Where Did The Village Go?

Reflections on motherhood, memory, and the communities that once raised our children

What’s the best way to parent? What’s the best way to mother? There are probably a thousand different answers to that question. But since motherhood is a big deal to me—having birthed my first child at forty-six and choosing to work in the profession of women’s health—I have spent a great deal of time weighing it and considering it.

There is no one right way to parent. My partner bought books, and to some degree I felt as though my childhood had prepared me for some things as the second oldest sibling in a spree of seven. But some things I wanted to change completely. Some traumas I was altogether seeking to avoid. There were happy moments I only found out about as an adult that it would now be within my ability to create for my two children.

There is so much I wish someone had given to the little Ruthie at four and five and six who was so serious and so worried about the greater idea of life at large. I pause as I write this thinking she really, really… really could have used someone getting about knee-high, looking into her eyes, grabbing her little hands and saying: It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. You don’t have to do or be anything special. You already are. Audible sigh. Maybe someone did. And she was just too worried to notice. I am vaguely aware of attempts over time that people, in their own foreign ways, may have tried to tell me this as I grew up. But I was never able to hear it. Until about forty-eight. Yes. Forty-eight.

Today I’m forty-nine—nearly half a century walking on this planet—and as it turns out, I am now the one who meets Ruthie. My inner five-year-old who is still cautious, careful, and worried. The part of me that once tried to hold everything together. Today I try to show up for her, and for my kids, the way that I needed someone to show up for me. And it wasn’t that people were never present. But sometimes, as happens to many of us, people who tried to step in got missed. Or their messages got missed. There was a point where if I wasn’t shying away from attention, I was firmly in the camp of childhood non-believers. To be so closed to possibility under the age of ten leaves me wanting to hug that little girl all the more tightly. And so I know there is still work to be done on myself in whatever years remain of this next half-century.

But what about motherhood? What is the best way to be a mother? As I look around our four-member family now, wondering where the time has gone, I am every day becoming a new Ruth. Responsibilities hang heavier. Fear about what could happen to my son as he grows older with my skin color has pushed itself to the forefront of my thoughts—fear about how he will be treated, what he will need to be told, and what could happen even if he does everything right. Some would say the early years before six are the easy part, but this part is so crucial to who he will become. My son, still under three, already knows my arms are safe. He knows I will hold him on his way out to dreamland every night. My six-year-old has begun measuring waiting time by Molly of Denali episodes, carefully calculating how many will fit into whatever window she has been asked to wait. This is such a tender and fleeting time, and yet the days remain long. I had envisioned a very different motherhood for myself, not the least of which was starting it earlier. But the stars came together when they were meant to, and here I am—the tired, perhaps exhausted, but deeply grateful mother of two children who are now my greatest teachers, next to my spouse.

Have you ever wondered about the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child?” Where did that come from? It didn’t begin with Hillary Clinton’s book in the nineties. The phrase is widely believed to come from African culture—possibly Nigerian—which fits right in with my own family history on my father’s side. When we were growing up, cousins lived with us and attended school with us. My grandfather’s family lived in compounds where three or four houses gathered around a central space. When sons and daughters partnered and had children, they didn’t always move away. Some stayed. Some left. But there wasn’t great distance between them. Communities grew alongside the bloodlines, and family dynamics—beautiful, complicated, messy—grew too. Younger cousins were watched by older cousins, who were watched by aunts and uncles. Grandparents were held with a reverence that felt different from the relationship I experienced with my white grandparents, though they too were present in my life.

Even though I didn’t grow up in that village with my grandparents, many of us were carrying babies on our hips by the time we were eight or nine. In girls especially, the ability to care for and protect younger ones was noticed and reinforced with positivity. Boys had different expectations placed on them, but a loving older brother or cousin was still valued. There were always people available—someone to watch, someone to comfort, someone to pull you out of trouble, someone to intervene before things escalated, someone to discipline, someone to separate, someone to manage. Not every method used felt right to me, even as a child, but I was mostly a bystander in that system.

My own motherhood looks very different. My spouse and I are the primary caregivers when our children are not in school. What a different world this is compared to my cousins in Cameroon. And different even from my own upbringing where caretakers—though not family—were part of daily life. We do not have genetic family nearby, but we have built something like a chosen family: friends we lean on, people we confer with, people we enjoy, people who show up.

And still I wonder. Would my children be better off growing up in a village made up of my parents, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, my aunts and uncles? Being from two different cultures, the answer to that is, at the very least, complicated. Something to ponder, I tell Ruthie. Something to consider. Just as my six-year-old peeks in again and asks how many Molly of Denali episodes might have passed already. Gratitude keeps my engines running, and I am grateful for that question, because one day there will be much harder ones.

“Two,” I say. “And one more to go.”

And so I leave this here—