So you want to be involved in radical communities but you have young kids

Could you start by being radically in community?

I’ve never wanted to write a “how to” piece. Even as a midwife, I’m not prescriptive at all; I think it’s my job to present information and experience, and wholeheartedly accept and support my clients’ ability to parse it, not tell people what to do.

But this is, kind of, a little, a “how to” piece.

As someone who has done a good deal of organizing with children — someone who has occupied Wall Street with a three year old and a 6 month old, who has hosted my share of phone banking events for families, who has driven children all over Brooklyn to fill community fridges and scrambled for the childcare for either me or my husband to engage in direct action and attended too many protests to count with now 4 kids in tow, I get asked “how do you do it?” a lot. People want to know how I find the time, the energy. They want to know how I find groups to engage in, and what kind of childcare I have, how I manage meetings that coincide with dinnertime. They want to know what snacks I pack for a protest and how I stay patient in the face of children whining about their feet or their boredom. They want to know how I stay “safe” or cope with anxiety about police violence. At root, all of these questions are, I think, evidence of how much parents want to be in the world, how much they believe it is a place worth fighting for. They are are testament to the way in which caregiving creates in us a drive to build a world that gives more care.

Because, after all, becoming a parent transforms us, and with it our relationship with the world. With children serving as, in Jennifer Silva and Allison Pugh’s evocative phrase, “witness and tether,” we see it, inhabit it, interact with it, and invest in it differently Relationships and priorities may change. Perspectives may shift. Empathy and sensitivity almost certainly grow, at least on a neurological level. We experience time in a wholly new way. We live in a set of different possibilities, many of them contradictory. And one of the many contradictions parents experience is exactly this deeper investment in making the world a better place while simultaneously having a material reality that leaves Doing The Work required of such better world-building completely out of reach. Long work hours, limited childcare, and household responsibilities make finding time for organizing meetings, or even the right organizing meetings to go to, let alone participating in direct action that might get you arrested, feel virtually impossible for the average parent.

This post is not, in fact, an answer to any of the many questions I get about organizing and protesting and participating in direct action while being a parent. Though, perhaps someday, I’ll write that post, too.

But while I won’t go so far as to make any kind of grand statements about the best use of one’s time and energy as a parent of young kids, I will say that for most parents with young kids, organizing with the kind of consistency and commitment that can lead to any sort of tangible “win” feels virtually impossible because it is, in fact, virtually impossible. With rare exceptions of groups that have thoughtfully centered parents as organizers, it’s simply out of reach for the average parent unless their life has been very intentionally (and usually non traditionally) structured to allow for it (or who are perhaps, independently wealthy and have unlimited resources for childcare and paid help for household tasks).

More so that bringing your kids to the occasional protest or attending an organizing meeting sporadically as your childcare situation allows, I dare say it’s potentially more valuable, at this stage of life in particular, to commit oneself to the practice building deep, intertwined community to begin with — and the unlearning required to do it. Not only is this a kind of radical work that is possible with young children in tow, it is work that is deeply meaningful and changemaking because it forces us to confront and disrupt the colonial capitalist paradigms we have internalized on a tangible, material level. It is the kind of work that will get us ready for the world to come, the world we or our children or our children’s children will have to build on the remains of the unsustainable empires that now teeter on the verge of collapse, because in the end it is the only world that can be. You know the phrase, “we keep us safe?” This is the work that allows that to be more than a slogan. Because all the organizing in the world is for naught if at the end of the day we don’t actually know how to care for each other.

To say it in another way, learning how to radically be in community is in and of itself a potent political act in an industrialized, capitalist culture that has eroded collectivism and connection in favor of individualism and isolation, that has siloed us into “nuclear” families who are responsible only to ourselves. Learning to be responsible to and for others not in our immediate families is something that has been colonized out of too many people. Finding our way back to interconnection is part of how we heal.

Art by Chi Nwosu

I’ve had a lot of trepidation about writing a post like this, for a long time, despite knowing there is a need for it, so before I start, I want to make clear some things I am and some things I am not. I am, first and foremost, no expert in building radical community. I am not someone who has founded or even ever lived in an intentional community. I am not someone who has ever founded, or led, any kind of community organization. I am not someone who has never ghosted on a friend or failed to show up when I should have. While the intergenerational immigrant household (of 30+ people!) that I grew up in could be called a lot of things, radical or progressive is not one of them. I now live a standard nuclear family structure (though in extremely close proximity — as in, I can see my sister’s bedroom window from where I type this in my own bedroom — to much of my extended family). I have failed, on more occasions than I’d like to admit, to bring the restorative justice framework I intellectually know I ought to to conflicts in the communities I have built or participated in. I have been unreliable. I have not always prioritized community care above my own introverted tendencies.

