Assisted Living for Kids. Part I.
14 Apr 2010 2 Comments
in Living In Community Tags: conscious parenting, Intentional community, Living In Community, parenting, parenting off the grid
I’m the youngest of ten children. I’ve been continually surrounded by a symphony of people, each with their own unique expression on the earth, like flavors in an ice cream shop, dizzyingly delightful, sometimes scary. I like it like that—the raw material of life that makes a certain sense when you look at it from far away. Like an impressionist painting—at close range, a confusing smattering of blotches and smears, but from a distance, when you scrunch up your eyes and blur them, the image is breathtaking, ingenious.
My Brothers and Sisters, minus the eldest.
The sound of pots and pans clanging in the kitchen, water running through the pipes, voices of loved ones in the distance is the music of life in motion, conversing, arguing, learning, creating, struggling growing, and loving. Here, in my home filled with friends and family, I am certain of something. That life simply is.
I’m in my 40s now. My brothers and sisters all have their own lives. My parents have passed on. I am divorced with two kids, and I finally have the opportunity to create another family to travel along with my children and me and to be of service to. It’s taken me this long to figure out that I don’t have to go through life alone as a single parent, and I don’t want to. I can choose to surround myself with people who like who I am, who believe in my life purpose and who challenge me to live it out; who are willing to let me be imperfect and are willing to be imperfect too.
A wonderfully strange twist of fate dropped just the right mix of people into my life to be my new family—the family of my choosing. After my divorce, I was alone for the first time ever. [And I loved it!] I spent time getting to know myself and started to truly value who I am. I dated a bit and within a couple years, settled into a new and very different relationship with my now fiancé, Timothy.
During a time when he and I had stopped dating, I got a roommate, Kat, who, with her eleven-year-old son, rents the downstairs floor. She’s a nurse, a single mom, and a woman of piercing insight and deep spirituality. I didn’t realized it at the time we agreed to be roommates, but she turned out to be an amazing friend and confidante. A short time later, when Timothy and I reunited, he slowly, gingerly moved back in with his kids. Now, we three share my six-bedroom house with our five boys.
Very quickly, we realized we had a well-functioning combination of kids, schedules, and personalities. And magic happened. We were happy. Each of us began to feel a deep contentment with our lives—even the struggles were more fun and enlivening. Combining our resources—both mental and physical—we became more than the sum of our parts.
A few months later, one of my two dearest friends from California visited and, seeing how we worked together, decided to relocate here. Alexis moved in three doors down with her ex-husband Todd, their two children, and her boyfriend Dave who drops in and out. Shortly after that, my former nanny, Corina started working for Alexis as her executive assistant and also moved in with her (Hooray!)
The Wearing of the Green
Alexis and I have another friend from California, Joanne, who also landed permanently in the area, not too far away. Each of the three of us, who had been married when we met ten years ago, had since divorced or separated. Joanne lives about 15 miles away with her two boys—longtime friends of my and Alexis’ children. Joanne’s husband bi-locates between here and Los Angeles.
Between nine adults, we have nine children, three dogs, three cats (not mine), and various small animals and fish and five ex-spouses; one very present grandpa as well as a handful of other grandparents who visit often and offer their wealth of life experience.
!
Yes, that’s right.
?
The question you’re asking is, “Is that a commune or what?”
Well, I suppose you could call it that, but we don’t, mainly because the word “commune” is loaded with baggage. We refer to it as “living in community,” and we all sense that the way of living we’d stumbled on is the way humans will have to live in the future to prosper and be truly alive. Had it been more acceptable in the 60s, without so much of the “commune” baggage, I think more people would have opted in.
The next question that might have popped into your head is, “Why on earth would you want to do that?”
Because it’s easier. Plain and simple.
Life is easier when people support you—people who understand you, who care about you, and who want to help you thrive. Thrive, not just survive, though that’s terrific too. What’s so remarkable about our community is each person’s unstated agreement to contribute to the whole. There are no slackers here, no hangers-on, no free riders.
Everyone works or is working on their advancement in some way. Everyone contributes of their time, their finances, and their talents in whatever combination they are most able. Yet, no one has been asked to make a commitment for any particular thing (except housing expenses and that without written agreements, which for two lawyers should shout, “Danger, Will Robinson!”) Each adult puts in whatever they can at any particular moment to logistics and operations.
If a child has to be home sick, there is usually someone around to stay home with them to minimize the impact on that parent’s work. If someone needs an ingredient, one of the houses probably has it. If someone can’t get their kids to soccer, someone else can.
Each adult has a relationship with each child and some are closer than others. The kids have some adult they can play, talk, be vulnerable with. Each child has someone other than a parent to help with homework resulting in a giant reduction in homework drama.
We cook for each other, a meal a week, which alone is a giant blessing because each person only has to cook once and that meal can be as elaborate or simple as the chef wishes. As it turns out, we all enjoy cooking more and create make more extensive menus. We have all week to figure out what to make and can put some real effort into it. Each person is nourished inside and out in a way we could not be alone.
