Start Rebuilding Your Parent Village
Much has been written lately about the deep isolation that many parents feel, especially those who work full-time from home with children who also study at home. I avoided clicking on most of these parts because it seemed useless to me to dwell on them. Of course, we are isolated, and it seemed that nothing could be done about it until the pandemic was over.
But I couldn’t resist reading an article in the New York Times called “ Parenting was never meant to be so isolating, ” in which some commentators on another Times article responded in response to the question, “You people have decided to have children. It was your choice, now stop complaining. ” Jessica Grose writes:
This criticism does not take into account the fact that practically throughout the entire history of mankind, parents have never raised their children in isolated nuclear units, as they did most of 2020, with little or no support from the family or society. As Stephanie Koontz, emeritus professor of history and family at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and author of Like We Never Were, said, it is absolutely unheard of for individual families to take full responsibility for children. American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. “
As parents of an only child – with the exception of a couple of years during which we were foster parents – my husband and I did not have to rely heavily on the vast village. There are more of us than our child, and it is quite easy for us to change responsibilities or take breaks as needed. However, the Times article got me thinking about all the little things I missed out on parenting during non-pandemic periods: how we would coordinate with the parents of my son’s friends to take turns driving. extracurricular activities. As parents of two children, they leave one child with us so that both of them can go to a game or to meet another child. The way we threw our son with them so we could – gasp – have lunch or dinner together.
We have to constantly remind ourselves that what we are going through is hard because, as the Times headline indicates, parenting was never meant to be. People are a kind of cooperative: we are created to live and work together, to raise our children together. We used to do much more for each other, but now it seems that we simply cannot.
However, there is a long winter ahead of us, in which even all the external, socially distanced workarounds that we have managed to come up with in order to survive isolation are about to disappear. We must find a way to provide each other with emotional support, even if we may not be a complete physical support system.
So I invite all of us to try to set aside a few minutes today – and a few more minutes tomorrow – to begin work on rebuilding the part of the parent village that we lost this year. If you’re used to grabbing another mom’s coffee on your way out on a play date, grab her favorite drink and leave it at her front door today. If you’re going to the grocery store, ask your single dad neighbor if he needs anything. Offer to supervise the outdoor play if the weather near you still allows it.
Create a group text with your other parent friends and call it an “anti-Instagram” group. You will not submit the cutest, most touching, and unrepresentative photographs of your current life to this group. No, you will only be posting photos of Zoom crashes, piles of dirty laundry and everything else that illustrates this, yes, we are still living in hell right now, but we are together even though it seems that we are so far apart.
Everyday life in this pandemic has often felt like it’s every man for himself, but we still need each other. All jokes (or dismissals) that this is our “new normal” do not change this fact. And every little thing we can do right now to start rebuilding our village will help us in the months ahead.