Now that my children are all technically adults, I’ve been thinking a lot about how close or distant family members live to one another and what that means for the quality and strength of relationships. My son and daughter-in-law have just made an offer on a house in a city that’s a two-hour flight away. Another son has lived in Europe for the last five years. My daughter is planning to move to Mexico. Even with most of us living in the Bay Area, it can be difficult to schedule a 45-minute drive (which can easily turn into a 90-minute drive if the Traffic Gods aren’t smiling) to visit a son across the bay. So there’s proximity, and then there’s proximity.
My own preference is for everybody to live on the same block, or around the corner. I think it’s a compelling argument with the potential to benefit everyone involved, but it has a couple of flaws. For one thing, we live in the expensive Bay Area, with a high cost of living that’s a real deterrent to many young families. For another, I moved 3,000 miles from my hometown to begin family life; my husband moved 6,000 miles from his. Part of that was youthful hubris—we didn’t need proximity to family and our oldest friends; we could blaze our own trail!—and part of it was a mistaken idea that we’d be doing a lot more traveling with young children than finances or energy levels would allow. So now I find myself preaching something that I definitely didn’t practice, which is an imperfect place from which to argue your position.
I understand the pull of the new and different and unknown. I was very ready to blast off from my little town by the time I was 18. It felt like Nowheresville—I believed that nothing really happened there, and I wanted to be somewhere that felt more important. Now I see my little town for the Shangri-la it was, with its bay and river frontage, lots of creeks, just water everywhere, with all the sailing and swimming and fishing and clamming that easefully and inexpensively happen in a place like that. You could ride your bike everywhere. Because it was a small place, people knew each other. There was a general investment in the community, with people volunteering to teach quilting, to show the Boy Scouts how to carve duck decoys for hunting, to staff the weekly jumble sale whose proceeds funded the local historical society. There’s a thickness to relationships between people in this sort of place. By that, I mean that you could go anywhere in town—the grocery store, the library, the movie theater—and you would surely see somebody or many somebodys that you know. You were seen, you were known, you were linked—you were so-and-so’s daughter or sister or neighbor.
That’s exactly what a lot of people want to escape when they leave their hometown. I think there can be good reasons to flee—there are toxic families and situations, and it can be important and essential for people to be able to get away from those sorts of circumstances. But I think there is also an idea that gained a lot of traction in the U.S. in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s (although it has deep historical roots, as outlined in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 Frontier Thesis and Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence) and that is still very much in play, that romanticizes striking out on your own, making your own way, reinventing yourself, shedding all that relational baggage that defined you (and will always define you, in part) for something fresh and unencumbered and of your own invention. I don’t think this always serves.
If that reinvention is wildly successful in financial or practical terms, a person might have a very different perspective on this. But I think, for many of us, the welcome ease of having an uncle or your mom’s friend who knows somebody in the field you’re interested in working in, and they can just make a call and help you out, well, isn’t that nice? Of course, you don’t need to be proximal for that kind of assistance to materialize. But I think proximity to the people who can be helpful to you is a multiplier. It comes back to being known and being seen. You have dimensionality; you exist in a place where you and your success and well-being matter to the people around you. That’s a very different proposition than anonymity. If your children grow up in the same church your parents were married in, if they run into people at the drug store who say, “I went to school with your grandmother,” there’s that thickness I’m talking about: You’re held by something larger that predates you and, presumably, will postdate you. There’s a generational folding in and expanding out, as your family’s reputation builds and reinforces. This doesn’t only happen in small towns or rural places; it can happen in cities too. I spent my first six years in the Brooklyn greystone that my mother had been born in. We literally knew everyone on the (long) block, their backstories, and family histories. The block was a whole world for a six-year-old, and I remember it feeling safe, familiar, and friendly.
I believe this being rooted in a place, living near family and other cherished people—whether the setting is rural or urban or in-between--serves as a foundation for healthy communities. You know how we have cannabinoid receptors in our brains that serve as a home for the tiny cannabis-like molecules that float around in our craniums? I believe we have receptors for community and family too. We’re wired for this. People cite, “It takes a village to raise a child” a lot. That village—do you find it, inherit it, make it? There’s no question that it’s helpful to have others looking out for your precious children (and of course, we hope everybody plays nice with this and doesn’t veer into nosiness, but that’s a risk you run). When I was a girl, my mother registered me for a summer day camp. I didn’t like it, so I just didn’t go. I left home in the morning to walk to the camp, but I decided to walk around town instead. One of my mom’s friends spotted me and called my mother: “Margaret, isn’t Mary supposed to be in that camp this morning? I saw her down on Main Street.” Busted. I was annoyed by this at the time, but now I see it for the show of community robustness that it was.