How to Find Your Village as a Mum || You May Have To Bloomin’ Well Build It
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The other Saturday, we had a houseful of people. Doors opened at midday and gently shut at around 6pm. Who came?
Several families, oodles of children, most of them seven and under. Babies, toddlers, small people charging around the garden. The sort of gathering where nobody expects to finish a conversation and someone is always looking for a shoe or wiping something or someone.
And it was lovely.
It was also a bloody lot of work.
For several days beforehand, we tidied. We sorted out the garden. We put toys away. We cleaned the loo. We shut bedrooms so I wouldn’t spend the afternoon wondering what was being dismantled upstairs. We bought meat for the barbecue, paper plates, boxed wine and cheap-and-cheerful fizzy drinks. Everyone else brought a pudding or a side dish.
Nothing was Pinterest-worthy but that wasn’t the point. The point was that when people arrived, I could say, come in.
The children could play and the parents could sit down. Nobody needed to worry too much about breaking something or making a mess. One family stayed almost the entire six hours. Another came for about an hour because that was all the mum could emotionally manage at the moment.
And one father said something to me that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
“It is so lovely to be invited to someone’s house. We always invite people, but nobody invites us back.”
And there it is.
We talk an awful lot about “the village” in motherhood
Where is my village?
Why don’t mothers have a village anymore?
We’re not meant to do this alone.
All true. But I’m starting to wonder whether we’ve begun talking about the village as though it is something that ought to be waiting for us when we arrive. As though somewhere there should be a ready-made collection of people prepared to bring casseroles, watch our children and turn up when we’re struggling.
But perhaps that’s not how villages work. Perhaps you have to help build one. And building one requires effort.
It requires inviting people when your house isn’t perfect. Feeding people when you’re busy. Trying your best to remember birthdays (my personal Achilles heel; I struggle to remember my own childrens’ birthdays!). Sending the text. Checking on someone. Accepting invitations when staying home would be easier.
And, this matters, RECIPROCATING.
Friendship is a little like tennis rather than golf. Somebody hits the ball over the net.
Come for coffee.
The ball comes back.
Come to ours next week.
We’re having a barbecue.
We’ll bring pudding.
Fancy meeting at the park?
Yes. I’ll bring coffee.
Backwards and forwards it goes rather than Boof! Boof! Boof! all in one direction like hitting a gold ball down a driving range. And somewhere in all those tiny exchanges, mums in particular are creating something intangible yet so special.
Have we forgotten how to build a village?
I suspect several things have contributed to this. COVID disrupted the ordinary rhythm of having people in our homes. Modern family life is extraordinarily scheduled. And when both parents are juggling paid work alongside children and everything else required to run a household, there is simply less slack in the system.
(I’ve talked before about just how lonely motherhood can become, and why I don’t think we’re meant to muddle through it in isolation. You can listen to that conversation here.)
But I also think we’ve absorbed a peculiar idea about where our serious effort ought to go. We’re quite comfortable being told that worthwhile things require work when we’re talking about careers.
Build your business. Network. Show up consistently. Invest in yourself. Make time. Put in the hours.
However family? Friendship? Community?
Somehow we expect those things to happen naturally, organically almost, yet when they don’t, we say we don’t have a village. So perhaps we need to put some of our best energy into building one.
Because no, we cannot do everything
This is something I increasingly believe about motherhood.
Women have been sold a pup, essentially lied to.
We cannot give everything to our careers, everything to our children, everything to our marriages, everything to our friendships, maintain beautiful homes, exercise, cook from scratch, volunteer, sleep eight hours and somehow squeeze a rich community life into whatever remains.
There isn’t enough of us. So choices have to be made. Sometimes hard ones.
Where do I want my energy to go?
What do we, as a family, want to build?
Because every “yes” costs something. And so does every “no”.
The big barbecue gathering cost us time and effort. There were certainly easier ways we could have spent the week. Nonetheless, at midday, we opened the door to about fifty people.
For the next six hours children disappeared into enormous cardboard boxes, babies were passed around, food was shared and adults got to talk to other adults. I watched something being built, not spectacularly nor perfectly, one paper plate, barbecued sausage and cheap glass of wine at a time.
So if you’re longing for more community as a mum, perhaps the question isn’t only:
Where is my village?
Perhaps there’s another question worth asking.
What am I doing to help build it?
Send the bloomin’ text. Invite somebody for coffee. Invite yourself round and tell them not to tidy before you come. Bring the pudding. Let the children make a mess. And it doesn’t have to be a big shindig with fifty people; just start with one, two, four or five.
And if somebody keeps hitting the ball across the net to you with lunches, coffees, catch ups, then for goodness’ sake, hit it back.
Because a village can’t survive on people waiting to receive from it. It survives because people keep contributing to it. That’s how we build the village. Together. So crack on…
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