need a village
The spouse is in the hospital ER waiting for someone to cut out his appendix and I’m here at home.
We agreed that it would be better not to have Spice sitting around all night in a germy hospital, but being here alone while he’s there in pain is soooo hard. I just got off the phone with him and at least the pain is wearing off under the morphine.
I lay here in bed, next to a sleeping Spice, wondering who I could call to watch her overnight so I could go to the hospital. My sister and I are no longer talking. My mother lives 300 miles away. There’s a close family friend I trust, but she’s retired and about 30 miles away; I wouldn’t want to wake her up in the middle of the night to make her drive so far. And I can’t think of anyone else. All our other friends ate either too far away, ones we really aren’t “close” to, or not the baby-watching type.
As always, I wonder what people did in the past for this sort of thing, and I’m reminded that we only stopped living in villages a couple of hundred years ago. Never before have parents been expected to raise a child alone, just two adults. Children have been raised by villages, passed along to grandparents, aunts and uncles, even older children for babysitting. Even my mother was raised by her grandmother and aunt, alongside her parents, and in turn she raised her younger brothers and sisters as well as her cousins. This whole nuclear family thing was a bad, bad idea.
I should really try and sleep since Spice and I will be headed down there in a few hours. I just wanted to say that it really does take a village to raise a child. From PPD to ADHD, it’s becoming clear what happens when the village no longer exists.
