thoughts on community
My friend Beck wrote a post a while back about community and how they can’t really be built. They’re organic. Jennifer responded with some of her own thoughts. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of community and its absence lately on a number of fronts. I blame the rise of the nuclear family. I remember reading about research (I can’t remember where for sure but I think it was in Sheila Kitzinger’s Ourselves as Mothers) that found in cultures where people lived close to their extended families, new mothers wanted mostly to parent just like their mothers. But in cultures like North America, where adult children move far away from their parents because, as Beck says, “moving away is what we do now,” new mothers generally want to do the opposite of what their mothers did.
The benefit of the extended family model, I’m guessing, would be more support for parents and in particular mothers. But that system also perpetuates the status quo and supports (depends on?) rigid gender roles. The benefit of the North American nuclear family is that it affords significant social change – probably an essential ingredient for the women’s movement. But it also makes for instability and uncertainty on an individual level.
It struck me reading Beck’s and Jennifer’s posts that it also makes it very difficult to forge real-life communities. Because there are as many different ways to raise children as there are parents, I feel like I can never step in and parent other people’s kids. And while I would welcome someone else stepping in from to time to parent my kid (like if he misbehaves at the playground), I wouldn’t care for it at all if it doesn’t align with my values and approach to parenting.
For the last several months I’ve been working on a book of some of the images I made and words I wrote during my son’s first two years of life. I’ve been remembering how angry I was, especially at parenting books with their prescriptive tone, contradictory advice, and dire consequences if I didn’t follow their instructions to the letter. But the only reason there’s so darn many of them, and so much need (I remember clearly my desperation to find some kind of solution to my son’s sleeping issue – little did I know the solution would be accepting that I can’t control it), is because of our lack of community. As much as I love my mother, I couldn’t always trust her advice because she got duped herself as a young mother by the parenting book industry. And I didn’t have any close friends with kids who were enough older than my son to offer comfort but not so much older that they couldn’t remember the reality of life with an infant. And so my husband and I struggled, and I made bleak photographs, and the three of us survived.
* * *
Ever since the workshop with Donald Weber, when he said that you need to know what you have to say and that takes time (and how he’s figured out that his work is all about power and the wounds it inflicts on those who don’t have it), I’ve been wondering what my own work is all about. And my initial thinking is that it’s all about community, or the lack thereof. More specifically, I think I could drill it down to being all about the rise of the nuclear family and its impact on society.
For my first volunteer shift at the Drop-In Centre, I was also in need of its services: one of my family members had been evicted the night before and was homeless. The thing about mental illness is that family cannot come together in the same way you can with physical illnesses – if you try, the mental illness will suck you all in. Sometimes I am ashamed at my distance from my family member, and I wonder if people around her wonder where her family is and what’s wrong with us that we aren’t doing more to help. The fact is there is a limit to how much hardship and distress a single nuclear family can withstand and overcome. I believe this may very well be the case for everyone who comes to the drop-in centre: the woman with a chronic disease who didn’t want me to photograph her because her family disapproves of her coming there but she keeps coming nonetheless; and the man whose mother is in a nursing home a few hours away and the man whose daughter will soon be moving in with him, and the man who walked here from the east coast, and the man whose daughters thought he was dead for the last decade, and the boy whose parents dropped him off to stay at the shelter, but stayed to eat a meal with him before they left. There is a limit to what one family can do, and places like the Drop-In Centre fill in the gaps.
I think this is also very much the subject of my Two-Powered series, which I have yet to unveil here – the photographs I made during the first two years of my son’s life that are darker than I remember. My parents were wonderful, but if the nuclear family hadn’t taken over our culture, I would have had no need for parenting manuals, and struggle to reject them and find my own path. Don’t get me wrong: my family is wonderful and they were very supportive during my orientation into motherhood, especially my mother. But I live two hours away from them, and there is a limit to what one family can support. Moving away is what we do now.
My belly dancer series gets a little more difficult to link in, but I believe it’s there. That I can’t articulate the link is probably the reason I’m making those photographs instead of writing about it. I started belly dancing when I most needed community, and it played a significant role in me overcoming severe anxiety and panic. Visually, the photographs are probably more about isolation than community, but the act of photographing these women has revived that part of my community. Yet I photograph them mostly alone and a bit overwhelmed, visually, by their harsh surroundings.
I’m shocked at how my camera, or perhaps more accurately, my compulsion to photograph people, is widening my community. I’ve said it before in relation to the Drop-In Centre, but I’ll say it again because it’s important. Photographing people deepens my encounters with strangers or near strangers. The other day, I found Nadia Sablin’s website, which has some beautiful photography. In book five, she shows “Portraits of friends and strangers. And strangers that have become friends,” which I thought was bang-on.
My newest project, still very much in its infancy, involves photographing original owners of houses in the neighbourhood we moved into last fall. The suburb was built mostly in the 50s and 60s, at the same time as the nuclear family rose to power in North America. So I’ve been going door to door to find original owners. Now, when I walk to work in the mornings or to the playground in the evenings, I know some of the people I’m passing, and we wave in a neighbourly way. I wouldn’t have otherwise met them were it not for my compulsion to photograph. Nothing else could make me knock on strangers’ doors – certainly not needing a cup of sugar or a sympathetic ear. But already I feel like this project could lead to the possibility of living near friends.
