Most of the children live with either both parents or their mothers, but it varies according to the needs of each family. One boy decided that he wanted to live in a larger living group where his friends lived instead of in a small house with his mother, and she supported that, though she still visits with him every day. Sometimes a daughter will live with her mother and a son with his father if the parents are no longer together as a couple, which is often the case. Usually, the parents remain good friends even after a separation and may go on holidays together as a family or to visit grandparents, so the children are still held in a secure family after a divorce. Still, Ina feels that it’s challenging to create enough stability in open relationships to make a safe container for kids.
Over the years, she’s observed that if the parents feel good in their open relationship, it’s easy for the children to accept new partners. If one parent feels neglected or unhappy about it, then the children don’t like it. Another difficulty is that some of the parents in the local neighborhood won’t allow their children to play at the homes of the ZEGG children; they think it’s too dangerous because of scandalous reports in the press in earlier years. But on the whole, ZEGG and its children are accepted. Ina explains that “we’ve been here eighteen years, so they see that in spite of what they may have read or heard about us, we take care of our gardens and our buildings. We’re not as strange as they may have thought at first.”
Ina, who has no children of her own, says that before living at ZEGG, she thought it was normal for teens to be in conflict with their parents because that’s how she grew up. Now she realizes that it’s possible for teens to have deep friendship and open communication with their parents. Often the teens will choose another adult in the community who is not their parent to bring questions about sex and relationships. All the adult women participate in circles to encourage the young women to value their womanhood and answer their questions about love and sex. Part of the gift of living in community is the opportunity to play an important role in children’s lives without the demands and responsibility of being a full-time parent. Ina says that this has very much been the case at ZEGG, where there are relatively few children partly because in the early years at ZEGG, there was the idea that you had to be almost perfect, an ideal woman, to be a mother.
ZEGG founder Dieter Duhm may have gotten the idea for the children’s house from the Osho ashram in Pune, India, which he visited in the 1970s. Jivana Kennedy is an American woman who spent several years at the ashram. Her own children never lived there, as their father took custody of them before she went to the ashram in her late thirties, but she reports that “from everything I’ve heard, those kids grew into the sanest and most creative teenagers anyone would want to be around—sensual and free but not crazed from the distortions that arise from lack of information and repression.”
While Osho often praised conscious monogamy as a very evolved form of relationship, he was a severe critic of the traditional family, saying that it was “no longer relevant for the new humanity that is just being born.” While acknowledging that families have helped people survive, he said that it was rare for a family to be loving, joyous, and free. Most were a “necessary evil,” which “corrupts the human mind” and breeds neuroses. Instead, he proposed that children belong to the commune as a whole, where they would “have more opportunities to grow with many more kinds of people” while their biological parents were freed to love each other or not without clinging together for the sake of the children.11 In the early days of the ashram, Osho’s theories were put into practice.
Jivana recalls that in the ashram, the children generally lived together with the most loving adults being the caretakers of the kids. “All the kids knew exactly who their parents were and had special time with them, but the rest of the time the parents were freed to play their social role, whatever that was, and the kids were socialized together with loving and nurturing supervision. Stories would float around about how five- and sixyear-olds would touch and fondle each other and sometimes even attempt penetration, but no one made any fuss about it. It was considered natural. The adults were in their own process of awakening to the unnaturalness of the uptight conditions in which they had been raised and were committed to not laying those trips on the kids.”
“Osho would often talk about teenage sex and how it was the most innocent, the most raw and pure of sexual experiences, and how it could help to blossom people into sexually loving adults when it was not thwarted and laden with fear and moral judgment or hidden in secrecy and shame. When it made sense to have conversations about birth control and STDs [sexually transmitted diseases], those talks were all handled intelligently and with love and met with little resistance from the kids,” Jivana concludes.
I know of one European teen who refused to live at the Ashram because she chafed at the rules and restrictions, which were not sexual in nature but applied to dress, schedules, spiritual practices, and the like and which she found oppressive. Instead, she stayed in the town and met with her beloved sanyasin father at the ashram gate. In chapter 5, we heard the story of Rainah, who feels that her teen years at the Osho ashram made her who she is today.
The Kerista commune, based in San Francisco and discussed at length in chapter 3, is another polyamorous group where the child-to-adult ratio was very low, as at ZEGG and the Osho ashram. After seeing how much time, money, and energy were needed to parent the two very carefully planned children born into Kerista, the commune decided that two children for thirty adults was enough and required all Keristan men to undergo vasectomies. I’d long since lost track of the two girls born into the Kerista commune who were in their early teens when the commune broke up, although they continued to live in a smaller group marriage for a time. The last time I’d seen them was shortly after the commune broke up, and they would sometimes babysit for me when my own daughter was small. After so many years living in a fishbowl, many former Keristans now want privacy, so I wasn’t able to interview either of these young women, who are now in their twenties. I did get a report from a personal friend who told me that one is just about to graduate from medical school, and the other is monogamously married with children of her own and living a normal life in rural Hawaii. Any parent anywhere in the world would have plenty to brag about having children like these.
