Every Friday, a handful of other homeschool moms and I meet up with our kids to learn, socialize, and play. We call it a co-op, but over the past year that we’ve been meeting up, it’s evolved into something for which that name doesn’t quite fit anymore. Like so many of my endeavors, the group was born out of a personal yearning for something I hadn’t yet found; instead of waiting around for it to materialize, I decided to create it. In my early envisionings of this group, I imagined a close-knit group of families helping raise their kids alongside each other, a group where everyone contributed equally and decisions were made democratically. I pictured us learning from and alongside each other, benefiting from each other’s unique knowledge and passions. I envisioned a group of other moms who respected their kids and spoke kindly both to them and about them, who were more interested in shaping their children’s character than their academic prowess. I also wanted to like these women on a personal level, for them to be people I would choose as friends even if we weren’t thrown together by motherhood and homeschooling.
Usually when I lead with such lofty expectations, I can’t help but be disappointed by the outcome. Particularly in group settings, it feels nearly impossible to marry the vision with the reality. In this case though, I got exactly what I was looking for, and so much more.
This past Friday as we sat on the beach together watching our kids industriously fill a giant hole with endless buckets of water, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by my good fortune. This is the village I’ve waited all these years of mothering to find, I thought. We often joke about starting our own commune—buying a bunch of land and living on it together with our combined ten spouses, 25 children, and 60 chickens. While I don’t see that as a realistic outcome any time soon, I realized that even with our respective homes scattered across two different states, we’ve managed to create something that feels like a real village, where everyone chips in to meet the needs of both the individual and the collective.
And honestly? It is nothing short of magical.
This Friday, one woman showed up wearing a pair of earrings another woman had recently made and sold to her. Another woman brought each of us bars of soap she’d made from her goats’ milk. I traded a copy of my book for two dozen eggs with another friend. We held each other’s babies in our laps, chatted with each other’s older kids, communally shared food and beach toys and towels. Laughter and tears were both present, as so often happens in a space where it’s safe to be both vulnerable and irreverent. Many of us had gone out to dinner together the night before, and yet we still had no shortage of things to say to each other.
This week, a group member joined us for the first time after having her fourth baby; another member, new to fostering, was bringing along a newborn who had just joined their family. It was an unseasonably hot day and we decided that instead of planned activities, the group would have a beach day instead. Thinking ahead, one of our group members, who hasn’t had a newborn herself in many years, took it upon herself to bring a pop up tent so the new babies would have a shady spot to sleep. This is what I consider true love nowadays. Not big, splashy displays of friendship for the benefit of social media, but these quiet heartfelt intimacies that mostly go unnoticed by other people.
It reminds me of the trees that live in cooperative, interdependent communities, sending each other water and nutrients and vital information through their root systems, all that relational magic happening just below the surface. Our group has become its own ecosystem in which each of us helps to sustain one another, funneling our best resources to the ones who are struggling, operating from a collective intelligence born of many years of raising children. It’s a quiet kind of love, nearly imperceptible, but if you dig an inch beneath the surface, you’d find an expansive web of roots, lovingly intertwined.
I think if I could offer only one piece of advice to new mothers, it would be to find their village or create it themselves. It is such a crucial piece of the puzzle that many of us mothers don’t even seem to know we’re missing. As a culture, we value struggle and sacrifice, see it as a badge of honor. The harder it is, the more worthy the work. Motherhood in particular is an endeavor we’re told is more worthy if it’s done alone, as if it’s somehow a less impressive feat if we have help doing it. But the reality is that the communal raising of children was the norm for hundreds, even thousands of years, not this lonely, disconnected, like-each-other’s-pictures-on-Instagram form of parenting that we’ve stumbled onto lately. We are social beings, hardwired for connection, and parenting is communal by design.
On this Mother’s Day, I am so grateful for my village, the women who make raising children feel like a communal undertaking rather than a solo endeavor. If you’re a mother too, I hope you have been blessed with a village of your own, people who will walk alongside you and make the journey a little more fun and a little less lonely.
Happy Mother’s Day to you.
With love,
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Preach!