A strange season in the magic of third spaces

SPECIAL OPPORTUNITY: Join us for an Examined Family online book club meeting on Needy by Mara Glatzel this coming Friday, June 30th at 9am PST / 12pm EST! RSVP here. Buy the book here. Mara will join us! We can’t wait to hear your thoughts, questions, and experiments with reclaiming your sovereignty. (We’ll probably cap it around 100 people, so get your spot before they run out.)

Examined Family is written by a “third spaces” obsessive and a grateful, tired mama. If you subscribe already, you already know that. And thank you! If you don’t, now’s a great time.

There were so many things I missed during the acute phase of the pandemic. Childcare. Grocery shopping (my husband did it all). The unique energy of a dark dance floor and a bunch of bodies moving on it. Alone time. Airplane time. My parents. 

But it wasn’t until life started coming back online that I realized that one of the things I missed the most were what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls “third spaces”--not home (the “first place”), not work (the “second place”), but a social environment where people gather. There is one, in particular, in my life that is rich with diverse activities, a place that feels representative to me of the goodness of human collectivity. 

I live in a cohousing community in Oakland–a collection of nine units, each with its own amenities like a typical home, but we also have a “common house” that sits at the center of our little plot of land. In the common house you will find an industrial-sized kitchen, a bathroom, a sitting area with a couch, and a few round tables covered in yellow checkered vinyl tablecloths. It’s a quaint space–no fancy light fixtures or modern anything, just bright yellow walls, a bookshelf filled with a ragtag curation of cookbooks, books on community, spirituality, and religion, and framed portraits of all the kids who have grown up in the community (it’s been around for over two decades!). 

When the pandemic hit, it went empty. What had once been a bustling center of community, and even neighborhood, life, grew quiet. In those early days of the pandemic, we would even spray the door handles down and wear gloves as we did laundry in the common space. The kids made signs about mask-wearing and appropriate distance and we hung them on the doors. The common house, for two decades, was the site of unabashed joy–graduation parties, Thanksgiving dinners, and movie nights; and then it was a site of warning, fear, and vacancy. 

A very typical common house scene. A 6-year-old leading two dads in yoga thanks to a book by Mariam Gates. Someone poised to jump off the window sill onto the couch. An abandoned game of Connect Four. A Sunday New York Times being offered up to the next household that would like it.

Just like everyone else, we did something very countercultural for us, and retreated into our individual homes. Sure, we still checked in on Louise, our neighbor in her 80s, and told one another jokes over the fence. When someone got covid, the rest of us would take care of their other family members. Eventually two other mothers and I became thick as thieves figuring out how to get through the days, dragging our brood down to the beach with a wheelbarrow worth of snacks and sit our blankets six feet apart. The spirit of our community stayed mostly intact, but our ability to physically and self-consciously gather like before, to fill that common house with surprise and study, love and listening, disappeared. 

Though we don’t pretend that the ravages of the pandemic are over around here, we are enjoying the return of the common house. Wednesday my women’s group, which has been meeting for seven years now, gathered around a table and ate a delicious potluck dinner (including an iron skillet with a huge chocolate chip cookie in it, just plopped in the middle). We talked about transition and rest and laughed so hard we cried. I don’t mind sharing, but it is the listening that really nourishes me. I simply love hearing other people’s human truth, laid out with tenderness and trust. There is something about the unplanned poetry of that offering that helps me keep going every time. 

But that isn’t the only dynamic that has re-animated the common house. A few households are part of a new church in Oakland. They’ve lacked a physical space, so they’ve met in the common house on Sunday mornings. I don’t attend the church, but was delighted to see a crew of little kids I didn’t know riding the bikes in the courtyard and generally feeling at home. 

By Sunday evening, it was time for our weekly common meal. Deborah prayed and then we let the guests go through the line and get their meal first. We all lamented that the kind renter was headed back to Rice where he’s studying. A seven-year-old who has just learned to make legit lattes, announced he would be serving them up in the common house the next morning for a half hour if anyone wanted to stop by. One of the community’s founders and the mom of two grown sons, found a little Ziploc bag in her special envelope on the appreciation board filled with loose tic tacs (called “TikToks” by the 5-year-old who put them there) and tiny chocolates. “I feel treasured,” said Kate.

There are book clubs hosted here. There are meetings right before midterm elections to discuss and debate local ballot measures. There are board meetings and writing retreats, artist workshops and integrated school gatherings, ping pong tournaments and endless imaginative games. There is the smell of Sarah’s latkes, Revy’s chicken, and John’s pesto. There is whatever you need there to be, because as it turns out, people need one another–physically together, spiritually searching, joyful and swept away in the company of others. 

It’s been a strange season—this coming back together moment. I feel like we are all re-learning how to be in the company of others, how to schedule our lives without obliterating our nervous systems, how to stay safe amid the continued risk of covid and so many other viruses that cycle through our schools and communities. Friends of mine have expressed social anxiety more than ever before, avoiding gatherings at times, and at other times, laying awake in the dark after one, wondering if they talked too much, scrutinizing what they said, feeling that “vulnerability hangover” that plagues so many of us. We are moving on, but trying not to leave anyone behind (so many are still immunocompromised). We are at once tentative and eager, starved for company and overwhelmed by it, trying to feel comfortable in our own “place in the family of things” as poet Mary Oliver puts it.   

If you recognize yourself in this, you’re not alone. If you recognize others in this, be patient. We are all trying to integrate the pandemic we’ve been through, the reckonings we’re braving, our own personal quest to “live a life that is loving.”

My favorite moment at a recent common meal was this: The littlest kid in the community bumped her head and started crying, so I offered her a kiss. She then went around to every single person at all three big round tables—perhaps 25 in all—and presented her little dark hair for a kiss from each and every one. Even the rather stoic young man who just graduated from college gave her a gentle peck. We’re all her, as it turns out, just less physically brave and emotionally honest. Gather gently in this strange season, but do, for God’s sake, gather. It’s how we were made even if we’ve forgotten.