family
For more than 15 years, our 7,500-square-foot home in Arizona was the center of our family’s life. It’s where we raised four daughters, celebrated birthdays, hosted big family Thanksgivings, and somehow managed to fill every room with memories.My husband and I had good careers, a family we adored, a home…
Cleaning my house sometimes feels like an exercise in futility. Benjamin Franklin wrote that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. I would humbly like to add a third: that a dog will track muddy pawprints across a freshly mopped floor. Growing up in a blue-collar family,…
When my husband, a doctor, went in for his first routine colonoscopy at 45 years old, he said nonchalantly, “I’ll be done by noon. Then we can grab lunch.” He recommends that his patients be screened on time, so he was simply following his own advice.He had no symptoms suggesting…
When I was a child, the Jersey Shore was my magical place. My great-grandmother, her siblings, and a few other relatives lived there in a high-rise apartment building, so every summer we’d visit for a week. Looking out from the balcony, I believed the ocean went on forever. On the…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lloyd Enbom, 40, a content creator who purchased an abandoned home in Hakuba, Japan, a ski town in Nagano Prefecture, with his wife, Mandy Rutherford. Enbom, who is from Australia, plans to continue traveling with his wife and two-year-old daughter while…
Kim Berling anticipates living a very long life. Much of it, though, may not go as she wants.Berling, 66, and her husband, 72, have cared for her 99-year-old mother-in-law. Both work to support her as her memory fades and her health declines. Berling and her husband, who lives in Albuquerque,…
I never thought I’d live with my mom again.But in 2024 — as my husband and I struggled to find a house in Connecticut that we could afford, and my mom was looking for a way out of Florida — I had an idea: What if the three of us…
For our daughter’s first birthday, my husband and I flew to Malaga, Spain, with our almost-1-year-old, my mom, my dad, my mother-in-law, and two family friends. We were a group of eight, all traveling together and sharing a four-bedroom, three-bathroom Airbnb for a week of sightseeing and celebrating.As a travel…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with McKenna Shamburg, 25, who moved from Utah to Indiana to be closer to her family to help raise her children. The following has been edited for length and clarity.I’ve lived in eight states now.I was born and raised mostly in South…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Madhur Mehta, 35, an Indian national living in Seattle and working at Amazon. The following has been edited for length and clarity.When I came to the US for my master’s degree in August 2021, my goal was to have a stable…
