Adjusting to a New Family Dynamic

This year marks another major adjustment to our family dynamic.

Our Family Dynamic Up Until Now

Up until the fall of 2024, our family (of five) has been largely together 24/7.

In the late summer of 2019, we bought a second home in the mountains and migrated the bulk of our daily living to up there. Then, in March of 2020, when the world all around us turned upside down, we made our way back to our homestead.

With each move, we stayed together, adjusting as necessary to either the environment around us or to the effects of what was going on in the world-at-large.

Then, in the summer of 2024, our youngest informed us that he wanted to go to high school — to get the going-to-high-school experience. Having two residences in the same state, we had a choice as to which public school to enroll him in. We chose the one in the mountains. Given his age, he was enrolled as a junior.

Since we had quite a bit of livestock to still care for on the homestead, we made the choice to temporarily split our household in two.

I went up to the mountains with our high schooler, while Ty stayed on the homestead with our other two (adult) children. And my son & I travelled back & forth between the two residences every week to begin with, then every other week thereafter.

This kind of living arrangement was very taxing on Ty & I, but we were both putting our kids first with the understanding it was only temporary.

We wanted to give the youngest what he wanted, which we couldn’t provide ourselves (& what we thought would be most beneficial for him). And we wanted to continue to help the older two make their transition into adulthood.

I must say being apart like that made our reunions all the sweeter.

A New Arrangement

This past summer, we decided to make a different arrangement.

Given that the youngest turned 18, we arranged to have the three oldest primarily stay together in the mountain home (along with our dog), while I largely stayed back on the homestead with Ty.

The deal was that the two older ones would run the family business (in exchange for their room & board), and Ty & I would back them up as needed and drive up there regularly to visit with them, providing any physical support they needed (in addition to the support we were giving them otherwise). And then one of us would bring them all back to the homestead whenever there were days off from school around a weekend or an extended school break so we could all be together again.

At this point, I have been the one who has been travelling back & forth between the two residences, which is fine with me (because it’s absolutely beautiful up there in the fall). And then, last weekend was the second time the kids have been home since this school year started.

During this time, we’re all having to make adjustments — not just to a new living arrangement & community environment but also to an ever-changing economy.

Given the threat of losing Amazon as our primary income source, Ty started building our own website to offer our primary merchandise for sale. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to help market that site in the modern age. (So much has changed since we last ran our own website in 2020.)

And then our oldest two are having to figure out how to plug into their new community environment, while our youngest tackles a full academic load (taking extra virtual classes to earn enough credit hours to graduate this year) and seeks to condition himself & improve his athletic skill in time for the upcoming basketball season.

In addition to all of this, I’ve been rekindling & developing relationships with other family members & friends I was physically apart from last year, while resurrecting my Substack sites which I had let go dormant over the late spring and summer months and launching a new personal website.

It’s been a very full past two months.

We’re not your typical “empty nesters”, so I imagine there are not many who can relate to all that we’re going through. However, I don’t think we’re your typical anything — and that’s why I’m maintaining this blog.

I want other people to see that there are alternative ways of life that can be personally customized to fit our individual sets of priorities and circumstances.

For us, our family unit is a priority. The overall health & strength of each member of our family is also a priority. And right now, helping our kids become more independent & self-confident is at the top of our list.

But then also, we want to keep our kids close — to each other and to us — physically, mentally & emotionally, so that we can all be interdependent on one another.

Meanwhile, I am steadily working on establishing & developing friendly human connections with those who are physically near us as well as with those who are emotionally and/or mentally near us. Because we recognize the need for a community of people in which to operate interdependently in order to maintain the land-based and more natural lifestyle we’ve chosen.

And I’m personally working on a massive project to promote private peer to peer exchanges within our personal sphere of influence. (I expect to share more about that in the coming weeks.)

In a nutshell, our entire family is adjusting to a new family, community, commercial & alt-economic dynamic. Hopefully, we will all become better, stronger and an even more cohesive unit through this transitional stage of our lives.