🫶🏽 Life at the Center: Kids on a Commune 🫶🏽 March 2020

By Renée Tillotson

Did I ever tell you we brought up our kids on a commune? Gosh, looking back on photos, we hardly seem to have been more than kids ourselves when we idealistically joined another couple and another family with kids to buy a rundown property together: 1¼ acres of an old farm, existing in the middle of a bunch of track housing.  We pooled all our resources of savings and loans from our families to get a mortgage from the bank for joint ownership. It was a true fixer-upper in every sense of the word. When we bought it, most of the buildings were nearly unlivable. The weeds reached so high, we couldn’t see the junked cars left behind until we cleared the lot. But that property was filled with a lot more than weeds: it was filled with POTENTIAL.  

With the motto, “Children of light, as ye go forth into the world, seek to render gentle service to all that lives,” we idealistically named our property Seva Nivas: House of Service. The couple with no children were both teachers. We were one of the two couples with children, with whom we owned a landscaping company, and later an engineering construction company as well. Over the years, the people on the property gradually shifted, the ownership changed, yet the concept of it being a place of service remained intact.

 From the start, it was all about the children… our children and the children of all the tomorrows to come. We felt as if by setting an archetype of how people could live and work together, following many previous American experiments in communal living, we would create a viable alternative to the nuclear family lifestyle. In fact, four other families soon bought or rented houses near our property and often came to break bread, read inspirational articles together, and celebrate holidays from various traditions.

Each family had its own house, often with a non-family member adult renting an extra room. We ran the office of our landscaping/construction company out of what used to be a barn, which was super convenient for the two of us who were moms. The neighborhood elementary school was directly across the street, so the kids could easily walk to and from school while we worked in the office. And if one of us had to run errands, the other mom was around to keep an eye open. We’d also hire childcare for the whole brood – yes, occasional brave souls were willing to watch what evolved into 8 children between our two families!

The kids got to see and participate in building the property from the ground up – either remodeling or tearing down and building up new structures. They even got to help Cliff create a 3-story treehouse for them. It had a trampoline at ground level, and a shaky bridge between the treehouse in one huge avocado tree to another tree that had a curly slide coming down from it. Oh the fun to be had by all the kids in that magical treehouse!

Cliff (my husband/biggest kid) built a rabbit cage large enough for the children to get in with the bunnies – that was a fun Easter! For the egg hunts, we’d line up all 8 kids by age, plus any cousins who happened to be visiting, and let the littlest ones start searching first. Eventually, the two oldest boys started playing the Easter Bunny for all the younger siblings. Months later we’d happen upon the occasional egg up in a rain gutter or some other unreachable place!

 We’d often grow vegetable gardens. One of my fondest memories of our daughter Sandhya and the little neighbor girl – about age 4 at the time – happened when I went out to the garden to pick peas or beans for dinner, only to discover that the girls had already picked and eaten every last pod! Yet how could I possibly scold a kid for doing something so 100% natural and healthy!?! The same two little girls, plus another extended family friend, made killer mud pies, complete with shredded grass and dandelion flower decorations. 

The boys had a much more military approach to the land. They dug out places for forts and it’s a wonder they all survived. I only recently found out about their unshored underground tunnels that we grownups were too busy working to realize they were creating! They no doubt kept legions of guardian angels occupied.

The children’s teachers across the street loved bringing whole classes of kids to visit the treehouse/playground area and eat snacks with lemonade on the lawn, usually as part of their Halloween parade or towards the last day of the school year. We tended to paint the buildings bright golden yellow and red and green, sometimes blue. With all the primary colors, delivery people who came to Seva Nivas and saw all the kids playing (not even counting visiting school children) wondered whether we were running a nursery school or something. We just loved kids and happy colors.

Diwali was always a special celebration, when we would tell the story of the Ramayana – not as elaborately as we do now at Still & Moving Center – but with the same brave princess, monkey hero and dashing princes overcoming the demon king. The children loved floating candles in a little plastic swimming pool for this festival of lights.

For the Fourth of July we’d pull out all the stops. The husbands would buy as many fireworks as they could afford (no doubt MORE than we could afford!) and we’d have a huge potluck, inviting over dozens of friends of all ages and backgrounds for a backyard picnic, with a veggie barbecue and ice cream that everyone helped to hand crank. We adults would give uplifting readings before dinner to remind us of the Founding Fathers, which I hope somehow sank into the kids’ subconsciousness. They could hardly wait for it to get dark enough to light their sparklers and watch the dads set off the fireworks. The intensely competitive father/son basketball games helped blow off some of the steam as they awaited sundown. Eventually, as the kids got into their teens, they delighted in putting on a fireworks display for us, the admiring adults. 

One of the delightful aspects of communal living turned out to be bonds that formed between the children and other adults in their extended “family” who were not their parents. Our two boys and another neighbor boy collectively spent years of their lives surfing with Robert, a man who lived across the street whose kids had already left home, and who loved surfing with every inch of his being. Robert is in his seventies now, the “boys” in their thirties, and they still to this day surf together whenever the rare opportunity arises. The ties are so close, that both of our sons asked Robert to officiate at their respective weddings.

A childless couple took one of the little girls on the property under their wing when she was a toddler and kept a special relationship with her all through junior high and high school years, which was wonderful for her as the quiet second child in a noisy family of five children, and fulfilling for them as well. A professor living on our property – who had attended an all-girls college in Massachusetts – accompanied our daughter and me on a trip to visit colleges back East when Sandhya was making her choices. And we could always count on another neighbor down the street, who was a brilliant math teacher, for help with the tricky homework problems. Many fine intergenerational connections formed over the years. And the children got to listen in on plenty of philosophical and political discussions when we’d all meet together over a big pot of spaghetti. 

Sandhya mentioned to me recently how living in a commune fostered such a strong sense of community in all three of our now-grown kids, which each of them has sought to incorporate into their lives. Shankar cares for his community in an intense hands-on way during every shift he works as a paramedic firefighter. One of his favorite parts of the job is giving fire station tours and fire safety tips to grade school children. Sandhya worked for 5 years directing a community gardening non-profit, which included gardens in the schools and at a soup kitchen. Govi, taking a leadership role now in our construction company, nostalgically remembered the company picnics we used to host in the summers at Seva Nivas with games and fun for the whole family while we honored the hard work of the parents. He decided to recreate that kind of family-centered event here in Hawaii, which we now hold at a company Christmas party every year. 

As one communal member used to remind us, “Wherever there are children, there is a golden age.”

I’m reminiscing on all these great memories of our sons’ and daughter’s childhoods as I now look to the next chapter of that property. It pleases me to know that that same little old house where we raised all three of our children will soon provide a home to a young couple and their baby girl, who will thereby be living close to her auntie, grandparents and other folks who will shower her with love!

It wasn’t perfect, and yet Seva Nivas held our family as a true community. It gave us the opportunity to bring potential into being, and to be of greater service to the world. It was for us a brilliant experiment in communal living that enriched all of our lives.