← All Of It with Alison Stewart
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A
Foreign. This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I am grateful that you are here. I am grateful to everybody who came to WNYC's gala last night. A good time was had by all, which is why I sound like right. Brenda Vaccaro today. I'll do my best. On today's show, we'll speak to the documentary filmmaker Ivy Maripol about her new film Ask E. Jean. We'll also hear from John Leguizamo about writing and starring in the play the Other Americans, which is now at the Public Theater. And musician Sarah McLachlan will talk about her new album, better Broken. That's our plan. So let's get this started with a conversation about building community. You hear the phrase a lot. It takes a village. But what does it actually mean to have a village in your life, having people that you trust and rely on more than just friends? It can make a big difference when you have kids, when you're sick, when you need real help. It can be especially hard when you move to a new city or you live further away from or even as a new parent, when you don't have as much time to build new relationships and you already existing ones, your friendships, they might be changing. Katherine Jazer Morton writes for the Cuts Brooding column and newsletter. She recently penned a piece called Is There a Secret to a Village? Hi, Katherine.
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B
Hi.
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A
We also have on hand Raina Cohen, an NPR producer, editor and author of the book the Other Significant Others Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. Raina n to speak with you.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Great to be here.
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A
So, Katherine, I know you say it's undefinable, but like Justice Potter Stewart said about something else, we should say you know it when you see it. But what are the words or feelings you would associate when you use the word village?
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B
I think the feeling you associate with it is an ease or relaxation around other people who aren't in your immediate nuclear family. So the idea of having people just drop by and not feeling like your house has to look a certain way or feeling like you can leave your kids with other people when you go out and run an errand and you don't have to worry about it or feel bad or like you're being an imposition on them.
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A
How about for you, Reina? What does the term village mean to you?
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C
I think of being I think of being able to lounge on the couch and be kind of horizontal and a bit of a mess, have people that you don't need to be cleaned up and put together for. So I think, you know, quite similar to what Catherine is saying. And a village doesn't necessarily need to be composed of your closest friends. It can just be people who are willing to lend a hand and who you are willing to also lend a hand to.
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A
For this is for both of you. Is there a difference between having friends versus having a village? And can you describe the differences? Catherine, what do you think?
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B
I mean, certainly they overlap, but I think there are some differences. I think that, you know, you have friends, maybe that you love to do certain things with and that like you have certain kind of rituals together or you lean on them for certain things. But I think that a village is really about everyday life more and about kind of just getting you through, like the sort of ordinary times that when there's nothing special going on, when you're not hosting. That's kind of how I see it.
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A
How about for you, Raina?
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C
I think that a village is more likely to be nearby, like physically proximate to you. So I certainly lean on friends when I have difficulties. But a lot of them are not in the same city. And even if they are in the same city, they are not the people who I come home to or the people who live down the bl. And as Catherine is saying, if a village is about the kind of day to day crises or enjoyment, it is just much easier to find that in other people if they are right near you. So the people that I think of who would say that they have a village, they're all talking about people who live with or right near them. And that's different from, you know, your best friend who lives five miles away or 50 miles away.
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A
Raina, you've written a book about the case for building a life around people, having people in your life. Why can centering friendships provide for a more fulfilling life?
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C
I think that we are told that there is one right way to live your life to be happy and that is to find a romantic partner and that person will be your everything. There are literally song lyrics that say that. And I think that it's very risky to expect one person to be everything to you, including your best friend. I mean, that is now a thing that you will hear at weddings. People will say, my spouse is my best friend. I think by centering your life around friends and a wider group of people, that is more durable, there's more of a safety net. But there are also different kinds of pleasures you can get from friends than you might with the person that you're trying to constantly make life decisions with and when you have, you know, all sorts of things entangled in them. So, I mean, I could, I could talk about this for a long time. But a few of the benefits are if you are partnered, it will probably make your romantic partnership better because you're not putting everything on them. If you have a number of good friends in your life, they are each likely to bring out different sides of you and, and help you tap into different things that you enjoy. So those are a couple of the reasons I'll, I'll leave it there for now.
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A
Listeners, let's get you in on this conversation. Do you have a village in your life, a network of friends or neighbors you can rely on maybe more than just friendship? Give us a call now at 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. How did you go about building your village? How did you meet new people? What impact has it had on your life? Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. You can text to us or you can call in. And Sharon has done. Sharon is calling in from Queens. Hi, Sharon, thanks for making the time to call all of us.
