It's too late to be writing anything. I should be in bed--after all, Sam will be up in a few hours for his middle-of-the-night bottle, which he still cherishes. But it's quiet now, quiet like it rarely is anymore in the chaos of my life.
One weird thing about suburbia is how isolating it is, despite being surrounded by people. At least that's how it is in my version of suburbia, anyway. When my husband grew up here, it was--for the most part--a community of people who had connections to this area, roots. Now it's a commuter stopover for metro Atlanta, and the people who are moving in to the million-dollar homes that are being built on every square inch of land around us have no ties here, no memories buried in the red clay soil they build their houses on, no sense of history to connect them to the towering pine trees they clear-cut to make room for one more ornate box with an oversized media room and no yard. We're always being challenged to take care of the earth, to make our carbon footprint smaller, reduce, reuse, recycle. But you can't force someone to care about things that have no connection to them. The people who live around me--and many times, I confess, the same is true for me--are only connected to their house, their immediate family. There is no sense of place, and that lack, that isolation, makes us selfish. It makes our lives impossibly small.
When you look at it that way, it's not the greatest place to raise kids, huh?
Maybe it's lack of sleep that's making me morbid and melancholy. Or the isolation. It's amazing how many people I see every day, but they are all strangers to me. Even at my son's preschool, I see the same people every day, smile at them and say "hello", but they are still strangers.
(And did I mention the traffic was so insane this morning it took me 10 minutes to get to Max's preschool , which is literally around the corner from our house?)
Growing up in the small-town, crazy church I did was mostly a pretty bad experience. And when I say pretty bad, I mean the pastor going to prison bad. It was scary fundamentalist, very scary--very cult-like. We were cut off from our extended family, our neighbors--anything or anyone outside of that church. I went to school there and spent my recreation hours there. It was its own weird and terrifying microcosm.
But even in the midst of all of that, you knew you belonged. You knew there were people who would be happy to see you when you walked through the door, people who knew you and your family and the intimate, mundane details of your life and would ask you about them.
In the book Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church author and sociologist James M. Ault, Jr. notices this in the congregation that is the focus of his book. He writes:
Virtually all the conservatives I met...spent their formative years into adulthood involved in a circle of relatives and family friends on whom they relied to meet day-to-day needs...extended-family ties [a term Ault is using to describe the relationships in the church congregation he is studying] were the building blocks of church life...
Though a life of mutual dependence within a family circle was commonplace among members...I met, it was foreign to people I knew in academia and the New Left, as well as to other educated professionals I knew. Most of us were prepared, from the moment we left home for college, to leave family dependencies behind and learn to live as self-governing individuals...In the process, we learned to piece together a meaningful life with new friends and colleagues alongside old ones. Our material security did not rest on a stream of daily reciprocities within a family-based circle of people...
Next to this in the book I have written in pencil "one of the hardest things for me to adjust to was the loss of family." And it was--it is. To this day, I still feel like I am looking for a place to belong to, a place to call home that is bigger than simply my little family. I have never again found that sense of a belonging in a church, no matter the denomination or size. I wonder sometimes if it is not why I always end up profoundly disappointed in any church I attend--I always feel like a stranger among strangers, all of us unknown to each other but with this mutual friend in common we gather once a week to commemorate. It's a feeling that's impossible to explain to those who have not experienced it. When we left the crazy church--a necessary choice, and one I am grateful my parents made--it was nevertheless a death for me of this family I once had and never would again (anyone who left the church was immediately excommunicated, and no contact of any sort was allowed by those still within the church.)
I'm aware that such conditional love made any sense of community I had illusory, but I still seek it wherever I go. The feeling of coming home, of being known. Here in these overcrowded, over-rich suburbs full of SUV's with anonymous faces hid behind tinted glass there is no silence, but so much isolation.
And for me, there is only the memory of what I once believed was real community. I still believe it exists, or at least that it should exist, but I've yet to find it again. Is that what this blog is about--another search for community? Perhaps. Probably, at least in part.
So, is community illusory? Does anyone else out there have that place where, like the song says "everybody knows your name"? Are we all strangers to each other? Is all of this the wild musings of an overtired, burned-out mother?
Comments welcome--if only to remind me I am not alone on this big blue marble.
