How are you coping these days? Share your story., page 4

People here have brought up communal living several times.

I have had friends and coworkers from other countries tell me how odd they find our lifestyle, because we insist on isolating ourselves so much.

We insist everyone lives in their own home, and your a failure if you don't.
If your over 25 and living with a parent, your a reject.

They feel we make things 100 X harder on ourselves for this. They live with their families. Everyone works and lives together. All the mothers raise children together.

And I see what they are saying.

I do believe that it has been unhealthy for us. Very unhealthy. now wonder we all spend like crazy and are medicated, we are all very very lonely.

We even take newborn babies, who don't even know for another year and half that they are a seperate being from us, and stick them in a room by themselves for 12 hours.

And these folks don't just do it for economic reasons. One coworker was wealthy. Her husband is a peace diplomat and even got a full time nanny and her children's education for free.

Instead she had her sisters move here and they watch her children. She couldn't see anyone but family raising her kids.

My ILs own a duplex of sorts. My husband and I rent the other apt. My ILs even catch heat for that.Their friends insist we should be in a seperate place. My ILs are like why? We see our children every day. I get to watch my grandchild grow up.

My MIL and my son adore each other. Every morning he has breakfast with her before daycare.They sorely miss each other if they don't do it.

Because he is surrounded by so much family, he is the happiest, most empathtic, social child you have ever met. his speech levels are incredible because he always has several adults interacting with him.

I see so many kids who are lucky if they see more then one caring adult at a time. And they look like lumps to me, even sad.

My job takes me to interact with a lot of people. I just spoke to one mother who left a co-operative. I asked her how it was, and she said it was wonderful. It was effecient, it is like one big family. (they had to leave for job reasons)

I would love to live in a co-operative.

I think the time is coming where we need to change our social structure. Live together as communities again and help each other out. Till recently, my MIL helped take care of my son, and I helped her with her aging and now deceased mother.

Now, if we insisted on being seperate, my son and her mother would have been in daycare, an institutional setting, that we would of had to shell out big bucks for.
Instead they both reap the benefits of having family there. My GMIL got to die with the ones she loved, instead of a hospital bed somewhere.

We have become so isolated we don't even know how to talk to another human being. We don't know how to chat with our neighbor.

My part time job at a local health department receives nuisance complaints. So many people just call on their neighbors over stupid stuff. To get them to think,I always start off the with the same question:

"Have you talked to your neighbor about it?"

I usually get a mumbled no.

But this has given some the initiative to talk to their neighbors about it, and it is usually met with no problems, and the nuisance neighbor is usually like"sorry, will take care of it!"and they do.

My favorite is when someone complains about the 5x5 patch of grass that is overgrown next door. Would it kill you to swing your mower over and cut it.
The best is when they complain about tall grass on the yard of a 90 y.o. widow on social security.

Get your neighbors together,help the old lady out and take turns cutting it. You get exercise, it solves the problem.

Granted there are some whackos, but they are rare, and you can tell who they are.

Now the big question here is:

How do we change American pride, isolationist mentality and get people to become community members again?