Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Value of Work

[Kay Argyle (argyle]

I enjoyed the times I cooked.  It was very rewarding, seeing the first
twelve people through the line all select carrot pancakes (my own recipe),
and the thirteenth person look disappointed when they had to settle for mere
buckwheat or corncakes.

Cooking, in our community at least, is treated as a higher calling than
other labor. It's too important to be left to chance, or somebody happening
to want to do it.  All work is equal (they tell us) -- but some work is more
equal than others.

In our first year, when the community cried "When will we have a lawn to
play on, when will we get our landscaping bond back?" my response was, like
the horse in Animal Farm, to say, "I'll work harder." (The horse finally
collapsed, and the pigs sent him to the knackers, you'll remember.)

Time I spent cooking was time I couldn't spend landscaping.  I quit cooking.
Since I couldn't afford our community's price for noncooks, I also quit
eating common meals -- and since then I find myself, like the animals at the
end of Animal Farm, looking through the common house windows at other people
eating. (Not that my neighbors are pigs. ;))

Most of the time I avoid the common house on nights I know there's a meal,
because if I pretend I don't know about the meal, or that I have better
things to do, I don't have to feel anything.  But when I dare prod at my
feelings, I feel alienated.  I feel ashamed.  It *hurts*.  (Nothing I should
have let go on as long as it has, but we've had such a struggle anytime work
has been discussed that I've been reluctant to force a new discussion.
Intense meetings give me anxiety attacks.)

I told someone once that on bad days the group process made me feel like I
was moving to Airstrip One.  I don't want to live in George Orwell's other
book, either.

Kay Argyle
argyle [at] mines.utah.edu
Wasatch Commons
Salt Lake City

P.S.  I hear someone in our group is preparing a work credit proposal for
presentation next month.  I'm dreading it and looking forward to it, both --
like anticipating a serious operation you hope will make you better.

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