Grown Ups Share
Practical everyday sharing ideas from five years in cohousing.
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Now Let’s Get To It
There are so many things I love about living in cohousing, but one of the very best is that the kids in my community get to regularly witness adults sharing with each other. These kids don’t just get told to share – they get to see sharing in action, over and over and over again.
Have you ever noticed how infrequently adults share, even the most progressive and community-minded among us? I’m not talking about contributing money to causes we care about or using public transit and the local library – or rather, not only those. I’m largely interested, in this post, in the everyday sharing of meals and tools and cars and internet and childcare and Costco runs and stuff like that. I’m interested in all the resources of our daily lives that tend to be held individually, at the level of each household – but that don’t really need to be.
My partner and I and some friends of ours started our little cohousing community in late 2019. We didn’t know what to expect or what to think about in advance; we just began. Less than six months later, much of the world was in lockdown and our (then) two households had become a COVID bubble – a real crash course in communal living, let me tell you.
It hasn’t always been easy, but it has always, always been worth it.
Today I describe what I’ve learned about everyday sharing from five plus years living in cohousing. My daily life these days includes a ton of sharing resources, tasks, and perspective with the other adults in our little community (and with the kids, too). Although this level of daily sharing may not be as accessible for people outside of cohousing, I’ve come to realize that a lot of our community’s habits of sharing are very transferable to a non-cohousing context.
An Auntie Bulletin reader once described our project here as a “cozy revolution,” and that label feels so apt for today’s post. As usual, the content is sort of domestic, sort of cozy – sharing a sewing machine, going in together with your neighbors on a shop vac – but it’s also transformative.
Here in the United States (and not only here), fanatical individualism seems to be metastasizing, spreading like a cancer throughout the body politic. The highest elected officials in the land are actively attacking institutions and systems like Medicaid, Social Security, and public education that allow for resources to be shared, and large numbers of Americans are cheering them on.
You know what I call that? I call that morally underdeveloped. I call that immature.
Mature people – grown ups – share.
Grown Ups Share Resources
Here in the U.S., and in many other places, culture and infrastructure alike encourage each household to acquire its own resources. At the level of cultural values, we are each meant to have – and to want – at least one car per household (or better yet, one car per adult). And sure enough, at the level of infrastructure and systems, auto financing is set up for individuals, not groups, to buy cars. Culturally, we are each meant to have – and to want – (at least) one fully equipped kitchen per household. Infrastructurally, very few neighborhoods or housing developments have communal kitchens or communal spaces of any kind. I could go on.
Before you start feeling judged, let me be clear that in my co-housing community, the adults do have our own cars and our (now three) households do have separate kitchens. This is how our society is set up and how our lives are set up, and it helps a lot to have enough of these resources for everyone.
However, we sure do share them a lot! If someone’s car breaks down or is in the shop or they can’t find their keys, there’s always a car to borrow. If someone with a small car needs to pick up a big armchair, our community has a Prius and an Outback and a bigger item might fit in one of those cars’ trunks.1
And the kitchens! We take turns cooking for each other several nights a week, which means that each household’s kitchen works for the whole community on a regular basis. One of our households’ kitchen/dining area can’t accommodate us all, so we eat at one of the other houses on those nights. One household has an amazing grilling set-up. The Instant Pot circulates frequently, and everyone’s dishes and silverware and tupperware are constantly on the move.
All this kitchen and meal-sharing has helped me to dream bigger. After five years of regularly cooking for my neighbors, and regularly being cooked for in turn, I have become so much more aware of how, every evening around 5:30 or 6:00 or 7:00, hundreds or thousands or millions of people all start chopping onions. We all have our own knives and our own cutting boards and our own dishwashers (if we’re lucky) and our own pots and pans and our own grocery lists. We all individually go shopping for those groceries. It’s a huge duplication of effort and resources and to me it increasingly just feels… kind of dumb.
I’m not trying to be an efficiency evangelist here. I’m not trying to talk anyone out of beloved, creative, literally nourishing activities, either (I love cooking). But come on. Be real. Do you really want to cook for yourself every single night? Wouldn’t it be nice to take turns? Wouldn’t it be nice, indeed, to have a shared community kitchen kept in clean, well-stocked, working order with a functioning rotation of who cooks when and an open door policy for anyone in the community who wants a hot dinner or some leftovers for lunch? Where you cooked once every few weeks for 30 people and in return got fed a nourishing meal any evening that you wanted?
This is not culturally or infrastructurally impossible. Societies could do this if we had the will. I know of much larger co-housing communities than my own that do it.
Okay, but let’s scale back from dreaming so big. I said I was going to offer practical everyday sharing ideas, so here are some of those:
Schedule a weekly or monthly shared meal with friends (Amanda Litman of Run for Something is having people over for dinner every Saturday in 2025).
Arrange with nearby friends that you’ll share cars as needed.
Arrange with trusted neighbors to purchase lawnmowers, shop vacs, power tools, exercise equipment, raised garden beds, even backyard sheds together. In our co-housing community, we buy all the same brand of battery-operated power tools so that they all work with everyone’s chargers.
Trade and share seeds, starts, and plant cuttings; and fabrics and craft materials; and games, toys, and puzzles; and lumber and hardware and plumbing and electrical supplies.
Share internet with reliable neighbors who are near enough. Share streaming services and phone plans with friends and family.
Keep a stack of $5s on hand to distribute to unhoused neighbors. My partner and I also keep stocked “neighbor kits” in our cars, with Ritz crackers (easy on bad teeth), men’s and women’s socks, chapstick, lotion, tampons, and other items to give out to anyone standing on the corner asking for help.
