A longing for Yesteryear…

This week I finished Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke: clever, surprising, deeply uncomfortable, and unexpectedly empathetic. It aches with me as I continue navigating the sandwich generation: consolidating estates across three states, caring for my 96-year-old mom, tending to wounds left by the uniquely American trauma of domestic gun violence while helping relocate a vulnerable family member, keeping pace professionally, and beginning my own Swedish Death Cleaning and working to flip NIMBY into FIMBY — Family in My Back Yard. (Because we need more housing in Monroe County and across New York State: communities cannot care for one another without an affordable place to live.)

Mother’s Day was not born as brunch and flowers. Its roots are in public health, peace work, community care, and women organizing for survival. Ann Reeves Jarvis organized Mothers’ Work Clubs to reduce infant mortality and improve sanitation. Julia Ward Howe called women to unite for peace after the Civil War. Jarvis fought to honor mothers with sincerity — and later opposed the commercialization of the day she helped create.

Society now depends on dual incomes while still relying on the unpaid labor of families — most often women — to hold everything together. Much of that dependence grew from systems organized around scarcity and extraction: how do we maximize value, productivity, profit (and still, often on the backs of women)? Maybe the better question is: How do we build communities resilient enough to care for one another well?Care work is treated as private, but its consequences are public: housing, health, safety, education, violence prevention, elder care, child care, and economic mobility.

From sexual assault to domestic violence, from gun violence to poverty, from caregiving to education, women have long served as the bridge between survival and possibility — weaving the fabric of support that communities depend upon.

This week, my family and I will head to Fayetteville, Arkansas by Amtrak for the Strong Towns National Gathering. One of the foundational ideas behind the movement is that we can no longer build our communities around the assumption of never-ending growth. We are being called instead toward stewardship: cultivating incremental, resilient growth that actually works for families and communities.

Economies and empires have historically been built by extraction of wealth. Extraction to the point of what? There is one planet. One shared future. One human family trying, imperfectly, to survive together. At the end of it all, we all return to the same earth and feed the same worms — despite all our status, accumulation, optimization, and striving.

A society organized only around extraction eventually begins to consume the very things it depends upon: families, trust, health, time, housing, community, even the planet itself.

Maybe the future of power could look less like domination and extraction and more like stewardship, responsibility, and interdependence. The ability to sustain families, communities, infrastructure, learning, and democracy itself may be the most important power we have — and perhaps a resolution so many of us feel in our nostalgia for a past that was never as simple, stable, or sustainable a fantasy that some strive to create.