Did We Bring This on Ourselves?
On a self-inflicted isolation and other parenting hypocrisies.
I often feel stranded, alone in the house with the children whilst my partner is at work. Our little family lives miles away from friends, grandparents, uncles or aunts. Our village, the people we trust near by, is limited to a couple of local friends and paid childcare. It is on the toughest days that I am acutely aware that we are on our own here, yet it was a decision we made and we are sticking to.
My partner and I both came to London from our home towns for work, leaving family behind; we did this to ourselves and we have no intention of leaving. There are many reasons why we can’t and won’t move back to where our families live - the greatest reason being that there aren’t many design jobs there, another is affordability. The reason we left those places in the first instance still applies some ten-fifteen years later and whilst you may argue we could work from home, I am not willing to bet my house on the permanence of remote working in such a fickle industry.
As prospective new parents, when we chose where we would settle down, it did feel a little bit like we were sticking pins in a map. We didn’t know the area well. We had barely passed through it on the train but we knew it could work, and it does. We were excited to raise our children here. What we didn’t know then was that we might need some help.
I complain about our lack of village, but by moving away from our families we have knowingly cut off the most vital part. Families are the part of the village who should show unconditional support, where friends might come and go, it is family who are the permanent fixture and the nearest grandparents live 100 miles away.
This isn’t helpful when the system is set up with the assumption, it seems, that grandparents will pick up the shortfall of childcare. It is Nannies and Granddads you see at the school gates, or taking the toddlers to the baby group around their limited funded childcare hours, it is Nana and Pops taking the children to the park in the school holidays, or home for dinner after school.
I complain a lot about the government’s limited funding for childcare but you could argue that we are lucky to have anything at all, and we are. I would be pulling my hair out completely if I didn’t have just one day where these two terrors were in someone else’s care, but really when you rely on solely paid childcare, it will never be enough.
Formal childcare has many rules and implications that informal childcare does not need to abide to. They don’t work bank holidays or weekends for a start, opening times are often shorter than working hours, especially if you factor in a commute. They often need months notice for extending/dropping days, which isn’t great if you are freelance, and they won’t take sick children. From my experience, even if they aren’t sick, they can send them home without any good reason.1 Formal childcare can be unreliable, yet you still have to pay them each month.
The first time we really became aware of the limitations of our childcare set up was actually when I was due to give birth to our second son. My brother had offered to take our eldest son, (he lives thirty minutes down the road, by car) but he had caught COVID and my sister, despite leaving Bournemouth earlier than planned because she “had a feeling”, didn’t make it in time and I gave birth alone while my partner was putting our eldest son to bed. The irony, of course, was that we had almost full-time childcare then, but our baby decided to come on a Saturday.
My sister and her daughter stayed with us for almost a week while we found our feet, helping to hold the baby enabling us to get some sleep and get our eldest to nursery on time. Almost immediately after they left, my partner’s parents flew over from Dublin and stayed close by. In those few weeks after giving birth alone, we were surrounded by supportive family.
We had shut ourselves away when we had our first son. We moved to a new place and I guess we didn’t want the bother of family coming to visit, we wanted to do it ourselves, but with a toddler to entertain the second time round, we agreed that we needed all the help we could get, but still, we didn’t really accept much help. I found it hard to leave the baby as he was only a few weeks old, and I still insisted on cooking dinner most of the time.
A piece where
writes about the Ways We Reject the Village really struck a chord with me, as I think I am a little like this. I know I am a hypocrite. I complain yet I don’t like to say yes to help. I like everyone to think “I got this” despite broadcasting to the world online that I really do not have this. Asking for help can feel like a failure and accepting it can feel like you are admitting failure. It feels like you can’t win, and yet without accepting help am I just being a martyr? Who is going to want to offer help again if I keep saying no? Has my attitude contributed to our isolation?Are we committed to the village? Or are we more committed to our own insecurities and block something beautiful from happening?
Are we committed to the village or are we more committed to doing it alone so that we feel capable, and then martyring ourselves later for it?
Are we committed to the village or are we avoiding being apart of something bigger because it means being seen in our shit?
Kat River, Ways We Reject the Village
In an alternate reality where our parents offered to help regularly with childcare, I wonder if we would accept it.
Some days I think I’d be glad of the relief that regular family support brings. I have already mentioned to my partner how much I am looking forward to going to see his parents (hint, hint, nudge, nudge) in the hope we may get chance to escape from the kids to sit by the river with a cup of coffee again one day. But the reality of our parents looking after our children on a regular basis could be quite different.