On the other hand, I am: someone who has 17 years of being a parent in my life experience. Someone for whom building a thriving community was a necessity as a parent because I made the choice to unschool my children. Someone who became enamored by anarchism at a young age and brought some of that political ethos to her parenting. Someone who was in fact raised in an immigrant intergenerational household and for whom interconnection — for all its discomforts and inequities and unhealed intergenerational violences — became embedded in her DNA (not to mention for whom, because she grew up with her feet on two continents, never internalized certain colonial capital assumptions). Someone who has, as a midwife, held the hands of hundreds if not thousands of people as they become parents, and who is intimately acquainted with the loneliness, isolation, and longing inherent in that transition in the culture we find ourselves. Someone who loves. Hard. Someone who, even still, is always trying to be better, to love more and harder, to build stronger community, to develop more connections, to bring more people together.

With those caveats, and with that context out of the way, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned in my 17 years of trying to build community as a parent. Because lord knows 17 years ago I would have loved to read a piece like this so maybe, just maybe, somebody out there will, too.

1. Show up. Persistently. Patiently.

When I got pregnant with Wren at 27 years old, I did not have a single friend who had kids. In fact, most of the people who I were friends with at that stage in my life were nearly a decade away from having kids themselves (those of them who had them at all). We were all living an extended adolescence, caught up in the Very Important Things we were writing as young academics, Very Important Things we discussed over long evenings in dive bars that sometimes ended with us having sex with each other. Not all of my friends were academics; some were artists or worked in film; a few worked tedious administrative day jobs while trying to figure out what they wanted to do when they grew up. But the fact remains that I went pretty much directly from a life where I did things like sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” drunkenly into the voicemail of someone I was sleeping with in the summer to (intentionally! Like, deeply intentionally, though in retrospect I really believe this is more testament to Wren’s insistence she exist than my own good judgment) pregnant with my first child in the winter. Suffice it to say, the friends who were singing along with me on that voicemail were not making the same choice.

What this meant was that I entered parenting without any comrades who could relate to my maternal reality. Which is to say, I had not a single mom friend. Not one.

So I had to find them.

And I did! But I need you to understand that this is not something that happened overnight, or even close to overnight. We’re not even talking months. It took years to get my parenting community to a place where I could even use the term to refer to what I had, in any kind of reliable way. And what it required was a lot of showing up. A lot of being bored. A lot of going back to mom and baby events where I hadn’t clicked with anyone before. A lot of trying to organize meetups and playgroups myself. On more than one occasion, it involved awkwardness or being the only person to show up to the meetups and playgroups I had organized. A lot of acceptance that, at least in the beginning, at least in New York City, a lot of the relationships I would begin to rely on would be less stable than I’d hoped, as people moved out of the city in search of more space of lower cost of living or more proximity to their families. It also, not incidentally, required a lot of being flexible about my baby’s (and then kids, plural) schedules so that I could maintain friendships with the friends who didn’t have kids, because otherwise I would have ended up isolated as fuck while I waited to cultivate relationships with other parents (I personally believe the way in which Western assumptions about what it means to be a “good” parent and give our babies “structure” serve as a tool of isolation, which is to say a tool of capitalism, is woefully under-talked-about, but that’s for another post).

None of this came easily to me. For someone who is extremely friendly and adept at social interaction (hello, female socialization and especially eldest daughter socialization) I am at heart a bit of an introvert. I would have just as soon “naturally” spent the entire day in PJs reading to my baby who, somehow miraculously, not only tolerated this but seemed to love it immediately from birth. I had zero things in common with the people who went to the local new parent meetups in the now-very gentrified neighborhood I had grown up in, people were inevitability whiter, richer, and older than me, and who inevitably centered their conversations on things that at once left me feeling inadequate and also judgmental (see: sleep training). I left a lot of meetups disappointed and lonelier than I walked in.

