Reply to What is “a village”?

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[quote=Anonymous]For some people it's family -- grandparents and siblings. When I was a kid, my grandparents didn't help out my parents, and because of their ages they didn't get a lot of help from siblings either. Though they did get some, especially when their kids were first born.

However, we lived in a neighborhood with lots of families and there was a lot of community there. In summer all the kids played outside together and all the SAHMs (it was mostly SAHMs) kept an eye out for one another's kids. I remember my mom was also a member of the Women's Center in our town and I recall going to events there where all the kids just played together, sometimes with supervision from someone's teenage daughter or sometimes the moms took turns, and it offered the women a chance to talk and get a break, and they also did a bunch of charity and outreach to help women in town who were food insecure or needed housing. I recall making meals with them at a halfway house for women and kids coming out of DV situations, and doing an annual coat drive for families as well. Very community oriented.

I've sought to create that for myself as a mom and really struggled. There was some when I was on maternity leave, but then people go back to work and it's hard to maintain that mutual support. I was on a group thread with my new moms group but it fizzled after a few years and now I'm only in touch with two of the moms from that group and neither of them live in the neighborhood anymore (one not in the area at all actually). I've tried reaching out to other moms at my work but people aren't interested in that kind of support group it seems. I actually do volunteer work with a local organization that works with DV survivors, and while the organization is kid-friendly and obviously invested in families and in moms specifically, it hasn't resulted in anything I would call a village for me -- it is mostly another obligation and tax on my time (a very worthy one, granted, I love the work I do there) and not a source of support. It's really different than the time I spent in that Women's Center growing up.

So for me, the idea that "the village" women used to have has evaporated feels very real. Another thing that kind of shocks me is how competitive women can be with each other, including (perhaps especially) around mothering, and I think it gets in the way of being more supportive of each other. I don't really get why that would be given the great strides women have made in so many areas. I think my mom had a much easier time finding supportive mom friends than I have had. I'd do anything for that Women's Center vibe I remember from my childhood.[/quote]

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