One of the few thoroughly polyamorous intentional communities in the United States had a strong focus on children. I say “had” because while the remaining three members are still child focused, they are no longer polyamorous. In the end, their desire to expand their service to children beyond their own family led them to abandon the practice of nonmonogamy. They’re still convinced that multiple parenting in a communal environment is good for children but say that they eventually found the interface with the larger society too difficult and limiting.
Heavily influenced by the Asian cultures visited by their male founder during his many years of travel, this group, which now prefers to remain anonymous, came together in the mid-1990s and were together as a community for the next ten years. During this time, there were anywhere from six to twelve adults and five to eight children, some of them born at home in the community. Three of the adults, two men and a woman whom I’ll call Mara, still live together, along with her three children, ages four, ten, and thirteen, each by different fathers. The oldest, now twenty-one, recently moved out of the family home after attending the local community college. He’s currently off traveling the world and was unavailable for an interview. Mara, his stepmother, describes him as very responsible but definitely choosing an alternative lifestyle.
I spent several days with this group in their early days in the late 1990s. My partner and I were traveling in their area, and a mutual friend suggested that we visit them. The visit, which was originally planned for a few hours, kept extending itself, as I found their whole approach to parenting and relationships fascinating. When they invited us to spend the night, we readily agreed. At that time, they were gradually carvi
ng out a homestead in the jungle. It was by far the most rustic living (as opposed to camping) environment I’d been in up to that point. They had a large outdoor kitchen that was the daytime hub for the community and one large structure that they called the “birthing hut” with a roof, screened walls, and a dirt floor covered with large rugs where everyone slept. The only fully enclosed structure was a small air-conditioned room that housed their computers and office equipment. I still remember the sense of “coming home” that I felt sleeping on futons in the birthing hut amidst the whole tribe of children and adults while listening to the sounds of the jungle outside.
One of the community members explained that the birthing hut was originally built so that they would have a clean, dry place where the women could give birth, but everyone liked the space so much that it eventually became the nighttime hub for the community. At the time I visited, all the children were small and would sleep with their parents in “family beds.” Those few adults who were not biological parents generally slept in another area of the birthing hut, and in the center was a large open area for making music and art and conversing with each other. Mara told me that if people wanted to have sex, they went out in pairs to little huts some distance away, but mostly people gathered in the big room every evening, and she felt that this was the greatest benefit to the children. During the day, the children would go around together in “little packs” learning and playing with supervision from only a few adults, but at night everyone was together.
“The kids gained so much; they developed magnificent talents! When you live with artists, you become one. The kids learned to cut, sew, paint, draw, and talk at very early ages. People said they had extraordinarily advanced communication skills, and they could converse easily with adults.” Mara concedes that the same is true to some extent of neighboring monogamous families who also practice the “continuum concept,” but advanced communication skills is one trait that keeps popping up as I talk to polyamorous parents about their children.
One of the things that intrigued me about this community was that the women tried to conceive around the same time so that they could breast-feed each other’s babies. I’d been a breast-feeding mom myself not so many years before, so I immediately understood the practicality of this custom, which made caring for another mother’s infant or toddler in her absence much easier and more natural. But there was more to it than convenience. Part of their philosophy was that our cultural obsession with monogamy begins at our mother’s breasts. Either literally or figuratively, we learn that one person—usually Mommy—is the source of love, nourishment, nurturing, and safety—all those things we later seek in a romantic partner. They theorized that if they instead conditioned their children to receive love—and mother’s milk—from more than one nurturing caretaker, they would be conditioning their children to bond with more than one beloved or “multisource” later in life. It’s too early to know whether these children will grow up to be jealousy-free polyamorous adults, and, in any case, it’s certainly not a controlled experiment, but I found it an interesting concept.
According to Mara, the remaining members of the group eventually decided to “single source,” as they call monogamy, because “polyamory was too much of a button pusher for people, and we’re not into a cover-up.” They now have a very public lifestyle as an educational co-op for young children and were a charter school site for three years. Mara is currently an elementary school teacher and feels vulnerable to public scrutiny. As she puts it, “The cocoon in which we had our poly family was too confining after a while. We wanted a larger context for our work with children. The social confines of the poly family were tight, and we didn’t want to risk either losing custody of the children or having the children encounter problems in dealing with the outside world. But when the community broke up, it was like having a phantom limb. The others were supposed to be there, but they weren’t.”
