My post from before the birth of my son

I’m going to be lazy and simply post what I wrote while living in our old coop when I was pregnant. This is context for my other posts that will be about this house with one dog, three couples, four kids, ten people (11 if you count Rusty).

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The WayBack Machine from July 20, 2014:

When my partner and I found out we were pregnant, we started thinking about our housing. We had been living in a coop for a while (me for many years, him for two), which is more than just living with roommates. It’s an “intentional community” of people who not only share food and chores, but host events together and actively participate in each others’ lives. So as you might imagine, we thought a lot about our housing.

I have always said that living cooperatively is a luxury when you’re single, but a necessity when you have kids. As we got more pregnant (and please don’t tell me that the word “pregnant” is binary in the English language — that proscriptive definition can only be enforced by people who have not gone through the many trials and science fiction-like changes that happen to your body in the various trimesters), I began to get questions about where we would live. When I said we’d be living at our coop, some people would ask why I didn’t want us to get a place to ourselves. This post is about why I am devoted to living cooperatively when I have a newborn, infant, small child, and beyond.

Nate and I are both software developers and we are very logical and proactive about improving our lives. When faced with having children (which we both wanted very much), we started reading as much as we could about what it is like. In case you don’t know, the first month (or few months) of having a newborn is usually very hard — so hard that people call it “unimaginable” how difficult your life is. Here are some of the top reasons given:

Hormonal changes — immediately after delivery, the level of progesterone in the mother’s body plummets. Progesterone is a happy drug, which you get pretty used to after 9 straight months, so the low is unavoidable. 75% of women get what’s called the “baby blues” which can last for a week or two.
Lack of sleep.
Isolation.

The first of these is pretty unavoidable, and my plan there is to be very aware that it is hormonal and will go away. The second one is partially unavoidable, and Nate and I have been reading a lot of books on newborns and their needs (1,2,3 among others). We will be interacting with our newborn in the way we believe (after much research) is most likely to lead to our best sleep. We’ll also be keeping a log of eating & sleeping patterns for all three of us so we can test our assumptions and change things that are not working.

This leaves item number 3: isolation.

Extroversion

Remember the Myers-Briggs personality tests everybody took in college? I’ve taken them a number of times throughout my life (though not recently) and have always ranked 100% extroverted. That’s right, not one question on the introvert side. I love being around people, and feel no need to be alone. Which doesn’t mean I don’t like to journal or think about my life or spend time immersed in flow-type projects — I love those things, I just prefer to do them around others than to do them alone. I do my best work in coffee shops and get really distracted when in a quiet library. If I’m feeling really down, I’ll go to a busy local bar and sit right in the middle of the crowd; somehow the sound of people laughing around me makes me feel better, like everything is all right with the world.

So you can imagine my reaction when reading that isolation is one of the biggest problems for new mothers. I would find an apartment with just Nate and me to be too isolating even without the prospect of a baby — I would be pretty unhappy. And for the record, Nate and I are both self-employed, and spend tons of time together. We often work out of the same co-working places, or both work out of our home office, or go to our local coffee shop together to work on our respective projects. We could (and have) easily spend 24 hours a day together and be very happy. So it has nothing to do with Nate, and there is no one in the world (either real or imaginary) that would make a two-person house okay for me. I just need more company.

Communal Living Is Not Weird

Without belaboring the point too much, I do want to express my bafflement at the people who think I’m weird. I have lived in Boston for almost 11 years now, and most of the people I know consider themselves introverts. And there seems to be a pervasive assumption in American culture that living alone or in a nuclear family (two parents and their children living separate from any others) is the only right way to live.

