No. 62: The Gift of the Village

Sometimes it takes a loss to bring people together, other times a loss reveals who's been with you all along.

I sometimes feel alone in the fact that I haven’t always felt like I had a village. Seven major moves throughout my life so far has meant that my best friends are dotted between Colorado, Nebraska and Arizona and though five of my six siblings are now within a thirty minute drive, that wasn’t always the case.

Plus, maybe most importantly, I’m the third oldest.

Has your birth order shaped your life experience so dominantly the way it has for me? I don’t want to get sidetracked this early in the letter but I genuinely am curious. I find that so much of my placement in my family has forever defined me. I’m sure it was the perfect cocktail of my dad being a public figure and the unique requirements of us as children coupled with the moves and the fact that seven kids is a whole lot of kids. The third-child-ness was imprinted on me forever.

I was in the “big kid” half of the family which meant I was helping train and support the “little kid” portion of the family. When I had a big accomplishment (winning an award, getting a scholarship) or life event (marriage at 21, motherhood at 24) my siblings were still in middle and high school, completely absorbed into their own lives filled with homework and double dates and curfew.

I was always the mature one of my friend group so I was the problem solver, the planner, the prepared. People would marvel at my “thoughtfulness,” though sometimes that just meant being the one to remember snacks and hand sanitizer. I’d spend my birthday money on a spa kit at Barnes and Noble to give my sisters a spa day in my room. I’d make cards and handmade gifts for friends birthdays when I had no money. It would take years for me to learn I felt most known and seen by friends who were “thoughtful” in return.

I moved out of my parents house at eighteen. From eighteen years old, like many, I have been responsible for the things adults are responsible for. Think: coming up with and making or grabbing every meal. Caring for my own space. Tackling what needed to be tackled in the realm of my responsibility. My college experience was split between

+ taking the train from the suburbs to downtown Chicago every day for school
+ sharing an apartment in San Francisco as a student athlete
+ commuting from Virginia back to San Francisco every week for 9 hours of classes and flying home in time to host or attend team Bible Study and then be there for O’s football game.

There was no meal plan, no dorm, no easing into adult life. Rather, someone opened the hatch on the wall of a cargo plane and kicked me out of it. Yes, I called my mom constantly there at the start which is how I learned things like if ground turkey has a smell at all, toss it and bar keepers friend can tackle just about any stain and never let yourself run out of checks and nine times out of ten, the weird thing the baby’s doing is totally fine.

Despite having my own supermom on speed dial, I didn’t feel like I had a village when I became a mother. Lema will turn 9 in a few weeks while most of my friends have just started having children in the past year or so. Many are still childless—some despite their constant efforts and others by choice.

It took almost no time at all to learn the simple fact that there’s a specific way you support a mother once you experience motherhood. You have no concept of the way it exhausts you, consumes you, delights you, or breaks and reshapes you until you yourself have had your body and heart forever marked by carrying and raising that baby or adopting and learning that baby or stepping in to care for that baby.

Before having a child of my own, I thought new moms wanted sweet swaddles and stuffed animals. Surely they wanted “Goodnight Moon” and lots of time with me on the couch snuggling the baby while they slept until they woke up screaming for milk I couldn’t provide. While this is true sometimes, now I know deep in my bones that the thing this new mother wants more than anything in the world is a shower and a nap and probably a gift card to Amazon.

I don’t say this to whine or complain, I hope you hear me, because I have the greatest friends and family in the world. I just know this is a safe space and feel compelled to be as honest as honest gets:

When I had my babies, I mostly felt alone.
Because I was alone.