Last night we had Janis night at our cohousing community. When we first moved in together (about 70 of us, and back then loaded with young kids and hence new parents) we decided to try something new: to have Janice Keyser, the early childhood expert and author, come facilitate a parenting group for our community. And we've been doing this now for many years, and have even reworked the term WWJD: what would Janis do?
The Janis evenings have proved to be invaluable for many things. We go around, and parents talk about their children, what is happening in their homes and lives. We see each other both loving, and often at a loss over some problem or other. We see each other vulnerable, occasionally uncertain, needing help. Somehow, this is fantastically powerful for knowing one's neighbors, for creating empathy for each other's lives.
I know this will sound uber Californian, but...often I am sitting and listening to the group, as people lay out a specific problem (we have lots of teens now, so the problems have themselves grown from when they were toddler problems), and I can feel the group as an organism. Often people are rapt, listening, taking it in, feeling, thinking. The parent will be funny, or wry, or sad, or straightforward, or all in a series; Janice will invariably reframe the problem in a way that is useful and also insightful. Occasionally other cohousers will chime in, give advice, reframe, ask questions. Typically there are tears and there is a lot of laughter, as what were once seemingly intractable problems wrestled with in one's home become the property of all, externalized, capable of not simply solution but also a wider perspective. Laughter is the relief that one's problems are, after all, a size that admits, if not of solution, then of opportunity.
We wind down after 13 minutes times 9 or 10 families, write checks, follow up things that were said earlier. We walk out of the Common House, onto the porch that looks out over the green and the houses, our houses, our community, and for a moment, before everyone descends the stairs and disperses to their domiciles, we are a community in every way that word has significance. We carry the communal parenting, in all its confusion and complexity and grief and hope, each of us.
We are parents in common.
Common circa 1300, "belonging to all, general," from O.Fr. comun "common, general, free, open, public" (9c., Mod.Fr. commun), from L. communis "in common, public, general, not pretentious, shared by all or many," from PIE (Proto-Indo-European) *ko-moin-i- "held in common." This compound adjective is formed from *ko- "together" + *moi-n-, suffixed form of base *mei- "change, exchange" (see mutable), hence lit. "shared by all." Second element of the compound also is the source of L. munia "duties, public duties, functions," those related to munia "office."
So: duties in common, and also change, exchange, in common, together. Community is based, in part, on what is mutable, not what remains the same. And when we meet as vulnerable parents, we give each other permission to show, not our coherent adult competent public face and impression, but our more mutable, changing, uncertain face. Or, to use another metaphor, we show the shadow side of parenting to each other, that which is usually kept in the dark, hidden from most people's eyes.
That we share these shadows is an act of trust that is pretty wild; it is also a highly practical ritual. For we all end up parenting, in various ways, each other's children, and this has the potential of producing a highly flammable kind of conflict. For when are we lions and lionesses more than when we are protecting our children? And when are we as blind and plugged in as when we are trying to figure out our children?
So what looks from the outside perhaps like an idealistic practice (living collectively, discussing problems with children and with issues arising from different kinds of parenting philosophies and practices) ends up having been, for my community, one of the most practical things we've done.
Perhaps we are as strong as our weakest link, our most vulnerable part, but we get stronger when those parts are admitted, shared in common, strengthened. Turns out we are each the weakest link on occasion. And then we have the experience of having Janice and others walk us through a process of getting stronger, of seeing things differently.
Borges, in the Prologue to "El otro, el mismo," writes, "It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature." A day after our Janice meeting, after hearing story after story of complicated family situations and conflicts and confusions and wits' ends, I feel as if the word co-mmunity,common, ko-moin-i, is itself a magical word, that calls up for me a circle of faces, a sometimes thick, sometimes electric atmosphere and taste of the air, a ritual of vulnerability that, irrationally, makes us less vulnerable.
So I am saying the word out loud, hearing it as a set of ancient sounds, an invocation.
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