<rant> I will briefly state that if you look at our distant past, it’s hard to believe that human beings evolved to live like this. No one really knows what life was like 10,000 or 100,000 years ago, but it most likely included groups of people spending their days and nights together the way that modern hunter-gatherer tribes do (or did when they were still relatively isolated from Western culture 30 years ago). No separate rooms, no separate houses. You eat together, you hunt together, you gather together. And my understanding is that hunter-gatherer societies spend a lot of time socializing (3-4 hours/day are spent doing work, and the rest of their time is spent socializing or preparing for socializing). Don’t get me wrong, I support my friends living whatever lifestyle makes them happy and have never suggested to a friend that their chosen lifestyle is not right for them — everyone should live the way that makes them happy! But I don’t understand why some people get judgmental about the way I want to live; I’ve been told I’m crazy to live with others while I have a newborn, and that I will deeply regret it. So I guess this is just my way of saying hey, just because I’m not like you doesn’t mean I’m wrong. </rant>

Why this blog

And that leads me to how this relates to us with a newborn in a coop. I was surprised to find that there is virtually no information on the internet about what it’s like to live in a coop with kids, or even to be the roommate of someone who has a newborn. While there are a few posts that turn up in google searches about this, most of them are either people temporarily living with a family member who has children or people who have never wanted a roommate but are in a position where they have no other choice. Inevitably, the advice on forums where these posts are made is “get out of this situation as soon as you possibly can,” with very little actual discussion of what it is like.

I have thought for years that we have come to a point in internet maturity where there is no topic that isn’t widely covered by google (i.e. forums, blog posts, articles, etc), so I was quite surprised. I know we are not the first people to do this since the early 90s. In fact, I’ve talked to people who’ve done it (one was the roommate of a mother & newborn, the other was the father of a newborn who had a roommate) — but no one posts about it on the internet, apparently.

And so this blog was born.

Why not live with others

Before I answer the question of why I want to live with others, let’s take a look at the reasons people give to not live with others when you have a newborn. Here are some of the reasons I have come across and how I feel about each:

Not trusting others to raise your children.

I really don’t feel that protective. Maybe I suddenly will once the baby is born, you might say, and we’ll see…I’ll certainly keep it in mind as we continue to blog. But to live in a coop you have to be pretty flexible about what room you live in, what furniture sits in your living room, the kitchen upkeep, noise, and so many other things. I am rarely (if ever) the person in the house with a strong opinion on any of these issues. And remember that I am not about to live with strangers — my housemates are people I care about and respect, people who make me happy. I look forward to hearing their ideas!

Not wanting others to see you at your worst.

Again, I’m living with people I really care about. One of my best coop memories was from a very dark time when I was going through a tough breakup, having trouble at work, and we had just gotten an unexpected 30-days notice to move out from our deadbeat landlord (who was in bankruptcy, divorce, and foreclosure). I came home to an empty house, sat on the stairs, and burst into very loud sobs. As it turned out one of my lovely housemates was home, and she came downstairs and gave me a very long hug. To me, having housemates there when I’m at my worst is a bonus.

And a note from my brother, who had a housemate when he and my sister-in-law were having their kids. He said that there were moments when they might have said pissy, irritated things to each other out of exhaustion but didn’t because of their housemate, and that he was really grateful for her presence and the effect it had on their interactions. Sometimes your “worst” is really not where you should let yourself be.

Not being able to leave the place a disastrous mess when you need to.

Yeah, Nate and I will probably wish we could leave our sh*t all over the house. And we’ll have to spend a few extra precious minutes (no sarcasm intended) putting our gobs of new baby paraphernalia away after we’ve used it for the 14th time that day. On the other hand, I really believe in feng shui in that I think your visible environment has a strong effect on your mood. If you leave your place a disaster because you’re down, you’ll come back to it and feel more down because it’s a disaster. I’m hoping that the need to keep it relatively neat will help us feel like things are not out of control.

Worrying about the baby crying and waking up roommates.

We definitely worry about that, but in reality it’s our housemates’ concern more than ours. A wise person convinced me a while ago to stop worrying about other people’s needs. Our housemates feel pretty confident that we can work it out. We’re definitely going to be more affected by it than they are, so we’ll be doing everything we can to have a happy, minimal-cry baby. We look forward to their ideas, because anything that helps the kid cry less will help us too.

