins, papas who pass away, old people who die slowly, and dogs who poop on the living room floor.

We are connected to our family through a shared personal history, responsibility, tears, and, yes, love.

Many people have a hard time understanding the life experiences and needs of those different than themselves. The competitive norms of our society contribute to this. So too does our lack of understanding and appreciation for family. Family is a training ground for the complexity of human relationships. Our own family is a model for the larger human family. Says Jehan Sadat, wife of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat:

When a Westerner describes the family, he is speaking of the father, mother, and children. But when an Egyptian speaks of family, he means the father, mother, children, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and scores of cousins. And there are no strangers in Egypt. Everyone is generously welcomed, whether by a rich uncle in Cairo or a distant and poor cousin in Aswan. We think of ourselves as belonging to one big family.

For families to survive, we must take risks and make sacrifices for each other. But family alone cannot save itself. Families routinely get into problems where they need resources outside themselves. We need to help each other and see a value in we as well as me. This doesn't mean longing for the mythologized ideal of families past. We need to invent new approaches to family and find new ways of reviving community.

The bottom line: The more relationships are nurtured, the stronger they become; the more they're neglected or undermined, the more likely they'll collapse -- whether we're talking about family or community. Networks of belonging give people a psychological home. This psychological home is how we as human beings have made meaning throughout the ages and continue to do so in our individual lives today.

   

The Paradox of Motherhood

Mothers and the concept of motherhood are at the core of family, and at the core of the potential for inventing new concepts of family and reviving community. That's a lot for a mother to carry on her shoulders.

Mother's Day itself is a microcosm of the simultaneous sentimentalization and commercialization of private family life over the last century. Motherhood is a tricky mix of sentimentality, love and honor, devaluation and frustration, and politics. Mothers are adored -- yet blamed for everything. It is very, very hard to be a woman and a mother in the modern world.

The role of mother has lost its transcendent moral and political authority. Historians have noted that by the early 20th century, the middle-class family had become much more emotionally expressive towards its own members, but more and more separated from other social institutions and freed from direct responsibility for them. Women increasingly labored for the personal comfort of their children and husband, without the traditional religious, social, and political connections and supports. Mothers were expected to do it on their own, for their own.

Individualism, consumerism, and market forces have contributed more to the stresses on the family than feminism. Most of the family problems associated with women's entry into the workforce stem from the inadequate and incomplete integration of work and family life in general. The job of mother is unpaid. Women who work outside the home generally receive low wages and often face stressful, unfulfilling working conditions. There has been a failure of employers and government to adjust work patterns to new demographic realities. And many men have refused to share in childraising and domestic work.

It may well be that mothers and others who care for children and for sick and elderly family members will go on giving, whatever the costs or consequences for themselves. Maternal love is, after all, one of the most powerful and enduring forms of love. But even if this is so, there is still a powerful argument to reforming the expectations on and the role of modern mothers, and in turn the concepts of family and community. It's called fairness.

So by all means think about your own mother this Mother's Day. We all need to feel loved and appreciated, and your own mother is probably no exception. But I think it's also important this Mother's Day to start thinking about some of the bigger questions -- about the future of motherhood and how we want to reshape families so that they sustain and nurture women, men, and children.

   

A Mother's Gift

We love our mothers. Of course we do. There are also times when we would like to strangle them -- and them us. The role of our mother in our lives, however tumultuous the relationship may have been, is considerable. It brings us face-to-face, at the most fundamental level, with the complexity of human relationships. And the relationship brings home, in such a personal and often emotionally wrenching way, the life course and the temporality of life, particularly if our mother is older or no longer here.

Author Reeve Lindbergh is the daughter of writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh and aviator Charles Lindbergh. In her book Under A Wing: A Memoir, she offers an intimate, compelling portrait of her family in all its complexity. She writes:

In our family it has always been hard to know what is right and what is wrong, in terms of what we can do for one another. It has been hard for us, too, to separate individual identity from family identity.

She insightfully comments on how we perceive and perhaps take for granted our own family relationships:

He took us flying on Saturdays. It didn't happen every Saturday, of course. Still, I spent quite a few of my Saturday afternoons in the 1950s several thousand feet in the air over the state of Connecticut, flying with Charles Lindbergh. I know that many people would yearn to have had the same experience, but as far as I was concerned, I was just sitting in the rear cockpit of a very small airplane, feeling a little sick to my stomach. I looked down at the forests and the fields and the houses and the roads below me from an intense, vibrating height and hoped that my father would not notice that I had cotton balls stuffed in my ears.

In No More Words: A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Reeve Lindbergh offers a sensitive, moving tribute from daughter to mother, from one writer to another who was her model and mentor, written with insight into life's final stage.

In her final years, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was incapacitated by a series of strokes. She became only a shell of the mother Reeve knew and loved, unable to speak or care for herself. Reeve had to confront, as we all do, the passing of her own youth (which some argue comes only when we face the loss of our mother) and the challenges of the life course:

Conversation was so integral to my own sense of my mother's life and identity that I cannot accept its absence. I find myself inventing her speech when I am with her, and continuing with the invention long afterward. Now my mother's eloquence has found new life in my mind, and in my dreams.... [I wondered what to do, and then I dreamed about my mother and she gave me an answer.] Just take care of her. Nothing else. This I could understand. This was my real mother's message to me from her real self, about my task as it related to this vestigial, wraithlike Other Mother, by whom we were both confronted... Just take care of her. That was all I had to do. I didn't have to understand her or identify with her. I didn't even have to love her, as I had so intensely loved my real mother, for more than fifty years. How simple, and how wonderful! My mother had returned to me, and she had healed my hurts and solved my problems once again.

It was to be Reeve's final gift from her mother.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh passed away in February, 2001, the same month that my beloved grandmother died (the one who inspired my book Something to Remember Me By and in turn the national Legacy Project). Reeve comments on the moment her mother died:

Birds came, and left again, and came, and perched, and flew, and fluttered around the branches, just outside my mother's window, just after she died. There were no birds there the day before. I know because I was sitting in exactly the same place, by my mother's bed, at exactly the same time. I would have seen them. But on Wednesday morning, the moment of her death, the birds came and sat on the branches outside her window, while we were sitting inside her room. I'm glad the birds came. In fact, I think I was expecting them.

   

The Something to Remember Me By
Legacy Project Revisited

Love, loss, pain, joy, memories and hopes. That's legacy. The Something to Remember Me By Legacy Project explores legacy from the perspective of mothers and fathers, parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren, the individual and the society.

Today, we are desperate for connection and meaning. We are desperate for a sense of where we've come from, who we are, where we're going, and why we're going there. The world isn't connected by molecules. It is connected by stories, our family stories and our societal stories. We are connected by the legacies passed down from those who came before us and the legacies we pass down to those who come after us.

This project is about bringing together all generations -- young and old, women and men -- to explore issues. It's about bringing together diverse groups -- families, schools, seniors groups, community groups, corporations, local and national organizations -- in a way they haven't been brought together before. It's about uniting research and grassroots concerns. It's about synthesizing information into a useful knowledge base. It's about creating momentum in an area that affects all our lives at the most fundamental level possible.

And with Mother's Day just around the corner, I can end by saying only one thing: Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I love you.