needing a village.

Thanks to Hillary Clinton, the Igbo proverb “It takes a village to raise a child,” is now almost a cliché in American society. A cliché we choose to ignore as we relocate our families, hide behind social media, and live stressful, antisocial lives (despite all the social media). And yet, it does–take a village. Not just to raise children, but to support their mothers, to praise their fathers, and to keep marriages from failing.

It starts with parents telling their children that no one person can be everything for another–whether in a romantic relationship, a friendship, a marriage, or a parent-child relationship. Children are warned against being too exclusive in their friendships, and later, in their romantic relationships. Parents worry about their children isolating themselves with too particular a group of friends, fear their daughters’ personal goals will be subsumed by their desire to impress their boyfriends, that their sons will eschew sports and good grades for female graces.

There is a reason why the traditional family structure has two parents, why we name godparents for our children, why aunts and uncles and cousins and family friends are important. It takes a lot to raise kids, to help them make positive choices, and to relieve parents of these responsibilities from time to time. Parents also need help making positive choices, need perspective when their kids do things that surprise them, and need support in order to balance the needs of their children with their own needs.

So when my marriage began to fall apart, it should not have been a surprise when my parents, aunts, uncles, godparents and anyone else who’d known me all my life started to step in and share their opinions with me.

And while I wanted to listen to my mother’s advice that I should not preference the words of my friends over the insight of my family, and appreciated my uncle’s frankness in sharing the struggles he and my aunt had throughout the years, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the insight of the previous generations had become obsolete in the modern world. Although they had faced their own financial, familial, and romantic challenges, to be sure, what did they know about navigating the challenges of the two-income family? About finding space for both individuals to pursue their dreams? About supporting each other, themselves, and their children at the same time? And, since we lived on our own, a full day’s drive away from the rest of our family, how could they counsel us when they’d always had parents or aunts or cousins at the ready to relieve them of their children for an hour or afternoon or weekend? How could they understand the complex struggle to maintain a sense of self when trying to be all things to all people all of the time?

In our modern world, individualism seems to have trumped community–for better or for worse. Families no longer live in the same states, much less the same neighborhoods. Siblings who stayed close to home are favored over those who left. Marriages are no longer for convenience, they no longer serve as safety nets for women who want children, and they don’t always provide much financial or other advantages. Although the concept of marrying for love has existed for over a century in America, it has really only been a majority practice since the women’s liberation movement ushered in second-wave feminism in the 1960s. Marriage equality, whether we’re looking at same-sex or heterosexual couples, calls for reinventing the concept of marriage, not upholding the traditional model. 

So I found it difficult to buy into their models of successful marriage when they’d grown up in parallel yet gender-separated worlds: the men orbiting outside the nucleus of the home, busy with work and sports and drinking buddies while the women made sure the whole thing didn’t implode, keeping home, raising children, maintaining family relationships and friendships. In a world where men were defined by their worth and income and women by their children and homes, it might not have been easier but perhaps simpler: because couples had clearly defined roles, maybe there was less to fight over. Men pursued careers and women took care of the children. And although men may have dominated the workforce, women were in charge of their domestic worlds. At least, in my family, the women said what, they said where, and they said when.

While the modern marriage allows for (and even requires) a blurring of gender-specific roles, the gender-biased balance that existed through my parents’ generation has been thrown off-kilter. In many of my friends’ marriages, women work full-time outside the home yet are still responsible for 80-90% of the work of raising children and maintaining a home. In my marriage, my super-human husband went from a somewhat equal partner (before we had kids) to a managing partner (after we had kids) at lightning speed. While I appreciated everything he was willing to do for and with our children and our home, I found myself increasingly marginalized in my own family.

My husband’s vast stores of energy made it feel like competition was more important than compassion. Our fights seemed to always be about which of us spent more time with the kids, made more money, did more things “for the family.” We fought about who did more around the house, from laundry to cooking to yard work. We argued over who spent more money and why we couldn’t ever save any. We were making an upper middle class living, but struggling to maintain a lower middle class lifestyle. Even so, pursuing graduate school, career advancement opportunities, extra income–these were all deemed a drain on “family time.” In my husband’s eyes, we both had to be “all in,” all the time.