Not wanting to deal with any additional interpersonal relationships.

Guess what? Living in a coop requires upkeep of interpersonal relationships. It does. I’ve lived in a lot of coops and they all require everyone in the house to spend some extra time making sure everyone else is doing okay. I’ve always found that pretty fulfilling and very worth the extra time. Our housemates also understand that the first month is likely to be tough, and that it may take us a few weeks to get into a routine. We feel confident that none of our housemate relationships will blow up in the first four weeks, and then we’ll be taking the time to check in with them more regularly.

Why live in community with a newborn

My number one reason why I am devoted to living with others when I have a newborn is this:

For various mostly unavoidable reasons, the first few months with a newborn are among the most physically and emotionally draining you will ever experience. So what you really need is to live in whatever way makes you feel most centered, most calm, most pampered, loved, warm and fuzzy. For most people, that’s having a place to themselves. For me, that’s living in a coop. No one way is more right than the other; the most important thing in this time is to meet your own personal needs, because you are going to be really busy meeting the baby’s needs.

Because of the demands of breastfeeding (which can consume up to 12 hours a day, every other hour), this is even more true of the mother than of the father. Nate would be fine living either nuclear family-style or cooperatively, but I really need the extra company. So that’s it, really, the only reason I need.

But there are other things that I believe will be bonuses, and these might be more convincing arguments to people who may be on the fence about having roommates while you have a newborn, so here goes.

You don’t have to leave the house to get a little easy social interaction. Given that isolation is one of the most-cited reasons for postpartum blues and/or depression (the more serious version), it’s nice to have friends you don’t have to schedule with, who will just show up at breakfast or dinner.
Fewer chores. Guess what? If you live by yourself, I do fewer chores than you do. I share them with my housemates, so, for instance, I never go shopping. Instead of having to do everything myself, or between two people, our chores are split among five people, which really cuts down on time (and can be more fun if you do them together).
Trade chores over time. We don’t expect our housemates to do more house chores than we do, but we plan to do extra chores before the baby is born so that we’re “ahead” and can slack off a bit in the first few weeks post-delivery.
No gendered chores. I never thought about this until I read this article (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/two-couples-one-mortgage/374102/), but the author is right. Living cooperatively removes gender roles in chores, and I’m happier that way. Chores are rotated or volunteered based on interest or ability (like owning a car for shopping), and each month at our house meeting we can change which chore we do.
Save money. It is definitely cheaper to live with others. Rent is cheaper, groceries are cheaper, utilities are cheaper…I’d personally pay more if I had to, but it’s a nice bonus.
Emergency help is right there. We don’t expect to have any emergencies. But if there were one, having housemates you get along with is amazingly helpful. For example, I was stuck at a hospital a couple of years ago after a painful and emotionally stressful medical procedure during the complete shutdown of Boston when the marathon bombers were on the loose. No subway or buses, no cabs, I couldn’t get home, and I really needed to go home. Our housemate who normally doesn’t let anyone drive her car let Nate use it to come pick me up — which by the way was illegal, since all car traffic was shut down too. It’s like a good insurance policy — you don’t have to think about who you would call if you really needed something.

I hope this explains my thoughts about living in community with a newborn child, and helps others who are thinking about doing it too. I welcome questions from anyone and hope this blog will start a vibrant discussion!

Footnotes:

Our Babies Ourselves: http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babies-Ourselves-Biology-Culture-ebook/dp/B005HE8DXA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405905345&sr=1-1&keywords=our+babies+ourselves
Happiest Baby on the Block: http://www.amazon.com/Happiest-Baby-Block-Crying-Newborn-ebook/dp/B000SEI6L8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405905414&sr=1-1&keywords=happiest+baby+on+the+block
The Sleep Book for Tired Parents: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0943990343/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1