What do we even want anymore?
Unoriginal thoughts about "the village" and what it takes to maintain it.
I was born at the dawn of the 1990s. On a February Sunday, two months in to the new decade in central Kentucky, I made my appearance at a local hospital and then went home to the same house I lived in for eighteen years. One thing you need to know is that rural Kentucky, probably like any other rural locale in the United States, is that many we’re about twenty years behind what people are up to on the coasts.
So, what does this mean?
It means that largely, community is still a thing, people look out for one another, you know your neighbors, and overall, you know you can count on people. Granted, this has started to change in the past ten to fifteen years, but it’s still the same energy. Two weeks after I was born, my mom said that she had about fifty visitors throughout the day to see me.
You read that right: FIFTY.
Why? Because in Map Dot, Kentucky, it was what you did when someone had a baby and it was not viewed as an intrusion. It was part of life and just accepted as the natural flow of existence. You have a baby, people come out, you have a chat, and they leave. You also probably also had about twenty to thirty people come to the hospital.
But now, it’s so different and we’re all feeling it.
I see this often on social media: We don’t have a village. We don’t have help. You have to buy help. Nobody wants to look out for one another. Where are the involved grandparents I was promised? Nobody told me it would be like this. Did I tell you we don’t have a village?
When I moved from Map Dot to NYC to eventually Upstate New York, where I got married and had babies, I noticed the community difference. Neighbors don’t speak to each other (our current neighborhood is a wonderful exception), lives are fairly closed off. Families now live away from each other, which wasn’t the norm even when I was growing up. We are spearated, drifted, and impersonal. People in general can’t build a village because we’re all literal strangers siloed off in our little matchbox lives.
And I think this is where the issue lies: We, specifically those of us in the West, really don’t know how to live in community.
Real world example: My husband is from the Middle East. In his home country, gathered from my expertise research skills (eavesdropping on and participating in FaceTime calls), it seems like people give a shit about each other. Yeah, I’m sure it’s annoying for your fifth uncle’s wife to ask you for the tenth time when you’re getting married, but she’ll be there to help plan, set up, and then babysit once you start having babies. Get sick? Your cousin who is a nurse will probably stop by regularly after to work to make sure you’re okay. Even better, your nephew who is a doctor will help you read the test results. (Yeah, sure, there’s people there who drop the ball and are bad, but overall, rampant individualism isn’t a lauded trait.) Frankly, the Western mind cannot comprehend or fathom that people do this or even used to do this for each other once upon a time.
Here are some other things I see online and sometimes in real life:
Elaborate guidelines, sometime sent out over email or in physical mail, for visiting a new mom and baby,
Cutting off people for not supporting every single thing you do 110%,
Not letting relatives see your babies and kids because they didn’t do anything for you during pregnancy (sometimes new parents are never are able to articulate what they wanted in the first place),
Getting mad because your neighbor told you that they formula fed their kids and they turned out fine,
Getting mad because your favorite Substack writer (me) said breast milk is optimal infant nutrition,
Creating a spreadsheet so your husband can see how much work you do,
Getting mad because your husband didn’t know how to load the spreadsheet you created, and
Posting unhinged comments on Instagram because another mom said she had a nice postpartum and you feel overwhelmed.
Do you see where I’m going here? We don’t know how to live in community and we actively work to push people away. Our society has no idea how to let people in. For the record, I am all about protecting the postpartum space - it’s vulnerable and earth-shattering, especially for first-time mothers. I’m not suggesting that you let all of your cousins come over the moment your baby is born and I absolutely do not endorse your out-of-town aunt coming over the day you arrive home from the hospital, expecting to be taken all over your city on a sightseeing tour and out to dinner (these things do happen). Also, nobody with cold symptoms needs to be around your newborn.
But, I am suggesting that since we have no idea what we want, but we also want a village, that we chill the hell out. Can you imagine what would happen if my mother, in February 1990, wrote and mailed out an extensive list of how to act and what to do when you came over to visit me? What if I go over to my husband’s home country with my two boys and give my mother in law, a completely unproblematic angel of a woman, a long list of rules of how to exist around my children? I’d be laughed off of the continent and my parents would have been labeled as entitled and disrespectful. Why? Because in many cases, these behaviors can convey an inherent distrust of the community in which you live and grow.
I get it, it’s hard out there.
Our culture is incredibly gross and toxic towards children and mothers. Likewise, my husband and I are part of the percentage that live away from our families. There are days I wish my boys could run up to their grandparents house, play with their cousins, and make those kind of memories. I wish we were in Capital City, where my husband grew up, so the boys can speak their other language more often, run around the bazaar where their uncle has a store, and eat lunch from street food vendors. But, for now, that’s not the situation. We’re a suburban family in the American Northeast, working to open our lives to people in the most postive ways possible.
We gotta be the change we want to see in the world, even if it means acting like we live in Map Dot or Capital City, when in fact, we’re at the end of a cul-du-sac.
A Personal Note From Sarah:
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This is an incredible post. I feel like every millennial parent needs to have someone constantly yelling this line at them: "But, I am suggesting that since we have no idea what we want, but we also want a village, that we chill the hell out."
Something that irks me in the talk about how we don’t have « village » is that we only seem to be referring to the things we would gain from a « village » and we never address what we would have to sacrifice. Are we actually capable of surrendering total control over our children which is what would be required if we raised our kids in multigenerational configurations? Aka could you handle your mom deciding where your kid goes to school?
Louise Perry points out for all the complaining about how we lack a « village » it seems that once we have the financial means to do so, we leave our villages.