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
It’s hard to help parent even other family members’ kids. You have to be willing to mesh each others’ beliefs.
I’m having a thought that’s hard for me to put into words — something about family sometimes being a personal disaster. Like, some people are born blind, and some people are born with a pain-in-the-ass hypochondriac perpetually unemployed sibling, and both of those things are a shackle around the ankle. In our society we’re told that all shackles can be and should be undone, but in fact, blindness can be reversed more easily than a sibling can be cast off. …A community can be like that, too. You only have a limited ability to choose your community; you could be dragged down just as easily as you could be pulled up. And I think that’s a big part of people turning their backs on the concept of community.
June 22nd, 2009 at 3:54 pm
My youngest brother is mentally ill and going through a very terrible time and one thing that my husband and I have been fighting about is his expectation that I will remove my brother from my life. If we lived further away, if we were insulated from daily contact with my family, this time would be EASIER for me. But SHOULD it be easier? It’s an interesting question, if I can remove myself from the stark misery of what’s going on to answer it.
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
I recently read a book about the evolution of childrearing practices by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy called Mothers and Others, and I have all kinds of half-formed thoughts about families and community as a result. It’s a good book, incidentally.
Her basic thesis is that what makes humans *human* is our ability to read teh emotions and intentions of other people (body language and facial cues etc.), and that this is what underlies our ability to collaborate on projects that involve more than one person, from group hunting to building space stations. So that modern civilization arises at least in part from this ability to read people. And that this ability to read people evolved in a context of communal childrearing, where human infants were so costly to raise that even a mother and father cooperating couldn’t do it–and there’s no evidence anyway that mothers ever relied on fathers for childrearing. So, in a society where infants needed to be provisioned by people who were not related to them, the skill of reading the emotions and intentions of other people (will this adult feed/protect me?) became evolutionarily advantageous.
She also writes a lot about how we are unique among the great apes for this–that chimps, gorillas, etc., *never put their babies down.* They don’t let even siblings, their own older children, or their own mothers hold their babies, with very few very rare exceptions (essentially, when the known danger to their infant is so low that the risk of letting go of them is practically non-existent; trusting others to hold their babies is a trait that great ape mothers have but never use).
So I’ve been wondering what happens to the human species when we lose communal childrearing.
I mean, it’s all great and wonderful that we can each basically customize our own planet these days, and walk around in a constructed bubble where we rarely need to encounter the politics, values, religions, family formations or even musical tastes of people significantly different than we are. It’s certainly comfortable. But so is sitting on the couch and driving everywhere. What’s comfortable isn’t necessarily good for us.
There’s evidence that the offspring of other great apes are born knowing how to read the emotions and intentions of others of their species (and humans, if raised in captivity), but that they lose this ability after a few months (unless raised in captivity), presumably because it doesn’t benefit them in the wild. Their mothers never put them down, and they are very rarely provisioned (”parented”) by non-related adults of their own species, so the trait atrophies. So what happens to humans if the mothers stop trusting other people and, metaphorically at least, never put their babies down?
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:16 pm
When my son was tiny and I was pregnant w/ my daughter, I was invited to join a babysitting co-op. I was invited by some women who had their children in the same daycare as my son. They knew each other well but I only knew them slightly. When the kids were young the co-op was really active; we kept spreadsheets with exchanged babysitting hours and had regular meetings (it was a ‘girls’ night out;’ we drank martinis and gossiped) and all that.
My neighbor eventually became a part of the co-op, but otherwise the members lived in different parts of town. It’s defunct now — now that people feel comfortable leaving their kids with inexpensive teenaged babysitters, and now that the kids have an opinion about who they play with. (The oldest child of one of the members is kind of, you know, a pain in the ass.) And I hardly ever see them anymore.
That co-op is a great example of the way that people these days come together for awhile and then go their separate ways. It wasn’t a community. It served a purpose, though. It was something valuable.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:08 am
this – and the comments here – are absolutely fascinating.
there is definitely a challenging side to community and family, as Beck and Jen point out…a shackle quality or at least often an insularity that i think has led many of our generation (and our parents’) to run from the small-town mentalities we might have grown up with out into the seemingly cosmopolitan and accessible world.
but then, raising children in the isolation of that cosmopolitan world – and even just finding one’s own way, without the fallback of being known deeply and tied to people by bonds stronger than one’s own charm on a given day – damn, it’s hard.
for me, the online world has provided community i otherwise wouldn’t have in nearly so rich or diverse a form, during these years with young children. but having it in the flesh and accessible? fabulous. i hope the project does lead to friends.
June 29th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I think we talked about the lack of community and support when we met, didn’t we? I think about this a lot, the fact that my husband and I chose to settle an hour from both our families. I often think about when I was home with two very young children and, in retrospect, I was not okay. I was easily frustrated and probably yelled too often because I was overwhelmed. Luckily, I had friends at the same stage. But it’s not the same as having your mother or mother-in-law two doors down.