I’m standing in front of my front door, wondering whether to turn left or right in the alley outside. But the decision isn’t really about direction. It’s about who I was and who I was invited to become.
This article originally appeared in: resurrection and ecologist magazine.
Turn left, like I always did before I had my daughter, and head out of town and up the road towards the views and open spaces.
Living in the heart of Devon, with its green valleys, foothills and heavy rain, wide open spaces are hard to come by and I crave space, lightness and the breeze that outlines my solitary edges.
Cooperation
Turn right and you’ll go down the hill, past cottages and pubs, past the village hall, which is a testament to what the community meant to this place. I get out, close the door, and turn right. I head into town to find the literal and figurative things I need to raise my daughter.
My husband and I moved to this town for affordability, not for our roots. Although we are invested in our community, we have felt lonely during this period of ‘motherhood’ – the process of becoming a mother. I talk to other like-minded moms.
Until the industrial age, children grew up in communities where siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and neighbors often cared for newborns and mothers.
Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argues in her book that since the Pleistocene it actually took a village to raise a child. Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding.
The ancestors of the taxonomic subfamily Homininae developed the ability and need to care and cooperate in ways that others did not. We are here today because we cared about each other.
Community
However, the nature of care and community has changed. We generally no longer live with family or friends, individualism is becoming more emphasized, and ‘third spaces’ that are conducive to community life, such as libraries and parks, are closing. It may be easier to pay for help than to ask for it.
Before giving birth, I read a book that gave advice that focused on both mother and baby, not the village. I go to baby groups and appreciate the connection, but all of us there are exhausted.
My husband loves spending time with our daughter, but he does most of the paid work, so my daughter and I spend most of our time together. I’m working on remembering my shapes and trying to write on the edges, but I need some help. I need help and am looking for my own village.
I was faced with the need for a village. Because although I have worked with communities and represented them internationally, through charities, locally and through politics, I had never really thought about it in depth. immersed Single. I have turned down too many invitations to belong due to moving, neglect, or fear.
Community is inevitably challenging, but it is also a gift. Motherhood asks me to receive that gift and step into the village, the literal village, and the larger metaphorical village, rather than watching from the edge.
recognize
It requires me to cross from independence to interdependence, to a new way of being. I want my daughter to know who her neighbors are and how she can love them and be loved by them, even if they are completely different from hers. I want to know this myself.
Here’s a clue to love. Our neighbors help us with things without us even asking. After I gave birth, my church family brought me a meal. There is a youth club run by weary volunteers who gives the kids a place to belong on Friday nights.
Love is everywhere and generous. The hedgerows are full of blackberries, the blackberries are turned into jam, the jam is sold to raise money for the food bank, and the food bank (surprisingly) feeds the farmers who look after the hedgerows. A life of eternal giving and receiving and giving and receiving.
It’s love that seems unremarkable, mud-stained, and ordinary. It is patient, special, place-based, and demands that I be the same. Choosing to reach and stay in relationship with the ground beneath my feet.
The love needed to create a village is here. What is lacking is the social and practical infrastructure to support this, and the recognition that if the village becomes like this, the children, mothers, and all of us will wither away. Spaces for building communal living are shrinking, policies and funding to support care and community are being cut and the cost of living is rising.
Normal
I have friends spread out both geographically and online. These relationships are an important part of my wider ‘village’ of support, but I still feel that the restoration of place-based communities is essential. I have especially seen its power in work across Africa. As author and farmer Wendell Berry said, it is “a commonwealth: places, resources, economy. It responds to the practical as well as social and spiritual needs of our members.”
The village rebels against messages that praise Western individualism and tell us that we can do everything alone. After working with the community for 20 years, motherhood made me realize that I couldn’t do it, and that the community was divided, making me realize what we were collectively losing. Now I want to understand and reclaim the ecosystem of care in which we were all once rooted.
My daughter and I are standing outside. The breeze passes through the village, through other lives, and now embraces us as well. I saw dark clouds approaching over Dartmoor, and was struck by the boundary between the clear sky and the approaching storm, between light and dark, between past and future.
We return to the intimacy of the crib and think about how ordinary this love, this motherhood, can seem. But the word ‘secular’, I learned, has Latin roots. Mundanus – ‘Belonging to the world’ – and this is what motherhood asks me to change, what it asks us to restore: community, interdependence, belonging somewhere in this cruel and beautiful world.
This author
Elizabeth Wainwright Writer, coach, hill guide And mother. Her background is in international development and regional politics. This article originally appeared in: resurrection and ecologist magazine.