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D
Olivet, you know, I had this discussion with my daughter. I'm a grandmother. And I told my daughter, don't be stupid. Get people that are doing the same thing, especially parents that you can rely on to even just pick up your child and be safe. As women, we have a tendency not to ask for help. Also with men, I tell my all my lovers, get your own tribe, because my friends are my friends. You need to get some friends. And I find that when I worked in the nursing home, men are like solo characters, the hunting and a gathering thing, that they don't have friends and your friends wind up being their friends. And I said, no, you got to have your own set of tribe. But.
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A
You preached. Sharon, thank you so much for calling in. Did you have any response to what Sharon had to say? Katherine.
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B
I absolutely agree that, you know, having a partner and as Rayna was saying earlier, having a partner that relies on you for all their social contact is not good for a relationship. And I think everyone needs, you know, even a tiny group, it doesn't have to be a lot of people, one or two people who are really just like, there for you and who you can always, you know, turn to, I think makes such a huge difference. So I agree with Sharon Totally.
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A
Let's talk to Emily from Ossining, New York. Hi Emily, thanks for making the time to call all of it.
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D
Thanks, Allison. We were at the gala last night and it was lovely. But what I want to say about building a village is that my husband and I for several years in the early 90s, were trying to build a co housing community, which is basically a village. Do you know about co housing?
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A
Yeah, sure.
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D
Yeah. Well, Westchester county turns out to probably be the hardest. The New York region turns out to be the hardest place you can do that. And we, we did get a core group and we did get to be friends with a lot of people, but we don't live. But we eventually failed at getting the co housing built and was huge disappointment. We had a 5 year old son at the time, he's 40, now lives in Brooklyn. But it's a great idea. And There are over 150 CO housing communities in the US and you know, you know, hundreds and hundreds in Denmark and Scandinavia. And it was a huge disappointment because it's such a great way to live. So we moved a few years ago from Briarquist to Ossining to a neighborhood that's more kind of neighborhoody.
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A
Yeah.
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And I'm trying to make that into a village. You know, I mean, my closest friends don't live here, but I become. Started becoming closer to the people in the neighborhood and the children in the neighborhood. So I'm glad. Anyway, I'm glad you're.
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A
Yeah, I'm glad you're having a good experience trying to build this village. Serena, it was interesting what Emily said in the beginning of her call because you actually live with friends.
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C
Yeah. Well, can I want to. So I do live with friends. So it's me and my husband and two other couples. And I have visited a number of co housing communities and every time I have visited the them, you know, different parts of the country. I'm amazed that you can assemble so many people to, you know, build a property. But one of the things that I'd gotten advice on from Phil Levin, who, who's a property developer and he runs a company called Live Near Friends. So he's trying to help people do this. His recommendation is to start small. So to start with, you know, four, four to even six people I think he thought was like a little bit large because you have to coordinate a lot of them. And so that's sort of how things began for me and my husband of trying to find a few other people who wanted to build a shared sort of central of gravity for where we would live, and then hopefully pull more people in over time.
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A
Rhiannav, you talked a lot about building villages as parents, but in terms of people without kids, what are some things that they can do to make it seem like a village?
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C
I think maybe it feels more natural with kids to build a village because there are very clear needs that parents have, and there are things that are that go wrong that become more complicated if you have kids. So, for instance, I interviewed a woman who talked about her car breaking down, but she needed to get her kid to daycare. And then her best friend, who she lived nearby, was very happy to just take the kid to daycare. So those kinds of needs become really obvious and urgent. But even if you don't have kids, people get sick, they need some soup, they need some, you know, they need something from the help picking things up from the grocery store. They have surgeries, and they need someone to pick them up. I mean, there are all sorts of ways that we do need help from others and where we are equipped to help others. So I think asking for that kind of support and trying to also pull people in to live nearby, since proximity is so important, are, you know, a couple of the ways that you can build a community or build a village even if you don't have kids?
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A
Catherine, you write about this a lot, that it is especially difficult as a new parent to build a village. Why do the circumstances around new parenthood make it a little more challenging to build a village?
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B
I mean, I think that, you know, obviously you're tired and you're overwhelmed, and often, you know, you're feeling like not yourself. But I also think that, you know, the culture that we belong to, the consumer culture that we belong to, encourages people to believe that they can control their environment really successfully by making a series of choices and that by, you know, the things they buy can create an optimal environment of control. And I think that for.