Sometimes we are lucky, and community just happens. You just show up one day and you find “your people.” You walk into a mom and baby yoga class and fortuitously there’s a few amazing people you connect with right away, and you’re off to the races. But more often, building community takes work. It takes persistence. And it takes ownership. The parenting community that has lasted for me the longest mostly emerged from a weekly homeschool “picnic” I started with another friend. It was probably the third or fourth regular playgroup I’d founded or tried to found.

This leads me to another important lesson I learned in those efforts:

2. You need people more than you need The Exact Perfect Friend.

As a young parent, I had a very specific blueprint in my head for how you became friends with someone. And a big part of that blueprint was THE SPARK. You know, when you meet someone and the conversation becomes vibrant and animated and filled with the recognition of all you have in common and your shared sense of humor and your common politics. You just KNOW this person is going to be important in your life. Sure, you might be friendly with a whole lot of people. You might even end up hanging out super regularly with some of those people you’re friendly with. But those people are part of your group of friends *because* they are connected to someone with whom you had THE SPARK. The people with whom you have THE SPARK are the people you do everything with. You follow, as they say, THE SPARK.

As a new parent, I wanted THE SPARK. I (and I say this in a tongue and cheek way, no shade to my late twenties self) wanted other parents like me: young(ish) and tattooed and wearing American Apparel hoodies, people who used playlists as a love language, people who at least leaned left and who were energetic and idealistic and wrapped their baby BFFs onto their back ready to plant seeds in a garden or march in a protest. I wanted girlies ready to read Barbara Kingsolver and spend an entire summer freezing and canning produce just as an experiment of how local they could eat. I found it, with a handful of people, here or there. Most of them ended up moving out of NYC for one reason or another because, let’s be real, the idealistic tattooed mamas with their BFF wrapped to their back who were down for canning food wanted to live in places where they could grow it. They wanted to live someplace where they could maybe afford to send their kid to a Waldorf school. Who could blame them.

Most of my enduring relationships in my community, though, are people with whom I didn’t initially feel THE SPARK. The relationships developed in a slow burn of sharing a lived reality. They developed because we were all people who committed to showing up. In this, homeschooling was an advantage, because if nothing else all of us were committed to showing up to build community for our kids. We had a reason to invest in each other that was explicit and clear. It didn’t matter if I had THE SPARK with the parents; what I needed was a pack of children for my kids to run around with, because they didn’t have that built in through schooling. My kids didn’t seem to need THE SPARK either; they needed enough kids for a game of “everybody’s it,” or enough people to put on a performance of Hamilton with, or a few kids willing to pretend play an elaborate game involving pirates or Greek myth or dinosaurs for the afternoon.

And honestly, thank all that is holy for that, because it showed me the value of letting relationships develop this way.

I’m not saying you should ignore red flags in a relationship, that you should endure racist or homophobic or otherwise hateful or biased people just to have people in your life. I fucked right off from a preschool playgroup I spent a lot of time, energy, and heart devoting when the teacher we hired started to show bias against the only Black kid in the class and none of my attempts to address this with the other parents worked. What I am saying is that when we as humans lived the way our cells still want us to live, we didn’t have THE SPARK with everyone in our extended kin networks, but we were still able to provide for and care for each other. And maybe it’s worth remembering that.

Art by Violeta Lopez

3. Do not be afraid of spontaneity.

While a lot of my parenting community grew out of the roots of the regular meetups I helped to organize, and a lot of traditional friendship advice insists that scheduling time together shows that you are prioritizing that person, I’ve found that, as a new parent, spontaneity deepens connections and intimacy. There is such an immediacy and unpredictability to life with toddlers and young children that aligns perfectly with spur of the moment plans. How often have you been sitting around a messy house with children who are climbing up the walls, unable to manage any of it, when you could have been letting them run in fresh air and connecting with a fellow parent who was feeling the same way? Reaching out spontaneously not only shows the other person you’re thinking about them, but shows you’re thinking of someone who is safe to show that side of yourself to. It also, when it works out, gives them a pressure valve for whatever day they might have been having.

This goes the other way too: can you challenge yourself to say “yes” to a spontaneous offer to hang when you receive it? You will find it probably goes against most of your instincts; can you push yourself to accept even if it’s not terribly convenient? What can you let go in order to connect? What might not get done, and is that okay?

