They say it takes a village to raise a child, but what do
you do when there is no village?
I grew up in small towns.
My father isn’t fond of busy, populated places – he always preferred
small towns, or the outer-lying suburbs of cities, which can be almost the same. Growing up, we lived in a procession of small
towns – Meekatharra, Wittenoom (which doesn’t even exist anymore), Port
Hedland, Karratha. In between, there
were years here and there living in a very outer suburb of Perth, the same
place that my parents still live. When I
was a kid, we basically had the run of the town – we’d leave home first thing
in the morning on our bikes with our friends, and we’d be home before the sun
was down, or there’d be hell to pay. I
remember only one afternoon when we got home too late – our punishment was that
we couldn’t watch Astroboy that night; the kids next door had to go to evening
Mass in their play clothes. We never got
up to too much mischief in our small towns, because every single person around
knew exactly who your parents were, and no one had any qualms about letting
your parents know if you’d been up to no good (or even just a little
not-good). It kept us all in line.
By the time I had children of my own, I lived on the other
side of the country from my parents and my in-laws. I live in what is best described as an inner
city suburb in a large capital city (“large” being somewhat subjective, but
large for Australia). My multiple
relocations as a child meant that I don’t have a group of childhood friends
that I see on a regular basis. My
extended family also live on the other side of the country, my husband’s
extended family are all based in a different, more southern state than us. Again, given that we live in Australia, even
though they’re in state directly to our south, it’s a decent 10 – 12 hour drive
between us and them.
When my eldest daughter was born, therefore, I had no
village. We’d only recently returned to
Australia from a three-year secondment in Canada, so we’d left behind those
friends, plus many of our local friends had moved away in the three years we’d
been away. I did have a couple of
pregnancy buddies – a friend had her second son a month before my daughter; my
sister’s son was born six months after my daughter – but neither of them lived
near me – my friend lived in the US; my sister was based in the UK. When my daughter was born, I knew exactly
zero local friends with young babies.
Happily, the state health department had an excellent “new
parents” programme, which involved attending four weekly meetings with a
nurse. The meetings were, from memory, a
couple of hours long. The first half was
an informal chat with the nurse, the second half was a chance to chat with the
other new parents (pretty much always mothers).
The meetings started when your baby was 6 – 8 weeks old, and there were 8
– 10 new parents involved who lived in the same general area.
And it was here that I found my first village. Our mothers’ group started off with nine
mothers, but one left after the first week and another dropped out later. We continued our group after the four week
course, catching up once a week for a couple of hours at a time, meeting at
each other’s houses. We picked up two
other mothers along the way – a woman I met at a baby yoga class who had no
family nearby, and the friend of one of the other mums who hadn’t really hit it
off with her mothers’ group. Our group
continued to meet up weekly, at parks, at homes, occasionally at cafes or
restaurants. We weren’t always all there
– most of us went back to work within the first year of having a baby. Every six months or so, we’d go out to dinner
together and spend hours talking and laughing.
We had a collective first birthday party for our children at a local
swimming pool, and followed this up with a second birthday at a big park. The communal third birthday happened on a
sunny afternoon by the river; the fourth birthday party was rescheduled, due to
torrential rain, and wound up going ahead a week late at a different park in
the same part of town. Once the older
kids started school, it became a bit more challenging. Even though we lived fairly close to each
other, our nine older kids wound up attending eight different schools.
We were still meeting up regularly when the first of the
second babies was born two years later.
Over the course of the next two or so years, the rest of us also had a
second baby. A year or so after that,
two of us had a third baby. For those
playing along at home, this basically meant that for the first eight years that
we knew each other, at least one of us was pregnant, breastfeeding or caring
for an infant, or a combination thereof.
Two years ago, two of our number moved overseas; one to New
Zealand, the other to Europe. When we
catch up nowadays, we aim for kid-free days, and it takes a bit of a juggle to
make it work for most people. My village
of new mums is far more widely dispersed now, with our kids at different
schools, our second (and third) kids at different ages and stages and a
combination of work, after school activities and life in general making a group
gathering more difficult than it used to be.
But I talk to a least a few of these mums on a regular basis; we still
hang out and enjoy the “family” that we created out of that group.
Coming out of that, however, was the other village. The one from school. I was lucky to have one of my mothers’ group
friends at the same school – her eldest daughter and mine were best friends
from early on. From the beginning, we
determined that helping each other out would make life easier for both of us. I took her school-aged daughter one afternoon
a week; she took care of mine a different afternoon. When our two eldest girls had two swim
classes a week, she took them both to one and I took them both to the
other. When our four daughters were in a
singing class together, I did the school pick up and took them to class; she
picked her daughters up after the class was finished. As time moved on and another friend’s
daughter joined the same choir, we finessed this even further – we each took
the five little singers to choir once every three weeks.
Nowadays, my girls are older – 7 and 9 – and my son is
3. My friend and her two daughters are
in Europe, but my love of the collective helpfulness of a village of parents
lives on. Between them, my two girls do
one weekly activity each during school hours, and six outside of school. One of
these out-of-school activities (singing) is currently the same class for both
girls, but this will change in a few months, when the older one moves up to the
next singing level. Happily, I have two
friends with daughters at the same school who are similar ages to my girls and
who do some of the same activities.
Between us, we negotiate getting children to and from singing (all five
of them), tennis (for two, although I take a kid in trade for mine being
dropped at her lesson) and art (for a different two). The three of us all have three separate
sign-ins at our school’s after school care, because we’re all authorised to
take each other’s children. There are
another couple of friends with whom I have a similar (although less scheduled)
arrangement with. It is not unusual for
me to show up at school with one (and sometimes two or three) children who are
not mine, because a member of my village has an exam that morning, or needs to
go to the dentist, or isn’t well enough to be taking kids to school. A few months ago, between four families we negotiated
the logistics of our school’s two different discos, leaving two mums at home with
the four non-school-aged children, while two mums and a dad took the seven
school-aged ones to the appropriate disco for the evening. Several weeks later, I had an appointment
that conflicted with when I drop my daughter and her friend at art class. The friend’s mother was working and couldn’t
make drop-off, so a third (totally unrelated to either of the artists) mother
stepped in to take care of things.
My little village has come about via equal parts luck and
organisation. My daughters have managed
to befriend other kids who like the same activities, and whose parents are
people whom I like and (more importantly) that I trust with my children’s
safety and well-being. These parents
have been willing to help me out with my kids, in exchange for being helped out
with theirs. And, a factor that I think
is critical, we are all okay with the fact that sometimes we won’t be doing an
equal part of the work. Sometimes, one
of us will be doing more than the others, and we all understand that. When someone can’t do their regular thing,
one of the others will step up and be able to make it work. My village has reached a point where I don’t
feel guilty about asking for help, or feeling as though I will owe someone a favour
if I ask for something. My village has
become something bigger than that, what a friend once very aptly described as
“the friends who function as family”.
So yes, it takes a village to raise a child. And villages don’t really exist in the
physical sense anymore. Building a
village of your own takes a bit of work and a lot of luck, but it is worth the
effort that it takes. Your village will
help you in times of need but, crucially, it will also give you the chance to
help others when they need you. And this
will make you feel good, but it will also let your children, and all the
children within your village, see that the adults enjoy helping each other, and
they will learn this too. And your
village will help your collective children to learn how to be good people. And this is a wonderful thing.
