Very astute observations about cohousing | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: David Heimann (heimannworld.std.com) | |
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 20:39:11 -0700 (MST) |
Hello, I read the following letter to the editor recently from Joan Labbe, a member of Mosaic Commons Cohousing. In it, she describes the cohousing dynamic in what I feel is a very accurate, readable, and effective way. I have her permission to forward it to Cohousing-L. Read it, enjoy, and use it to inform your own larger communities! Best regards, David Heimann JP Cohousing ============================================================================ From: Joan Labbe Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 11:49 AM To: editor [at] brainchildmag.com Subject: Letter to the Editor Dear Brain, Child Editors, I have been a member of a cohousing group working to build a community for the last year and a half. I hve also been visitor on several occasions to two local established communities, interviewed cohousing residents, and been involved on a national email list for cohousers. So I read with great anticipation and growing disappointment your Winter 2004 feature article "Village People". Cohousing is definitely not for everyone and I respect anyone's decision that it is not for them. However, I take great issue with the last few pages of the article when the author attempts to generalize, based on visiting only one cohousing community and reseraching mostly communal living, as to what the drawbacks to cohousing are in general, that is, what cohousing demands of its members. Cohousing groups differ greatly in many areas including values, goals, physical layout of the community, certainly the predominant parenting style, areas of diversity and rules by which members agree to live. I would hate for anyone to visit one cohousing group, feel their parenting style did not fit in, and draw the conclusion that cohousing as a whole was not for them. It seems more likely to me that that particular group was not for them. I believe this article, since it purports to draw conclusions about cohousing in general, would benefit greatly from the author including visits to three or four cohousing communities, doing more research (much of which is available on the internet) on cohousing rather than communal living and checking her impressions with cohousers to see if they resonate. She could also have benefited from joining the national email list and seeing what types of conflicts come up on there. By not doing this, she has written an article that is not able to be well rounded or accurately draw a picture of the common facets of cohousing. What the author wrote about diffusion of intimacy in families and the need for hard conflict resolution work did seem accurate for my experience with cohousing, although some of her research was based on communal living. Cohousing families often face the dilemna of how to get in "family time" and many communities report coming up with creative ways of doing this - such as designating a family night and having signs on their doors letting residents know when they would like not to be disturbed. I admired the author for her perception when she wonders if she was ready for the hard work of conflict resolution that is necessary for really living closely to other families and knowing them well. It is indeed hard work, but with a huge payoff. However, there were other generalities at the end of the article which did not accurately reflect my experience with my cohousing group nor my experience visiting other cohousing groups. The author talks about her perception that cohousing exerts pressure on its members to be "a certain kind of person", which seemed to be someone who is neighborly and sharing all the time - a regular group of "Mother Theresa's" it would seem. I have not experienced such pressure. Actually I have found my cohousing counterparts to be pretty regular people who, like most of us, feel like sharing sometimes, and sometimes don't. What they demand of me is that I be who I am and that I take responsibility for my needs. I find it interesting that the one person the author interviewed who was leaving cohousing was a person who said she had great difficulty asserting herself or asking for help. In the situation where she had babysat other members children and had messages on her phone and felt she couldn't say no I had quite a different take than the author who seemed to feel there was an underlying pressure there from the coho community to change this person. I saw it as a person without the skills to communicate what she needed to the community and who was thus overwhelmed. She was feeling she couldn't say no, but she didn't ever say that. She was needing the other people to read her mind. Had she gone back to the community and said "look, this babysitting gig isn't working for me and I'd rather pass on it", then had her experience been that the community shunned her in some way, I would be more receptive to seeing this as the community's issue, rather than the individual member's issue. As it is, I see the member struggling with making her needs know, which is crucial to any healthy relationship including those in cohousing. My own experience is that many different needs have been expressed in our community, including many introverts' needs to sit things out and these have been completely heard and respected. This brings me to my second area of disagrement, which is what the author perceived as cohousing's "celebration of the extrovert". I do not find this resonates with my experience at all. In fact, quite the opposite. I am an introvert among many in my group. Before I joined the group, I internalized what I perceive now to be the celebration of the extrovert in the world at large - they are the go getters, the ones who get things done. I always felt it would be better to be this way instead of being an introverts who tends to be viewed in terms of what I can't do. When I joined my cohousing group I found a strong collection of introverts who had their own needs and were amazingly comfortable with themselves and good at expressing their different needs. This has been a tremendous gift to me in terms of being comfortable with who I am and realizing that my introversion not only fits into, but is respected, heard and even valued in my cohousing group in a way that it is not in the regular world. Lastly, I feel the need to comment on the author's feeling that she wouldn't want to be called onto the carpet for values discussions necessarily all the time. Together with her comments about how she "wants a situation where I can control how much I give and receive" it seems like she is saying that a member in cohousing is not in control of things such as the conflict resolution process or sharing. This is also the opposite of my experience with cohousing. I will say one thing about control. Cohousers have the ultimate control. There is no "big brother" shaping, molding or telling us what to do. We build and run our community together. We each have a voice with both the power and the responsibility to use it. If you are a member of a coho community and are feeling that someone's snippy comments about woodchips in someone's mouth or putting bags in the wrong place are creating an atmosphere you don't like, you have the opportunity to address it and create a better atmosphere. That is the hard work and also the joyous payoff of cohousing. It demands that we take responsibility for that which we don't like and which we complain about. What I find is that this makes me a better person and that it helps make my cohousing community (such as it now is pre-land) a better place. Many folks find that cohousing is not for them from reasons ranging from "I need more physical and emotional space than that where I live" to "I don't want to work this hard." However, this article does not give an accurate picture of the hard work of cohousing. I hope to see a more thorough and well-rounded piece on cohousing in the future in your magazine. Sincerely, Joan Labbe _______________________________________________ Cohousing-L mailing list Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org Unsubscribe and other info: http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L
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