When There Is No Village

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.