You Don't Find Your Village, You Build It | Ep. 151

So the first thing that I wanna say about building your village and creating your village and blah blah blah is, I, like, I want you to hear this before you hear me say anything else.

If motherhood feels lonely and isolating to you, I want you to know that you are not doing it wrong.

But it feels hard because it is hard.

Like, we were never, ever meant to do this alone.

Think about it.

For basically all of human history, women raised their babies completely surrounded by other women in community, their moms, their sisters, their aunts, the neighbors, the older women who'd already done it and could say, "Oh yeah, that's normal.

Let me hold her so you can sleep." You know, the, the very, like, actual primal village feel.

Or even if we, if you live outside the States, then maybe it's very normal in your culture, in your country to live multi-generali- generationally.

How do [laughs] I say that word? Whereas in the States, that is not the case at all.

So just know that, like, you were never the only adult in charge of a tiny human for 12 hours straight with no one to hand them to.

This is a brand-new concept, because never before in history has motherhood been this isolating.

We are kind of the, one of the first generations running this experiment of doing it mostly alone in our own separate houses, and then wondering why we feel like we're losing it.

[laughs] So that loneliness you feel is not personal failing.

Just want you to know that.

[laughs] It is your mind, and your body even, going like, "Hey, this was supposed to come with people." So just a little small reminder and a note of encouragement first, it's not just you, and it's not because you're bad at this.

You're doing a job that was designed for a whole group by yourself.

Of course it's heavy.

Now that we got that out of the way, I wanna talk about before building a village, I want to redefine what a village even is.

I think we have to fix this picture in our head because I think the picture is half the problem, truly.

Like, when we hear village, I think a lot of us imagine this picture-perfect Instagram fantasy, like six best friends dressed super cute raising their kids together, and someone always has a casserole, and there's random play dates on Tuesdays at 3:00 in the afternoon, and no one's ever lonely, and everybody just shows up for each other, and it's like this beautiful image.

And for almost all of us, it is just not real.

So then when we look at our actual life, which is like a group chat we forgot to answer or a neighbor that we wave at when we cross paths, and we go, "Well, I guess I don't have a village," and we just give up before we even start.

So here's how I want you to think about it instead.

Your village is people who know what's going on in your life and would show up if you need them.

So before we go one step further, hear me out.