Page 13 - C.A.L.L. #32 - Summer 2010

KALEIDOSCOPE

“A healthy mix” is Ma’ikve Ludwig’s definition of raising her 12-year-old son communally, in
a scene “where the lines between community and family were a bit fuzzy”. Let us give her a
chance to speak for herself:

Growing Family in Community By Ma'ikwe Ludwig

During one of my son's brief forays into something resembling regular "school," I picked him up one
day and was greeted by a quiet and somewhat perplexed version of my usually gregarious child. When I
asked him what was on his mind, he reported that the class had been assigned a genealogy project, and
he was to bring to school the next day a family tree.
"Let me guess," I said, feeling a wave of both amusement and compassion. "You're having trouble
figuring out who to include?"
Jibran was raised in a scene where the lines between community and family were a bit fuzzy, to put it
mildly. Even if he'd been asked to simply represent his siblings, parents, grandparents, and aunts and
uncles, he'd be sketching something closer to "bush" than "tree." His dad, Marqis, for instance, can
legitimately be referred to as either an only child, one of four, or one of 10, depending on whom you
count. And do you count your parents' current partners? Or just legally sanctioned relationships? And
if the latter, do you then take the opportunity to share the story with your second-grade classmates
about the time your dad made you, look up every swear word he'd ever heard you utter in the
dictionary, only to discover that the word "bastard" was actually an accurate label for yourself?
The timing of the assignment made for even more intense soul-searching on Jibran's part: I was eight
months pregnant with his half-sister, Ananda. And while halfs- and steps- could hardly have been that
strange in his alternative school, the circumstances around this child surely were.
Let me back up.
Jibran has spent his whole life living in some version of community. When we were pregnant with
Jibran, we made our first family move to living communally, and he's been raised with a healthy mix of
strong parental ties and having lots of kids and adults in his life that mattered a lot, but aren't
related. He is highly independent, has influences from dozens of adults who have been in his life, and
is amazingly socially savvy for a 12 year-old. And he has, in many ways, never truly been “mine.”
Jibran's name was inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s poem, "On Children”:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you, but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you…

We loved this poem, both Marqis and I, and when he suggested that
the child in my belly might be named Jibran, we both had an immediate sense of rightness, and never
re-opened the boy’s name conversation again. And after all our years in community, Jibran embodies
the poem beautifully.

Bruno Wegmüller of Brachenreuthe prefers to look at the issue from the parent’s point of
view and relies on Germany’s greatest poet no less, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to
introduce his contribution to the debate in “On light and shadow” , which awakened faint
memories for me of heated discussions about communal life in my youth movement days:

Writing history is ever a precarious undertaking. Despite honest intentions one runs the risk of being
dishonest; indeed, he who undertakes such an accounting declares beforehand that he will place some
things in the light and other things in shadow. GOETHE

The story which is told here runs the risk of being dishonest since which of us likes bringing the
shadows into the foreground. Why is it always so easy to find fault with others, and even to make
others responsible for our own failures? Is it part of human nature, is it vanity, or do we distance

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