Hm, I guess that person would be me. 😀
I’m not usually described as “calm” (too much energy), but perhaps unstressed is more accurate. I am not feeling any stress from this new housing situation. Am I happy? Heck yeah! Feeling at home and in my element? Absolutely. Loving living with others despite the chaos of boxes, the lack of kitchen shelves/cabinet doors, the almost complete lack of furniture in our bedroom, or any of the other slight frustrations? Definitely.
One of my reason for feeling so comfortable in the house is my personality: as I mentioned before, I’m an extreme extrovert. But another is how clear it is to me that my son is much much happier here with his faux-siblings around most of the time than in our old house where there were no other kids at home and our housemates worked every day. He probably has my extroversion, and he’s just a lot happier here. (I wouldn’t call him calm or composed either, though.)
I’ve also lived in coops for so many years that I’m accustomed to the general “social contract” that comes with. I am not picky, so I don’t have a lot of policies I want to communicate with others. But since I’m not picky, I don’t mind following most policies if it makes my housemates happy; just let me know. There are a lot of things we haven’t worked out yet, like who does which chores or where to put all our stuff. But I know we’ll figure it out eventually, and in the meantime it is refreshing to live with a bunch of people who are kind & thoughtful. Looking back at my past coops, it seems like most of the real problems came from housemates who were just too selfish or self-centered and unable to be thoughtful or generous or empathetic.
Oh, and let’s not forget that my house growing up was so messy on a daily basis that one time when my dad asked a police officer inside (because he’d seen a teenager jump the fence at the pool next door) the officer thought our house had been broken into and trashed. So I have a very high tolerance for mess, but I’m not messy myself.
So I’m happy to be that person who’s just really content right now. Could it be improved? Sure! And it will be. We make great strides at organizing every week, and that is no small feat when smushing three families into a one-family house.
Oh, and it could also be happiness by comparison: we spent the previous six weeks couch surfing with a one-year-old. Our last place was very small and our son would get so bored there that he would literally beat on the door and cry. So I took the bus into Berkeley (from Oakland) and spent the entire day shuttling him from the YMCA to the library to a restaurant for lunch to the occasional muddy park (because it was raining almost every day during that month) and back to the Y and back to the library for 8 hours every day because we had no nanny.
So maybe that was just so stressful for me that this seems like heaven!
CO-FAMILY LIFE 