Mara feels that the community struggled because they attracted too many wounded people with histories of sexual and physical abuse. “There was not a strong enough ‘center’ to hold a container for all the healing they needed to do,” she says, but critics feel that the community was too extreme and required too much of people. As in many monogamous breakups, there is often more than one side to the story or even more than one story for each person at different points in time. Whatever worked or didn’t work will probably never be known, but I have to admire these folks for putting it all on the line in their determination to find a better way to raise their children.
CHILD-CENTERED FAMILY
My impression, after examining what little evidence we have, is that it is not polyamory per se but rather the extent to which the family and the culture it’s embedded in are child centered (or not) that influences the health and well-being of the children. The 2008 CBS television series Swingtown provides an excellent example of how this distinction impacts children. While the story line is fictional, the program was created by a man whose own parents had an open marriage, and the characters are amazingly true to life if somewhat stereotypical portraits of “two generations of friends and neighbors as they forge intimate connections and explore new freedoms during the culturally transformative decade of the 1970’s,” according to the CBS promotional information.
Swingtown follows three sets of couples: one of them fun-loving seasoned swingers with no children; one upwardly mobile and open-minded pair who are conscientious parents with two healthy, normal teenage children; and one moralistic and judgemental pair who have a sexually repressed teenage son. There is also a neighboring single mom whose teenage daughter is left to fend for herself while the mother indulges in drugs, alcohol, and sexual adventures.
The couple who exhibit the most turbulence are the two who make themselves vulnerable to the turmoil of questioning their values and experimenting with opening their marriage. However, they never allow their inner turmoil or adults-only recreation to interfere with their ability to parent effectively. They consistently provide parental support and supervision while allowing an appropriate level of freedom and autonomy to their son and daughter. Their son ends up taking on a protective role with the girl next door, who runs away from home only to find that her self-absorbed mother hasn’t noticed. His older sister explores her own sexuality and intellectual interests and refuses to cave in to her cute but not-so-bright boyfriend’s possessiveness. Meanwhile, the “normal” couple, though good intentioned, are exposed as smothering, controlling, and overprotective parents whose son is developing into a misogynist, pornography-addicted loser.
While the Moral Majority often complains that the media have a liberal bias, in my view Swingtown is just telling it like it is. I doubt that such an honest and accurate portrayal of nonmonogamy could have been shown on network television prior to the twenty-first century.
COMING-OUT ISSUES
The term coming out has been popularized by its use in the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities to describe the process of telling the truth about oneself and one’s sexual orientation. Someone who has not yet come out is said to be in the closet. These concepts apply quite well to people with a polyamorous relationship orientation. However, as we shall see, there are significant differences as well as significant parallels with the homosexual and bisexual experiences. Some polyamorous people find that the challenges of coming out are even more threatening than dealing with jealousy, while others simply skirt the whole matter by not taking on a polyamorous identity even though they are engaged with multiple partners in an ongoing and consensual way.
COMING OUT IS A PROCESS
Coming out is an ongoing process that occurs gradually over many years. It includes first recognizing that you do not conform to the relevant norm— in this case, admitting that you are willing and able to love more than one person at a time. Once you’ve recognized yourself as not necessarily being monogamous and not wanting to lie about it, you then have to sort out what you do want and learn to accept and love yourself as you are.
Part of coming out to yourself involves finding a label, name, or identity that more accurately describes who you are or at least finding a way to see yourself and think about your desires and behaviors that corresponds to the reality of how you show up in the world.
People who’ve never thought about it might think that admitting to being polyamorous or accepting oneself as polyamorous would be a simple matter, but most us of have been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that we should be monogamous. Although this is rapidly changing, polyamory is still considered deviant. Many people have also developed judgments based on experiences with other people’s unethical or disharmonious non-monogamous styles of relating and are reluctant to associate themselves with these negative examples. Consequently, people are often more likely to expend energy trying to squeeze themselves into a monogamous mold than considering the possibility that it’s really okay to relate to more than one person at a time.
I recently granted an interview for a podcast. The interviewer clearly had a negative attitude about polyamory, so I asked her what she thought of when she thought of polyamory. She immediately said, “Thank you for asking me that!” and began telling me that when she asked people what they were looking for in relationships, men usually said that they wanted freedom to date lots of women, whereas women often said they were looking for “the one.” In her own life, she’d struggled with a partner who’d wanted to be polyamorous but whom she didn’t feel she could trust to be honest with her about what he was doing. In addition, she was horrified by the sometimes insensitive and manipulative ways in which she saw men trying to impose their polyamorous agendas on the women in their lives. She saw polyamory as a weapon in the war between the sexes that was most often employed by men who were “unwilling to commit.” There was no way she wanted to identify herself as polyamorous.
Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners Page 20