An American feminist criminologist's commune in the city.... by Erin Sanders-McDonagh from the SPACE ISSUE

I live in a commune. More precisely, I run a commune - with my reticent husband and my nearly-six-year-old son. Since my son was born on 2011 we have had seven people live with us for more than six months (including a few au pairs), and more than 50 people stay with us for at least five nights (and often many more).  I work as an academic: a feminist criminologist. I am also American, with the annoying frankness and slightly aggressive nature that come along with both my profession and my nationality.  

We have an actual house with more than two bedrooms – a rare luxury for a London family, and made possible because my husband works in the building industry and was able to extend and extend until we now have two spare bedrooms, and one extra bathroom. The people we have had live with us have always been women – some have been temporary lodgers, some have been friends escaping situations of violence, or needing refuge while they wait for landlords to ‘verify’ them; some have been acquaintances – friends of friends of friends who have needed a place to stay in London for a few days, weeks, or sometimes months. At the moment we have the second cousin of our second-to-last au pair living with us until September. While Blanche stays with in our spare bedroom downstairs off the kitchen, in our upstairs spare room we are also hosting a colleague and friend who I met recently at conference in Boston. An amazing houseguest (she came with champagne and witty conversation!) who has been able to stretch out some travel funding she received by staying with us for free for a few days. While my husband would almost certainly prefer the privacy that should normally accompany living in a house in the suburbs of London, I cannot help extending my home to strangers and semi-strangers, convinced that karma will one day reward me for inviting people I often barely know into my home.

Our favourite houseguest (Naomi) has lived with us (on and off) for over five years in both bedrooms at various points, and has all of her wordly possessions stored in the upstairs bedroom at this very moment. She is travelling light around Cambodia while she finishes her PhD on Khmer women and domestic violence shelters. Naomi has seen my son grow from a barely-walking-infant to a constantly-running-moving-dancing six-year-old. Naomi loves football and makes a mean mac-n-cheese, and we have comes to see her as one of our own – she is now family. 

Naomi was with me in the pharmacy when my then two-year-old son, learning how to hold and train his bladder, accidentally peed on the floor. We had gone out for a quick visit and the potty training had gone so well we didn’t think he would need a nappy. We were wrong. He wept with abandon as his trousers darkened, the urine streamed down his legs and leaving a small puddle on the floor. The vitriolic gaze of the woman who had to clean it with her mop lacerated his already fragile confidence, and he began to sob. The acerbic stare of this women trained on me, telling me through her eyes alone that I was an despicably unprepared mother, and that on my poor son with his leaky body had rendered her life miserable by failing to contain his bladder.

How. Dare. You. Leak.

His shame visible as he told me, ‘I couldn't help it mummy – I didn’t mean to”.

My husband and I both grew up in conservative (not Conservative) households. A rural Irish village for my husband with two devoutly Catholic parents and three adorable sisters; me in a single-parent family where no one discussed sex,  snot, or bowel movements (they don’t exist) and I wasn’t told about the female menstrual cycle until nearly 10 years old. How horrific, to find that for my whole life the women that I knew and loved bled under their skirts and trousers, and kept this bloody secret hidden from view, acting as if life was normal while they bled to into bulky diapers under (and sometimes through) the polyester linings of their 1980s wardrobes.

My own period arrived in mid-1990s at the age of 12. Other mother’s took their daughters to lunch to celebrate the arrival of womanhood; my friends were shown how to use tampons and given Pamprin by their sympathetic parents. They were allowed to take days off school when their menstrual cramps hit, given hot water bottles while their mothers stroked their hair and said: ‘there, there sweetheart – you stay in bed and rest’. I was given ibuprofen and sent off to school in my bulky sanitary pads – no sympathy. Bodily functions were disgusting enough, and they were not to be acknowledged, glorified, or even talked about. My mother never even told me about tampons, nor did she suggest I try them; when I got my first job busing tables at the age of 14, I spent my money on the luxuriousness of Tampax (introduced into the delicate process of inserting a wad of cotton up my vagina by my best friend in her en-suite bathroom after a few shot of Jim Beam).

