The community cave

Sometimes I imagine I’m in a cave, surrounded by aunties and uncles and grandparents, grey-haired and wise. Whenever a baby cries, he or she is passed around the group, hushed or held. When my baby cries, people are only too happy to hold him.

Having a baby has made me yearn for times like these, cave people times, when a community of people would help out parents and be substitute parents themselves. Whenever I talk to friends about the hard things about parenting, this always comes up. We all want a community. But so much of modernity is about individualism, that we’ve pushed ourselves away from collective living. We live in different cities or neighbourhoods to our families, and they have their own lives, and our friends have their own kids too. Imagine if we still had a collective way of living, many families in one house or one street, many hands to help. Parents could have more time to themselves. The rates of postnatal depression might be lower and we might be better at asking for help.

When Ruben was three months old, we stayed with a couple and their baby for a weekend. Not much was different; we were still breastfeeding, I was pumping milk, we washed nappies and clothes. But there was something so comforting about doing these tasks with our friends, alongside them. We talked not just for a brief couple of hours over coffee, but for a whole weekend, sharing little bits of advice and getting advice back. We talked about the cave and the village; how it would be easier.

I’m going back to work next week. One of the best things I did while on parental leave was to find a group of people to chat to and connect with, over babies. It took a couple of goes to find the right group. I went along to one that seemed to have all the right ingredients for a mums and babies group, like opportunities to play and sing, topics to discuss, but I just felt lonely afterwards. The emphasis seemed to be on the babies, with hardly any time for informal chats about the realities of parenting, those conversations that meander along and morph into something else. One day, instead of going to the group, I went to the local library and ate my lunch by the window while I fed Ruben. I got out a couple of books.

That was when I figured out what was missing: a focus on myself, other mothers/parents, and a chance to have a real talk. I didn’t want parenting videos or fingerpainting. I wanted connection and to talk about the highs and lows of parenthood, moan about sleep deprivation, get sympathy, give sympathy.

The new friends I’ve made through meeting other mothers and strengthening my existing friendships with mums, some on parental leave at the same time, some not – have really kept me going. So too have my friends without kids who’ve babysat and sat through uninteresting rants about the types of nappies that work best and the length of Ruben’s naps. Same with the family members who’ve been on the other end of the phone, or there in person. When I look back on these nine months and the incredible highs and lows of that time, I’ll remember the conversations I had with my community. And I’ll still wish that as a society we had better structures for parents, and that more of our structures held parents up and didn’t expect just mothers and fathers to do absolutely everything all the time. 

Now I’m passing on the torch to my husband who is taking three months of parental leave. I hope he’ll find people in his community too – though we suspect Dad groups are harder to come by, so if you know of any, let us know!