Aunt Leia

Kate calls me Aunt Leia.

Her friends call me Aunt Leia.

I cannot adequately express how much I love this.

I mean, really.

Aunt Leia.

There is something about hearing those words from this group of young humans standing on the edge of their lives that makes my heart ridiculously happy.

Kate is eighteen.

She is strong and sensitive and curious and loving. She is one of my favorite humans on the planet.

And right now, she is doing something enormous.

She has left everything she knows.

Everything familiar.

Everything safe and protected.

And, if we're being truthful, some things that were also small and controlling and narrow.

She is two weeks into college.

And not some tiny little private college where everyone knows your name by lunchtime.

No.

Kate apparently decided to begin adulthood at one of the largest universities in the country, surrounded by tens of thousands of students.

Wowsie.

Talk about jumping into life.

And she is doing it.

She is meeting people.

Trying things.

Making decisions.

Getting uncomfortable.

Figuring things out.

Living.

And perhaps one of the things I admire most about her is that she is wise enough to know she doesn't have to figure all of it out alone.

Sometimes she calls Aunt Leia.

I Thought I Was Helping Her

Kate calls and we talk.

Sometimes she needs advice.

Sometimes she needs reassurance.

Sometimes she needs another perspective.

And sometimes I think she simply needs a safe place to say the thing out loud.

So we chat.

I tell her what I think.

I share things I've learned from nearly sixty years of getting some things right and getting plenty of things spectacularly wrong.

She listens.

Then she does something I absolutely love.

She takes what feels right to her and leaves the rest.

And then she goes and lives her life.

She often thanks me afterward.

“Thank you for your wisdom.”

“Thank you for your advice.”

And I know she means it.

I know she is grateful.

What I'm not sure she completely understands yet is this:

She is helping me just as much as I am helping her.

Maybe more.

Love Doesn't Only Travel in One Direction

With Kate, I can be me.

I feel safe.

I feel trusted.

I feel loved.

And something remarkable is happening inside that relationship.

I am learning how to receive love while I am giving it.

For much of our lives, we can become very good at being the giver.

The helper.

The caretaker.

The advice-giver.

The person who shows up.

Receiving can be harder.

But Kate gives something back simply by trusting me enough to let me into her life.

She lets me matter to her.

She lets my experiences—the beautiful ones and the painful ones—be useful.

And perhaps that is one of the ways our lives become larger than ourselves.

The things we survive don't have to end with us.

They can become wisdom.

What Kate Is Teaching Me

Kate and I have talked about the women in our family.

We have talked about ancestral wounds.

About the ways women learned to survive.

About what was expected of them.

What they tolerated.

What they weren't allowed to say.

What they didn't know how to say.

What was passed from mother to daughter, sometimes without anyone realizing anything was being passed at all.

Pain can travel through generations that way.

Silence can.

Fear can.

Control can.

Beliefs about who we are allowed to be can.

But lately I've been thinking about something else.

Healing can travel through generations, too.

Kate and I are talking.

Out loud.

That alone feels important.

We are naming things.

Questioning things.

Looking at patterns and asking:

Does this still belong to us?

Do we want to carry this forward?

Is there another way?

I am sharing what life has taught me.

What parenting taught me.

What relationships taught me.

What my mistakes taught me.

What grief taught me.

What finally learning to love myself has taught me.

And Kate brings her own wisdom.

Her questions.

Her courage.

Her sensitivity.

Her willingness to look at things differently.

Together, we are deciding what continues.

And what ends here.

Maybe This Is How We Change a Lineage

I used to think healing ancestral wounds sounded like something enormous and mystical.

Maybe sometimes it is.

But perhaps it can also look like an eighteen-year-old girl calling her aunt from college.

And her aunt answering the phone.

Maybe it looks like telling the truth about things previous generations couldn't talk about.

Maybe it looks like a young woman being encouraged to trust herself.

Maybe it looks like an older woman realizing she doesn't have to have all the answers.

Maybe it looks like both of them being allowed to be strong and sensitive.

Maybe it looks like saying:

You get to choose.

You get to change your mind.

You get to ask for help.

You get to be fully yourself.

You are loved.

And maybe somewhere behind us are generations of women who didn't get to hear those words nearly enough.

So we say them now.

Out loud.

Again and again.

Until perhaps they become part of what gets passed forward.

You May Be Wondering…

Can one relationship really change generations of family patterns?

I think it can begin there.

We don't change the past.

Kate and I cannot rewrite the lives of the women who came before us.

But we can become conscious of what they handed us.

We can honor what helped them survive without believing we must continue carrying everything they carried.

And then we get to choose what we hand to the women who come after us.

Less silence.

Less fear.

Less control.

More choice.

More trust.

More truth.

More love.

Kate is eighteen and standing at the beginning of an extraordinary life.

I get to stand nearby.

Not directing it.

Not controlling it.

Not telling her who to become.

Just loving her while she discovers who she already is.

And somehow, while I am helping this beautiful young woman step into her own life, she is helping me step more fully into mine.

She calls me Aunt Leia.

She thinks I'm giving her wisdom.

Maybe someday she'll understand.

She is giving me some, too.

And I am so deeply grateful that in this lifetime, in this family, in this particular place in our lineage—

we found each other.

May you see the world through the eyes of love, remembering that we are all part of one living, sacred whole.