The Family Not Fighting

Is there a reason why we shouldn’t yell at one another and perform interesting dramas with family and friends?

And why do we treat our most dearly beloved worse than our co-workers and, say, a store owner?

Let’s answer the obvious first. If we lost control at work, we’d get fired. If we lost control in public, someone would call the police. We get mad or tearful with our friends and family because we can do it without immediate consequence.

But what harm does it do to rant and rave and scold? I don’t enjoy other people’s negative dramas, especially when they are aimed at me–and I doubt you do either.  No one thrives in such an atmosphere.  And children get wrong messages about who they are and what they are worth.

A willingness not to dramatize, not to try to control others by means of threats, much less actual violence, became an automatic filter for who chose to live on The Farm, up close in multiple family households. It gave us some of the sanest and sweetest tempered men and women our society offered. Fifteen hundred people living and working together and no fist fights–or cat fights either. Wow!!

Of course, there were sort outs. What’s a sort out?

My book about The Farm, Sweet Potato Suppers, will be out soon. Watch for the date.

What We Learned about Getting Along

Are you living with relatives?  In a shared household?

People once lived mostly in tribal units.  In her novel Reindeer Moon Elizabeth Marshall Thomas shows a tribal elder saying, “Give me two hands and I can get us through the winter.”  He shows both hands twice, twenty.  It took about twenty people to survive the winter.

So, how did we lately come to live in households of only one or two adults and their children.  Tracing back the history of European arrival on the east coast of the United States, we find that even the early settlers lived in separate family units.  When a young couple married, the community gathered to build them a house.  They did not add wings to the parental home.

As a social worker, I have spent time in many homes and listened to grievances.  As a friend, I have listened to my friends.  It seems some of us are darned hard to live with.  People dramatize anger, fear, grief, and discouragement.  They throw these dramas straight at their mates and children and anyone handy.  Who would stay?

And yet a group of peaceful hippies grew a village of multiple family homes and shared fortunes like ancient tribes.

What can we learn from this piece of history?  To live successfully with even one other person requires restraint, patience, a willingness to listen and to speak one’s mind peacefully.  More people require more restraint, more patience, and more communication.  The tribe in Thomas’s story had all of these plus other needed qualities, such as competence and a high level of responsibility.

If you are living with others, whether by choice or because of economic duress, be sure to communicate levelly and plentifully.  Assess your group for competence, for an ability to face a solve problems.   And find a way to improve any of these skills as needed.

Let me know how you get along.

Hippie Village

Publishing Alert: Sweet Potato Suppers, a memoir of life among spiritual hippies, will be re-published this fall! This eBook and soft cover edition will include pictures that were not available for the first edition. Read the story of how one family found hope and healing in the 1970s.

The full title of the volume is Sweet Potato Suppers: A Yankee Woman Finds Salvation in a Hippie Village. The title story shows the author’s small son at supper after helping with the harvest, sure he is eating a sweet potato he himself placed in the basket.

This story is a must for anyone interested in American history during the years of The Great Society when there was much hope that the meek would soon inherit the earth when the corrupt structure fell away.

This story is also for anyone interested in personal journey. As in ancient fairy tales, the author has taken to the road, or gone wandering, to find out what’s happening. She knows she has in herself an imperfect and confused protagonist, and she searches for a way to break through that crust that is the broken self and retrieve her actual self as the spirit being she is. You’ll enjoy the details of life on The Farm along with the inevitable hassles and happy discoveries.

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