One of the painful realizations of new parenthood is that having friends is not the same thing as having a “village.” What constitutes a village anyway? I can’t say exactly, but to quote the late Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.”

My husband and I didn’t have a village when we became parents. We did not live close to our families. It had been only a little over a year since we’d moved to a new city, so we didn’t have many friends, either. Of the few friends we did have, a couple had babies too, and those friendships kept me afloat during many an exhausted winter morning. But it wasn’t a village. There wasn’t much we could do for one another beyond keeping each other company. We certainly weren’t babysitting one another’s kids , and we could barely scrape

See Full Page