Find a local mutual aid group and contribute to it (money, time, resources, whatever). Be sure to tell the kids in your life that you do this, otherwise this form of sharing may remain invisible to them.
Grown Ups Share the Workload
Shane Meyer-Holt of the newsletter Untethered wrote a great post awhile back about how billionaires and hedge fund managers and real estate magnates and tech CEOs and the President of the United States are all freeloaders. It blew my mind. The basic argument is that they do not contribute to care work – which is to say the real, most important work there is. They only create problems that those of us who care – in every sense of the word – need to then solve.
When we think about an 80-hour week, we can’t help thinking about how much that person is doing – what’s unlikely to cross our mind is how much that person isn’t doing. Not just for themselves but for everyone else too.
To lean on old tropes, could it be possible that the 90’s stockbroker, who has no time or interest in anything beyond the vortex of corporate life, has actually been leeching for too long off the hard “glue-work” of his stay-at-home wife, the local volunteer librarian, and less busy friends who tend to the networks of care that keep everyone afloat and will tend to his grief when the market crashes?
If our only measure of contribution is economic, then certain members of society can get away with the absolute bare minimum of social contribution — often while perpetuating work cultures that leech endless hours and volumes of human energy away from families, neighbourhoods, collectives and communities.
So true, right??
The opposite of freeloading is pitching in and sharing the workload, and I sure have learned a lot about that from living in cohousing. To be clear, as an Auntie I contribute only a tiny fraction of the carework load to the family in our little community and the other families I love. While parenting is non-stop, Auntie-ing is very, very part time. And yet the regular after-school pickups and other childcare responsibilities that I do take on make a big difference for my parent friends, injecting — perhaps — a little breathing room into their week.
One awesome thing about Auntiehood is that we tend to have a lot more flexibility in our lives than parents do. If our work allows, we may even be able to travel to provide care for loved ones from time to time. I tend to do this a few times a year – visiting friends to care for their pets or kids while they’re on work trips or having a new baby, visiting family members to take care of them after a surgery or to keep my elders company when their more nearby relatives are out of town.
As an introvert with chronic health conditions, my total energy reserves are low, yet after five years and change of cohousing and even longer supporting family and friends hither and yon, I’ve learned in an embodied way that I like helping to share the load, and I genuinely feel better when I do. Helping out friends and family can be exhausting, but I keep doing it because it keeps our relationships nice and strong, and it means that I know there are so many people out there who love me like crazy and will have my back if I need them.
Hanging out with the kids in my life especially cheers me up when I’m feeling tired and depleted. It provides regular doses of love and meaning and silliness that are more healing than any medicine.
Okay, now here are some practical everyday ideas for sharing the workload of life:
Take a weekly childcare shift. Being the one to pick up kids after school and care for them until their parents are done with work is, I can attest, a great option if you can swing it.2
Schedule a standing date to do chores or errands with friends. Wouldn’t it be great to make a little weeding group and take turns weeding each other’s yards together? I hate weeding. I only want to socially weed.
Identify an elderly or disabled neighbor who might need rides to medical appointments or the grocery store. Offer, follow through, and get the next date on the calendar.
If there’s a cause you and your friends care about, but some of your friends can’t go to the meetings because they have to put kids to bed, make a little team and take turns watching the kids while the other adults attend. Report back to one another afterwards.
Take kids to community cleanups and other work days, as well as to marches and demonstrations. These are great activities for families and Aunties to do together!
In Conclusion
If we tell kids to share but they don’t witness us sharing, they’re just going to call us hypocrites when they hit puberty, and they’re also going to grow up not knowing how to share with others on a daily basis any better than we do. If we want children to mature into adults who share with others to advance the common good, they need to witness the adults in their lives sharing – visibly, frequently, and wholeheartedly.
When we cultivate habits of sharing with our neighbors, we disrupt an immature culture of individualism, greed, and self-centeredness. Aunties, alloparents, and parents have a particularly powerful lever for cultural change here, because the kids in our lives are watching us. What they observe us doing will be what they think is normal and good. And what they think is normal and good is what they will pass on to the kids in their own lives one day. Thus, when we share horizontally, so to speak – with our neighbors and community members at this moment in time – we also share vertically, down through the generations and into a better future for the kids and adults of the world to come.
Related Reading from The Auntie Bulletin
Auntie Collective Wisdom
Our survey for May is about Auntie impostorship: the ways Aunties may feel like we don’t quite belong or aren’t fully legitimate members of a family, kinship circle, or community we love. Sometimes this happens because others make us feel this way: a parent or primary guardian may signal, subtly or otherwise, that there are experiences or emotions we can’t possibly understand or parts of their family’s life where we’re not welcome. Other times, the source of our impostorship is internal: we tell ourselves stories about not quite belonging in the lives of the families we love.
How, if at all, has Auntie impostorship shown up for you? When and where have you felt like you don’t quite belong as an Auntie or other adult in the life of kids who aren’t your own? Have others signaled your outsiderness to you? Is it a story you tell yourself? How do you navigate these experiences? And if you’ve been relatively unaffected by feelings of Auntie impostorship, what’s your secret?
This survey consists of four open-ended questions. Feel free to answer as many or as few as you like, to think outside the box, and to answer the questions you wish I’d asked rather than the ones I actually did.
I’ll be collecting your ideas for the month of May. As always, when you complete a reader survey you’ll be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin.
Tip: If survey doesn’t work, double-check that you’re logged in to Substack.
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If you have a pickup truck and would like to join our co-housing community, the answer is yes.
If your workplace supports parents to knock off work a little early to pick up their kids, they should equally support you to do so. (This doesn’t mean they will, but you can certainly give it a whirl, and be sure to shame them if they say no).