Happy late October, Precious Readers!

As mentioned before, Pilot, Little Buddy Bacher, and I moved into our first house in 2022. While we don’t own the property, we do own our home. That’s right, we moved into a mobile home community. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, but we did not move to a trailer park. We moved to a mobile home community. It’s a pocket community of nicely shared fields, a simple, single in/out location, and the property is well maintained.

However, as mentioned in a previous post, our mobile home community was owned by a private couple who hired a property manager for the neighborhood. Well guess what? The couple decided to sell the property. Are we getting kicked out of our home? No. The owners decided to provide our neighbors and us with the opportunity to become a co-operative community.

The property is still owned under one owner: The co-operative. We elected an interim board of individuals, who work on creating a business name for our neighborhood. That “business” owns the property now instead of the couple. Think of it like a mini–Homeowner’s Association.

Our neighborhood is currently split in groups. Half of the neighbors are of the Baby Boomer generation. The other half is split between middle aged people, and people with young children. Pilot and I happen to be the center of the Venn diagram of the latter half of our community.

The Interim Board has been 4 men and 1 woman.

Well, here is my bias showing. Am I concerned about our neighborhood being ruled by white, Boomer-aged, proven to not be technologically literate, male presenting people? Especially in the 2023 social climate surrounding budgets, equity in home ownership, and the terrifyingly exponential increase of misogyny and racism? ABSOLUTELY.

Today’s community meeting was the election of the first full-term Board of Directors. The “Secretary” (I do have issues with this terminology) position had zero candidates. The interim secretary decided to step down. When the room was open to suggesting nominees, did anyone say anything? No. After a dead silent pause of 6 seconds, a white-haired White woman, who seemed quite disinterested, raised her hand with the statement, “If no one else wants to, I guess I’ll do it.” I’ll admit, not the attitude I had in mind regarding the people deciding the future of how I live in my own home.

Well, what would you do? This is an opportunity to set a precedent for future Boards to show multiple generations of people, of all races, and genders (or non-binary), can create a positive impact and fresh start to, let’s face it, an extremely tired-looking community. And let’s face it, I’m not working, I’m not writing at the pace I once was—though this blog is to help me get back into the discipline of writing frequently, eventually back to mostly daily.

I raised my hand.

Gave my spiel about my qualifications and my note-taking ability. (I may have mentioned my record of typing 101 words per minute with 94% accuracy.) If any of them saw my resume, they’d know I’m deeply overqualified to be someone’s “Secretary.”

Then, a voice rang out. The wife of the current Secretary asked: “Since you’re a stay-at-home parent, if you get a job again, will you have time to dedicate to this?”

Really? In this day and age, in the year 2023? The board is filled with people with jobs. I’d love to know if they were they questioned about their availability and time-management skills.

Feeling the eyes of literally my entire neighborhood on me, I knew as a minority female in 2023 America, my answer was going to be really key at setting the foundation of my ability to work with, and for, these people. Half of whom are of the same generation (or older) of the person who asked this question.

I kept my cool and answered. “I’m being selective about what positions I’m applying to as I’m job searching at the moment. Also, I’ve been known to be a workaholic. And I’m a clinical insomniac, so I don’t sleep. So, there’s that.”

Luckily, my answer got a decent laugh and ended the tension of the extremely outdated, sexist, misogynistic, and tone-deaf question.

The vote was 16-7.

I won.

One of the seven votes for the other candidate was from me. I’m not that arrogant to not vote for my competitor.

The board is now 3 men, 2 women. That feels more balanced to me.

Have I mentioned that I love playing the Choices* app on my phone. It’s an app that provides interactive visual novels. You create a custom character, select certain dialogue, can pay for gem scenes, and your choices can affect the ending of the story. Am I a little concerned about the timing of said game, early access to VIP subscribers for one of their books currently on weekly release called “Dirty Little Secrets,” regarding a murder of the president of the Homeowner’s Association of the main character’s neighborhood? Well, yeah… maybe.

If anything, my term is only for one calendar year. 12 meetings. I can handle 12 meetings. I’m looking at this as an opportunity to directly combat that type of outdated thinking to set a precedent of equity, respect, no HR-violating questions, and also show my child that groups in a position of power need to be extremely diverse in gender, age, ethnicity, and background to ensure all residents of the community are represented, feel seen, feel heard, and that the group representation is a vision queue that any open forum is a safe space for all.

Maybe this experience will be good research for how suburb HOAs work. Maybe this will help bridge the chasm between generations and residents. Allow us to come together and create a space of mutual respect and true community. To prevent outdated, divisive attitudes that echo in the format of the (hopefully soon imprisoned) orange ass from Florida, from cropping up. To destroy the weeds of misogyny, racism, generation wars.

If putting up with 12 meetings helps us have a fresh start to where my child’s community is working with him instead of actively against his interests, I’ll do it.

Having said that…

What the hell have I gotten myself into?

*I have not been paid or compensated in any way to promote this business. The above is of my sole opinion, and I utilize the app paid with my own funds.