Parenting in an atomised society

times of illness & needs we can't meet alone

“A household shouldn’t have to fall apart every time one of its members is ill. It should be held together by its community. Parents shouldn’t have to keep giving alone, at the times when they’ve got so little left. Someone needs to care for the ones who care.”

There is nothing wrong with motherhood. Least of all with stay-at-home motherhood. But there is something deeply wrong with motherhood in our thoroughly atomised modernity. Motherhood without the support structures that have scaffolded it throughout most of history. Motherhood which is not thoroughly integrated into extended family networks, locality and community. Motherhood which is bent and squeezed to fit into a rigid and disjointed order of “work and life,” rather than it being the central nexus, the heart, the hearth from which everything else flows, unfolds, and to which it all circles back…