Julie Jay: What if parents don’t have that village to help rear children?
Way back when, in the year 12,000 BCE, neanderthals raised their children in such a way that the wider clan consisted of multiple surrogate parents, and there were zero arguments around screen time. Prehistoric-age parenting was hardly a walk in the park — I’m thinking specifically of short lifespans and big animals trying to eat you — but at least they roamed in packs. As a result, unlike parents today, no mother or father was ever left to fend for themselves.
At the playground last week, I bumped into an old teacher friend. She told me about her nightmare week when she received a call to come collect her son from his primary school because he was unwell.
“Julie, I just wanted to cry because my first thought was: I have no one to help me,” she said, referring to the fact theyhad recently moved to the area and had not yet built up the core group of ride-or-dies essential to parenting survival.
“What did you do?” I asked, keeping one eye on this former colleague while keeping another eye on my eldest, who had already attempted to infiltrate at least one stranger’s family picnic upon spotting some cheese strings.
“Well, thankfully, my principal is a parent of young kids herself, and she took my classes for the afternoon while I went to pick him up,” she answered, retying her daughter’s shoelace. (Can we momentarily give thanks to the gods of Velcro here for saving us hours of tying time.)
“But it really got me thinking about the backup plan, so I told Dave (her husband’s real name) we need to start making parent friends that I could call in another emergency,” she continued.
“Like, what if next time I was in the middle of supervising a Leaving Cert exam or getting my roots done? There has to be a plan B.”
Before anyone judges us about our roots, please know that as mammies we can sacrifice many things — our once impossibly high bottom, going to the toilet on our own, having hobbies — but you can’t expect us to give up on the roots. This is primary medical care.
When it comes to my personal village, I am lucky in that I have an incredible childminder and not one but two aunties I can call upon in case of emergency. On top of this, I have friends and husbands of friends, like the husband who kindly minded the kids for 90 minutes while I worked the door at our local comedy club last Thursday, as I made sure everything was in place for up-and-coming act Tommy Tiernan. He’s from Meath but don’t let that fool you — he’s actually very funny.
I had the kids picked up before 9pm, and while driving home, I allowed myself a moment to appreciate how necessary friends are when you become parents, especially friends with kids who take little to no notice of throwing one or two more into the mix. (On that point, the friends you really need to keep close, in my limited experience, are the ones with three or more children, as they are very much of the ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ mindset when it comes to last-minute childcare requests.)
This week, I had to turn down a work opportunity because I couldn’t find someone to take the boys. So, I have started thinking about how I could pivot a little, professionally speaking, to allow for more flexibility regarding work and kids.
I explained my newfound perspective to a colleague in comedy who is also a mammy, and I can’t tell you the relief I felt when she told me that she had the exact same experience when her children were babies. It is only now that her kids are older that she is in a position to say yes to things.
“When they’re small, you don’t want to leave them, and you’re certainly not leaving them with just anyone,” she said. And having raised her kids minus family support due to geographical distance, I felt she was speaking to me on the level.
“No matter if you lived with two sprightly grannies in the attic or had an au pair in the basement, something has to give when they’re babies,” she said. I couldn’t help but agree, despite her analogy being ridiculous (sure as if you’d put the grannies in the attic and have them negotiating the staighre on the daily, and as for the au pair in the basement, I think this friend of mine was confusing our modest home with that of ).
But the good news is, 'villages' don’t have to be borne of genetics — they can be created. Striking up a conversation with a fellow parent in a playground, joining a baby yoga group, even unmuting and finally engaging with parents in the dreaded school WhatsApp group — all of these things can ignite a friendship and be the first step towards building a support network for when you are in childcare crisis or need reassurance from sympathetic peers that you’re not hurtling towards complete parenting failure at speed.
Of course, on days when you have no one and you have to cancel work or — perish the thought — get your roots done, it can be easy to envy our prehistoric ancestors, who were never short of a babysitter when they were off hunting and gathering or dusting the cave. But remember, they also followed a paleo diet, so needless to say, they had their own problems. As the old saying goes, faraway caves are not always greener.