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A
Oh, we. You know what, Catherine, we lost your audio right, just then and there. Did you hit. Did you hit mute by chance? Okay, we'll see if we can get you taken care of. We'll take Beth from Oyster Bay, and we'll see if we can get your audio settled in. Hi, Beth. Thank you so much for calling, all of it.
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D
Hi. Thank you. I love your show. This topic is. I'm a little emotional. It's, like, timely for my husband and I. We're both 69, and we did have a village. We thought we did with children, but then our children became, sadly, severely mentally ill, suffering from mental health issues. We had to step back and we have other family that lives geographically far away. So rebuilding community for us has been both homework and so wonderful. We've returned to our faith community, attending services, reconnecting with people, being involved in that, which is a really good way. We joined a local Y and we're meeting people and learning to remember people's names and eventually getting to the next step. It is a lot of work and I do think the older you get, it is harder. We both lost our mothers in the past year and so what we did for them as hands on taking to doctors, it's a thought process of how that's going to work for us. And again, I can't thank you enough for this very timely subject.
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A
Thank you for calling in. We're discussing how to build a village in your life. We'll be back after a quick break. This is ALL OF it. You are listening to ALL OF IT on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We're discussing how to build a village in your life and find community and support networks. My guests are NPR producer and editor and author Raina Cohen and Katherine Jazer Morton, who writes the Cuts Brooding column. We have a call from Sarah in Brooklyn who has a question that may either of you can answer. Let's talk to Sarah. Hey, Sarah, thanks for calling all of it.
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D
Hi, I hope this is the right Sarah because there's a lot of Sarahs. So I hope I'm the only one on hold. But I wanted to call and share my experience a bitch, which was that we dealt with a lot of cancer in my family this year. And it really affected and changed how we saw our village because a lot of people didn't show up that we were anticipating to show up or showed up in really disappointing ways. And now kind of after moving into the remission part of our life, we're really realizing cancer is kind of forever. And a lot of people that are still in our support group really don't recognize this and just kind of see it as over. And this is the experience of a lot of people that deal with cancer, a lot of people that deal with death, especially when it happens in young people, we're in our 30s, but also, I mean, with children, when children have cancer, people do not know what to do. When you have cancer in your 30s, when you lose a child, like the village around you doesn't know what to do and can really let you down. And it completely changes how you see how you expect people to show up for you and it's just kind of completely changed our social lives in our community, of how we anticipate people showing up for us. And that, I'm finding, is the experience of a lot of people that have cancer, especially in their 30s.
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A
Thank you for weighing in. Raina, do you have any comment?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I'm really sorry to hear that this happened to Sarah. And I'm also not, unfortunately, completely surprised. I think the desire for support is intersecting there with our culture's difficulty dealing with death and illness and grief. And I think the kind of operative phrase that Sarah said is that people did not know what to do. And I think that I'm trying to imagine what it is like from the perspective of somebody who maybe wants to help but doesn't know how to or is themselves, you know, has a hard time facing mortality and illness and recalling a story that someone I know gave or described at a wedding that was all centered on this idea of a village. And he said that, you know, after his first daughter was born, who had really complex disabilities, that people didn't show up in his life. And it was really hard, you know, being in the hospital, not having your people there. And he and his wife reached a breaking point and sent an email to about 50 friends and said, if there is any part of you that thinks that the best thing to do is to leave us alone, we are telling you that that's not what we want. We want you around. And they also explained the shame that they had felt that they were had, you know, that they were somehow responsible, even if it was irrational for their daughter having these issues. And that the only reason, you know, the only way they could imagine not feeling that shame is maybe having other people around that proved that them wrong. And then people showed up. So I think the lesson that this, the speaker here had said was that they aggressively sought community. They didn't expect it to just be there. And this is not to say, Sarah, that it is at all, you know, that your feeling of disappointment isn't an appropriate way to react. But I do think that sometimes we need to tell people what we need, even if we would really wish that they would know it, especially if they haven't been through a circumstance like the one you have been in such a. At such an early point in your life.
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A
Catherine? Yeah. Your village, as a parent, began because of some friends who invited you over for dinner. They made the invitation. Why was this step so helpful in cultivating your village?