I think I would feel guilty or that I was taking advantage. I wouldn’t want to see the help go unpaid, in some way. I complain about expensive childcare, but I don’t think I would accept a freebie.
Informal childcare may not have rules on taking sick children, but I’d probably feel bad about sending a snotty toddler in to the home of their vulnerable, elderly grandparents.
Then there is the difference in parenting styles that span the generations. I am quite precious, I think, with how I am trying to raise my children. I have read all the books and watch all the influencers and I think I know what I should be doing. I may not fulfil this most of the time, as I have talked about before, but I am okay with me not doing it but I would hold up these unrealistic expectations to others. I wouldn’t want them to be inconsistent with what I am trying to achieve in raising my children.
I know for example, my sister and I disagree on whether or not children should finish every morsel of their lunch, or whether it’s okay for them to get back to playing if their body is telling them it’s no longer hungry. I’m not judging her parenting, she has raised a thoughtful and lovely young girl, but her parenting style isn’t always consistent with what I do and I don’t want to confuse my sons.
Would differences like this be enough to prevent me from using my family for childcare? I worry about inconsistencies, yet as the primary carer I have no doubt I am responsible for many of them, but I am only human, so perhaps it is just to be expected. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter when all children really need is love.
After all, we can’t really control how the children are ‘parented’ in formal childcare settings. I know there are laws, and standards they are upheld to, which is great, but it could be that they do something in disagreement with your principles, or the way you parent. For example, I recently discovered that the nursery play Blippi2 of all things, to calm the pre-schoolers down around pick up time. I’ve been told they will otherwise gather by the door and try to escape, which I can imagine being quite stressful. Obviously I let my kids watch Blippi, some days I have YouTube on all day, but I don’t want them doing it - I am paying them good money for him to be there!
I have written before about the modern village and how I believe our support network is made of much more than the people who are physically there. We have forums and online support groups that our parents would not have had, we can message family and friends instantly, and see people on FaceTime calls. In place of family around us we have a sort of community building; wonderful doctors and NHS staff and plenty of volunteer run toddler groups, but what I am missing right now is the unconditional support. The being there at the drop of a hat kind of support, the hugs and the listening ears when you need a vent support.
I remember mentioning to a friend who lives around the corner once that we were clinging on after a week of Norovirus passing through each of us, one by one. She wanted to drop off some clothes for my sons and I advised her it was best to just leave it at the door, COVID style. When I opened the door and picked the bag up from the doorstep there were two post-it notes on the top. For the boys, one said - and another, stuck to the label of a Galaxy chocolate bar said, For You x. I cried.
Perhaps I do have more support than I realise, and that I need to be better at asking for it and not finding silly reasons not to accept it when it is offered. Our families may be far away but they offer support in different ways and anyway, there is still Christmas to look forward to.*
*hopefully.
If the post resonated with you, please join me in the comments. I’d love to hear your stories.
Well, they shouldn’t be sending them home willy nilly, but I have had a few suspect pick ups that really I could have done without including a disruption to the water supply (Thanks, Thames Water) and a tiny pin prick rash that was suspected to be chicken pox. (It was not.)
For those of you lucky enough to not be acquainted with Blippi, I beg you if you have a child who is even mildly interested in vehicles, trucks, diggers, ice-cream vans - DO NOT SEARCH FOR IT. You can never go back.
I can really relate to this post Kylie-Ann, thanks for putting into words a lot of my thoughts around this. The thing I do like about not having family near is, I don't feel indebted or like I owe someone something because they've looked after my kids. Or being told how to parent my own kids. My kids were in private nursery when they were little and I was generally happy with that. My eldest has severe allergies so it's also a trust thing, I don't trust anyone apart from myself and my husband to look after her. I think it's also something to be proud of as well, bringing up the kids by yourself on your own terms. That's not me saying it's not hard, because it is, and it does put huge pressure on us as mums ❤️.
Our village was close by when my two were younger, one set of grandparents a 20 minute drive, the other 10. And yet still we did it broadly ‘alone’ with highly expensive childcare for work days. We’d only started to lean on our Dads one day a week each for a school pick up, feed and turn around into sports kit and ready for another ‘car share’ parent to pick up for sport.....then came the pandemic. My Dad talks so much about missing that one day (1.5 hours) with them. We see loads of our friends in the years since (we were the first to have children) have their kids go to grandparents every.single.weekend. Should we have leaned on them more, absolutely, could we have, yes. But did a huge part of me feel, our kids, our responsibility? Also yes, even though it sometimes broke us and envy was high. And now as a parent of two teens, I feel a huge void where a village could be. I’ve felt less alone than when they were tiny.