The first true love of my life and my first boyfriend was a year ahead of me in school and was a member of the ski club and the golf team in high school. Despite being a year behind, I tutored him in History and English – helping him build a GPA that would allow him to go to university. When my boyfriend’s mother found out about my menstrual initiation, she called my mother to make sure that I was using some kind of contraception (she thought, and said plainly, that I was a whore at the age of 12 and I was clearly trying to to entrap her son by getting pregnant as quickly as possible). It didn’t matter that we weren’t having sex – the very idea that my body might bleed, that my fertility became explicitly exposed through my bloody, oozing body was simply evidence of my baseness: Good girls from good families got their periods at 15 or 16 years old. This ‘early’ arrival signaled my working class origins. My mother was told in no uncertain terms that a teenage pregnancy would not be tolerated. Whilst I had no intention of getting knocked-up, I went to my gynecologist and was given Depo Provera, a drug that would sent me spiraling into depression and anxiety (side effects that no one every told me about), but ensured that I would not fall pregnant. My boyfriend was certainly not given the same message from his parents – the imperative was not about him wearing condoms or taking other measures to ensure that WE didn’t get pregnant, but rather it was my responsibility to ensure that I didn’t fuck up. My menstruation was the harbinger of decay and debauchery. The material reality that reminded everyone that my body lived, breathed, shat, bled; nothing to celebrate, but rather a threat. My boyfriend and I didn’t have penetrative sex until we were both sixteen – years after the crisis of menstruation. But my mental health descended while I took these hormones to insulate my boyfriend’s family from the potential inconvenience of having to deal with a baby born out-of-wedlock to a less-than-worthy scholarship kid. My period is always a reminder that, even now, that I was a slut, a threat – I could have ruined the life a perfectly perfect middle-class American family. In the end this boyfriend married a girl that he spent year fucking behind my back while he was away at university and I finished my last year of high school. I hear he’s fat and balding. 

My son, living in the commune with our au pairs, lodgers, friends, waifs (and strays) discovered at the age of 2 that periods were a normal part of the lives of women with whom he lived.  My husband and I, shedding the conservative elements of our pasts, allow our son to see us naked, to bathe with us, to paint his toenails with nail varnish; we encourage him to to cry when he is sad or angry or hurt. Our communal spirit means that my son is growing up around women who bleed and who do not hide this shame, women acknowledge this monthly (ish) right of passage, and women who speak about it openly, honestly. He knows what a tampon is, he knows that mummy and Naomi get back cramps once a month, and that other women who come to our house bleed. He knows that my mother, now in menopause, does not bleed (but does not like to talk about it and does not like to be seen naked – still conservative). He talks about periods like they are a part of normal life. 

My son. A new generation. A new start. Raised by a father who saw the importance of teaching his son about feelings, about feeling, about love. Raised by a mother who wanted her child to know that bleeding was not dirty – bleeding is human; to know that women were not just ‘women’, they were human. Raised by a larger commune, a group of women who over six years have showed him that bleeding (and pissing and shitting and crying) are all part of the normal leakages that occur at the liminal boundaries of the body.

Home for my son will always be connected to the reality of the human body. The space of home will always be bloody, tinged with the salt and sweat and iron-tinged brown stains of femininity. The community of the commune encouraged the conversations on the toilet – as other women helped to potty train him, told him that everyone slips up and leaks sometimes (and to ignore that horrible woman from the chemist: she has leaked at some point too), told him that periods are normal, sometimes painful, frequent but sometimes sporadic, blessings but sometimes curses or sadness. They were part of the lives of women – but were also part of the lives of men. They are a part of his life. They are attached to everyone he knows in one-way or another and are no more shameful than the sweat from his brow, or the spit in his mouth. My son knows that he will never have a period, but knows that bleeding and life are connected. He has watched and talked and known about periods since the day he could speak. My son knows that periods are like any other bodily secretion – but also knows that women’s blood is a life force, the very thing that allows him to live, and for the world to exist.

A period. A full stop. An ending. And a beginning. The start of all human life begins and ends with this bleeding.