Dinnertime
Consequently, we can all ease up a little and enjoy our children more. We avoid being the helicopter parent because there are other people to tend to and the children see that each person is vital to the whole. When working on our relationships with our ex-spouses, we rely on each other to keep us real and in control. When confronting our own feelings of inadequacy or fear, we help each other see a better reflection of ourselves.
What greater lesson in life is there than learning to live together, resolve conflict, cooperate, grow, thrive, and love?
Next Up: Part II. How does it work and why?
Who is a Legitimate Mother: Part III. “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”
20 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in Politics and Parenting, Uncategorized Tags: breastfeeding, consciousness, Culture, feminism, Mothering, parenting, politics
Women accept diminished value in part because we are in an inferior bargaining position. The glass ceiling still looms. Men are at the highest levels of business, they decide who to pay what. And why would a company pay a woman as much as a man when they know darned well they can get the same (or better) labor for less? Ironically, companies often support unequal pay by declaring that men have families to support, ignoring the fact that many households are headed exclusively, or primarily, by women.
Of course they pay women less! If industry paid us comparable wages, we might be able to support our families and undermine the economic superiority of those in power. This is not to say that men do this on purpose but that our social structure encourages it on a subconscious or semi-conscious level. In response, in the 70s, second-wave feminism developed consciousness-raising groups, a watered down version of which exists in diversity and corporate sexual harassment training today.
The beauty is in the details.
American society has a pressing interest in maintaining the constructs that decide who is a legitimate mother (read a legitimate woman), and who is not. Social conservatives often bemoan the loss of the traditional family unit (which, by the way, is a local structure that doesn’t precisely apply in every society). The traditional American family unit is a male head-of-household model with wife and children following at his heels. Rarely do such households include more than two generations, parents and children, or more than one family unit as in communal living.
Who does this structure serve? And how does this impact our children? And why does it matter?
It matters because understanding the structures in which we operate is critical to ensuring that our children grow and prosper. It matters because for too long families have lived in isolationist, hierarchical fashion, with the man as king of the castle with privacy as the supreme law. What happens behind the closed doors of the home, stays behind closed doors. No one, save the government and only when there is clear evidence of a crime, may peer into the inner workings of the family unit. It matters because so long as we are silent about our families, we are powerless in the world. It matters because as the mother goes, so goes the child.
We know this through the many studies that show a correlation between maternal health and infant health as well as economic indicators that tie women’s poverty to children’s poverty. Children of mothers who are de-legitimated (because of marital status, poverty, education, or mere gender) endure the social sufferings of their mothers. Thus, the child of a single woman of color is less likely to be honored, educated, and raised to his or her full potential than is the child of a white married woman. This child is far more likely to receive all the benefits and protections society can offer while other children are less valued and less supported. What happens to these castaway kids?
We know the answer intuitively, as well as objectively. These children are the have-nots of the world; they are the ones most likely (though by no means guaranteed) to lose heart, to be abused, to drop out, to become abusers, to be incarcerated, to be put in foster care, to have their parents’ rights terminated. In short, by ignoring the pressures on the mother, we perpetuate the ills of the child and thus the ills of society and the world. American society aims the energy of its wrath at the mother and her “badness” for having had a child and failing to live up to a social expectation; rather than question the origin and legitimacy of this expectation, or directing its energy to promote the well-being that mother/child pair.
Society goes as the children go. We only harm ourselves and our children’s future by not being fully aware of the structures that determine our roles, rules, and outcomes. Our children will grow to repeat them, often in unhealthy ways. Our daughters will be consigned to smaller lives than they are capable of and will stretch out against those constrictions in ways that don’t serve them. Our sons will be deprived of female partnership in all its powerful aspects; feminine wisdom, intuition, multi-tasking, cooperation, nurturance, health and healing, endurance to name but a few. Our men will continue to be separated from the feminine, a lonely place to be for sure. Our society will continue to fail to fulfill the promise of the founding fathers and mothers, and to be embroiled in unbalanced global resource conflict (but more about that in another post). Our children will have to deal with the crippling effects of social isolation, intolerance, dissociation, and economic inequality.
Ultimately, both men and women are responsible for the world our children receive. At the very least, we should understand it and be able to describe the visible and invisible forces at play so our children can understand what they’re inheriting.
The next time you see a mother and experience a judgment about her, think deeply about the social constructs in your mind that give that judgment energy. Ask whether the judgment is legitimate, rather than whether she is legitimate.
What do you think?
Next up, more about how women can shape our experience through consciously building our life structures!
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the presenters at the first Motherhood Conference (sponsored by DU, University of Dublin and Whittier law schools) for their insight into the history of motherhood and tireless work in feminism–of which I have been woefully ignorant for too long–Rickie Sollinger, Kris Miccio, Penelope Bryan to name just three. Deep gratitude to my law school professors who have rounded out my understanding of the world, and sometimes left me picking my jaw up off the floor; Penelope Bryan, Rebecca Aviel, Jan Laitos, Nancy Ehrenreich, Catherine Smith; and to my sisters who have gone before me: Linda, Kathy, Mary, Anne, and Mimi.
