By Kirsty Fernandes
If you’d told us 10 years ago that this would be the kind of life we could create, we would have laughed. My husband and I were both working long hours in corporate jobs in big cities, along with everything that kind of life entails. Now we have found balance: working part time, living in a cohousing neighbourhood, and spending plenty of quality time with our kids.
Back then, we were totally lost on the other side of the birth of our first daughter. We had prepared so diligently for her birth, and nothing else. We’d done the antenatal classes, hypnobirthing, written my birth plan and, after a rocky pregnancy, been supported through an amazingly empowering birth.
And then, we were lost.
We had no idea what I needed for my holistic recovery and it would be months before I felt I came home to myself. By the time my daughter was 9 months old, we were all struggling with sleep and she cried any time I went to put her down, even to make her breakfast. We were doing all the attachment style things – cosleeping, babywearing, breastfeeding… and yet, something wasn’t quite balanced in our dynamic. We were exhausted and wondering how we were meant to get our own needs met. In a twist of fate, I stumbled upon Aware Parenting while listening to a series of podcasts.
Now we have found balance: working part time, living in a cohousing neighbourhood, and spending plenty of quality time with our kids.
Aware Parenting focuses on creating secure attachment, democratic discipline (no punishments or rewards), and recovering from stress and trauma through our natural healing mechanisms. There’s a real focus on balancing the needs of everyone – including us as parents. It was the approach that rounded out what we were already trying to create with our little one. It was a game changer for us as a family and inspired me to become an instructor to support other families to implement this approach.
When I became pregnant with my second child, all of the feelings I hadn’t processed from my daughter’s pregnancy came rushing up to meet me. It occurred to me that there was little support for new mums to process their fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum and early parenting stories. I was lucky enough to utilise the tools of Aware Parenting to see me through processing my own feelings. I then trained in postpartum care and birth debriefing and have been listening to birth stories unfold for five years.
Aware Parenting and working in the ‘birthy’ field brought to the forefront the importance of choice and autonomy for our children, and suddenly unschooling/life learning became our chosen education. My husband and I quickly realised that we wouldn’t be able to provide this for our kids without community support, so we looked at creating a cohousing neighbourhood in Tauranga where we were living at the time. Cohousing is a housing model in which a neighbourhood is purposely designed to increase connection between residents through shared central spaces and resources, while still owning your own home. It’s an alternative to mainstream housing models where households live completely separately, which for some encourages disconnection and loneliness, or lack of support. Living in a close-knit, intergenerational cohousing community was attractive to us because it would allow us to explore the parenting and education models that would best support our family. Cohousing allows connections between residents to flourish, providing more support for families and creating a safe place for our children to grow and thrive. Unfortunately, we really struggled to find an affordable piece of land, and enough financial capital to get the project off the ground.
Cohousing is a housing model in which a neighbourhood is purposely designed to increase connection between residents through shared central spaces and resources, while still owning your own home
While we were exploring options and connecting with others about living in community, we were told about the Tākaka Cohousing project; it was lightyears ahead of us and our values aligned. We particularly resonated with the concept of the Community Land Trust – the tripartite structure between residents, Manawhenua ki Mohua, and the wider Golden Bay community, and the focus on education, affordable housing and regenerative land practices. We hadn’t heard of Tākaka or Golden Bay before, but felt it was an opportunity worth exploring. We connected with the team at Mohua Ventures (the developers) over Zoom and then headed down to Tākaka to check it out.