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B
I think it made me feel included in a way that just felt so easy And I think that, you know, it's interesting because in some ways, having young children and the feeling of frailty that can come with that and sort of instability in the world can be similar in some ways to dealing with, like, difficult illness, you know, things that are less to do with, like, young children. And I think it's, you know, this idea that you're not going to be showing up in a polished or in a way that feels completely under control. And when other people give you grace in doing that and don't seem bothered by it, it can be very freeing and very like a feeling of belonging can grow out of that. That, I think, is what a lot of people are looking for when they're feeling frail and, you know, ill or just exhausted or, you know, not sure of their place in the world at a particular moment.
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A
You write about this concept called weaponized competence in parents. Would you describe it for us?
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B
Yeah. So, I mean, weaponized competence is just the. The feeling that you're the only one who is going to do it right? And so you are going to be the only one who does it because, you know, anyone else who tries is simply going to fall short. And this is often, I think, a response that, you know, and I, I hate to gender this, but I think women tend to have this a little more. Although I, you know, obviously there are many, many exceptions. But, you know, it's. It can be kind of like a passive aggressive defense mechanism to just feeling frustrated and disappointed by the world around you. And, you know, it can be the kind of thing where it's like, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna clean this kitchen, because if you do it, it's not going to be done to my standards, and I'll never let you do it because it's never done right. And, you know, these kinds of sort of, you know, competence as a weapon can isolate us and can make it hard for other people to give us help and feel able to come to our help and come to our aid. And it can make it hard to open our house to people. And I think that that's something that, you know, in particular, new parents can lean on this kind of weaponized competence as a way of trying to exert control over their environment. And I think it can have the effect of being really isolating.
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A
We have a guy. We have a guy on line seven. Zeke, thanks for calling in.
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D
Well, Alice, I always love calling you number one. And this is going to be an interesting story, but we just talk about community. Whenever I call in my friends Tend to hear me speaking on your show. So first of all, let me say hi to my lovely community out there that listens to Alice. About four months ago, I had an accident. Fractured two vertebrates and broke two ribs. Okay? And I can. And I was in bed for six, for almost six weeks. And very dark place. But I have to tell you, an amazing thing happened out of that. So anything I was a bright place was the love that I began to receive from so many people from the Park Slope Co Op, from the Union, Union Street, Park Slope area, friends from all over the world, too. But I was getting so much love that it was overwhelming that I remember the hospital, I said, I got. I can't stay ill. We got to get me out of the hospital because my friends will be upset if I don't come out alive, right? So then I realized what made this come about. People said, zeke, you're a giver. And what happened was during COVID I'm part of the Garden of Union, and I started growing vegetables. And people were so depressed. It was a very hard time for all of us. So I began to give vegetables away because I was. I needed. And people's faces were bright, were just lighting up. So each year I've been doing that. So what happened? I didn't realize I was building all of these friends and community around this. So when this injury happened, they're like, zeke, we need you back. You need to be giving more of that love. We have to support you to keep supporting love. And I went, oh, my God. And I was like, this is just, you know, you do it without looking and complete strangers I didn't know were coming up to me. So my recommendation to people and join the community guard is number one, okay? Grow more than you can and give.
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A
Away as much as possible. Zeke, thank you so much for calling in, and we hope you will call us again. We've got about a minute, two minutes left, and I wanted to give each of you a chance to weigh in. Rhianna, is there anything important on this that we haven't talked about that you think people should take away with them?
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C
I think the idea of trade offs feels really important and related to what Catherine was saying, that if you really want all the control, like, you're going to have to give up support. And the reverse is true as well. So I think recognizing that there are inconveniences to being in community, whether it's because you don't get everything you want, or you have to give a little bit, figure out what is your what do you actually value the most? And then it makes some of those things that you're giving up or compromising on feel more worth it.
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A
Katherine, how about you? What do you want to leave people with?
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B
Yeah, I just think that when we make community with people, it can be hard. It can challenge us, it can frustrate us, it can be inconvenient. But I really think that it challenges us to be self aware and be kind of the better versions of ourselves in a way that, you know, is really valuable. And it's very hard to get that when we aren't interacting with others on a really regular basis. So I think everyone should commit to it to some degree.
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A
This last text says New York City is so great that you can cultivate friendships around activities. I have my concert going and choir friends in fall and spring gardening friends in spring through fall birding friends. Sometimes just spring and fall migration, but there's somebody around all year around. My guests have been Raina Cohen and Katherine Jazer Morton. Thank you both so much for joining us and for taking our listeners calls.
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Thank you, thank you.
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Our state has changed a lot in the last 140 years.
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Who need it most.
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Together, we're building a healthier future.
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Learn more@mycare.org Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all.
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