Thinking of having kids? Have this talk first.
Shifting the culture before it feels "too late".
When I was pregnant with our first child, no one spoke about “the village” or need for community and support until I was well into my third trimester.
The first time I heard mention of this was at a Mother’s Blessing my mama put together and facilitated in my honor. As the women in my life shared around the circle their blessings for the chapter ahead, my mom reminded them: “Continue to check in with Emily and Charlie. They will need your help, on the other side.”
This sentiment stayed with me like many others from my mother: words that feel like a warning, a premonition; the wisdom of a woman who had walked the path before me.
A few weeks later, the topic of postpartum care came up in one of our prenatal appointments with our midwifery team. I had recently purchased The First Forty Days and The Fourth Trimester, staying on brand with my desire to learn and read everything before this baby arrived. These conversations and resources prompted us to pay for a postpartum doula, and think twice about whether we’d want family to stay with us after birth (originally, our plan was to “keep the nest between the three of us”.)
Despite these whispers of what was to come, I hadn’t yet understood on that deep, core level. My world was about to get rocked.
Like so many other parents, we were initiated into parenting with some support but not the full spectrum of what was needed.
We knew we needed to prioritize “healthy, responsive attachment” with our newborn.
But we didn’t understand that this attachment needed to come from an entire village.
Here’s the shitty thing:
We’re putting new parents in the most unfavorable of conditions: learning about the need for “the village” while they are already drowning in the gaping hole of its lack.
Like many parents before me, I found myself riding the waves of newborn life, juggling the transitions with my husband, piecing together collective care in those early weeks, making the requests for family to come back for another visit so we could have help for just a little bit longer.
Like many parents before me, I found myself alone, waiting for my partner to get off his work call so he could come back and hold the baby, resentful and silencing myself because shouldn’t I be loving this?, and unsure how to meet my needs without “sending my child to daycare” (a solution that was never a solution, for us).
I didn’t want transactional care with my child.
I wanted a village to raise her, with us. A village filled with trusted relationships, familial, and safe. I wanted to be surrounded by other people who could care for us as we cared for our daughter, well beyond those first 40 days.
Three years later and I’m still piecing together a vision of the kind of village I want to hold us — the kind of community I want to be in reciprocal relationship with — and then I think:
Imagine if I had started this journey BEFORE having these kids?
I ask this not from a place of regret, or the kind of “what-if” that diminishes the present moment. It’s more of an inquiry for our greater collective body; an inquiry for the parents that are still deciding if they want to be parents.
This inquiry is for all of you wondering: should I/we have a baby?
I’d love to see a world where, pre-conception, we begin asking ourselves:
What kind of attachment village do I want to raise this child?
That’s what we need, ultimately. Not just attuned and responsive mothers. Not just attuned and present fathers. We need a whole community of care to welcome this child into the world, to hold them, respond to them, feed them, rock them, carry them, play with them, and tend to their needs, as newborns, as toddlers, as young children, as adolescents, and beyond.
The sad reality is — many of us have lost ties with this way of being. We were conditioned, from an early age, to be independent; to forge our own paths at the expense of the bonds we could build with a community we belong to.
And yet — the communal way of living is ancestral. There is a part of us that knows it in our bones. While the path of reclaiming, reorienting, to a “village way of life” may be lifelong, it can also be deeply nourishing… and familiar.
At least, that is my hope, and my belief. The path of “revillaging”, of connecting to our inner villager and becoming the village again can actually be in itself a nourishing path.
We don’t need to wait for an “unsupported initiation” into parenting to wake us up to our need for the village.
We can start having these conversations now; sharing wisdom across ages and stages of life.
We can tell stories of possibility, connecting to our own creativity, and witness the examples of village life emerging again.
We can be honest with our friends who are considering the path of parenting, and we can ask for them to show up as part of our village now to see, more intimately, what parenting life would entail.
I believe that we can do this. It begins with the commitment to try — to play, to practice, and to devote ourselves to the revillaging path, together.
If you are looking for a free but valuable resource to guide you through some of the foundations of “village-making”, check out The Revillaging Playbook. Filled with prompts, practices, and stories, this guide is both inspirational and practical, helping to bridge some of the gaps in understanding what makes a village come to be.