We already live in a culture where it’s normalized to put something on the calendar and then flake out when it approaches because our capacity is low. (I absolute love this article by Ayesha about our cultural assumption that the solution to low capacity is being alone when really we are nourished by being together). Spontaneity is the antidote to that. It is not an instinctive way for most people to be. Do not expect people to take you up on it all the time, or some people to take you up on it at all. But some will. And those are the people you will likely start to find yourself sharing a deeper sense of camaraderie with, because the people who see you spontaneously are the people who see you at your most messy and least curated or prepared. They will see you as you are, which is someone who is very happy to see them.

4. Feed people, and care for their kids.

It’s simple: if you really want to deepen your community, you have to serve your community. And the material needs that are most parents are most likely to accept acts of service in are food and childcare.

Because we live in an individualistic culture, you may have to offer a lot. You may have to get comfortable with people not accepting your offers. The offers may have to start small, like staying at a playground with a toddler who won’t leave for a while longer so the other parent can go mail their letter before the post office closes, or pick up their dry cleaning, or whatever. You will have to, likely, take initiative but be super intentional and specific rather than vaguely saying “let me know if you need anything” to a friend who has the flu or just had a baby, i.e. “I’m dropping chicken soup on your porch” or “can I take your older child to the park on Tuesday afternoon so you can have some time alone with the new baby?” You will have to listen to your friends to know what their lives are like. You will have to actually take note of the conflicts and pressures they specifically face.

Here’s an example of my own life: a moment that really changed the culture of the homeschooling community that I was in was when one of the partners of a mom attended picnic with her son was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer ended up, thankfully, much less severe than was originally diagnosed, but at the time, there seemed to be a shockingly high probability the situation was dire, and as a result, she was trying to go to most appointments with him. This mom was relatively new to the group, and not someone I knew well at all, an acquaintance of another friend. The truth was, I actually thought her kid, who was at the time de-schooling, was kind of a pain in the ass. But each week she’d show up not only incredibly vulnerable and afraid for the future of her partner, but incredibly frazzled, telling us of all the appointments she and her partner were going to, and how much their child was with the babysitter or bored in waiting rooms as a result. Pretty quickly, a lightbulb went off for me. I asked several of the other parents if they’d be willing to create an “on-call” schedule of when each of us was available to have her son should an appointment or procedure come up. When they said yes, we made the offer to her, and I set up a shared, color-coded google calendar. Each time something got scheduled, she would access the calendar and reach out to the families available on that day. It alleviated so much pressure and guilt for her at a time when she was already at capacity, because she knew her son was spending her spring playing with other kids instead of with a babysitter or sitting in a doctor’s office.

I’m not actually still friends with that mom; over the years her son ended up very involved in a different homeschool community, and we lost touch. But helping that family created a culture of closeness for the community that remained. It leveled us up, as the saying goes. It created a culture where it was normalized for us to step up for one another. It evolved us into community that frequently traded kids, which helped all of us. Even as our kids are older and in high school, this still remains true: one of these parents teaches my son biology and takes him to homeschool ski/snowboard club, while I see her kids weekly for literature class.

5. Ask for help.

Asking for help is a form of community care.

Yes, you read that right. In a world where we are indoctrinated into the idea that we should be able to care for ourselves, that we don’t need help, that we should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and solve our own problems, admitting you can’t do it alone is a radical act that models much-needed vulnerability that benefits everyone.

It also shows people that you trust them. It shows people that you need them. And it allows them to trust you and show they need you, too.

To be interdependent we have to be interdependent. To be interdependent we have to set the groundwork that shows we believe in interdependence. And we can’t ONLY do that through service.

An illustration: I don’t know that I would have gotten through my last year working in the medical industrial complex — when I was really floundering from secondary trauma from the abuses I was witnessing and adrenally fatigued from working in a high-cortisol environment at the same time Andy was trying to publish in order to get tenure (though fat lot of good it did us in the long run) — if I hadn’t gotten help from my homeschool community. In the same way I had learned to be specific with my offers of help, I was very specific with what I needed for help — someone to take my kids on Sunday mornings for a few hours after my night shift so I could sleep while Andy wrote, because I no longer could nap for only two hours and then get up so he could have the day to work the way I had for the years prior. A few families stepped up, and we built a rotation where my kids were with a different family each Sunday for the 6 months until I could quit. Each family only invested about 4 hours of time in our family every 4-5 weeks — a totally doable amount — but it made an absolute world of difference to my little fivesome.

It was horrifically uncomfortable for me to ask, because I was the kind of person who prided myself in “doing it all.” Which is exactly why it was important for me to ask. The illusion was serving no one: not me, and not my community either.

6. Accept that the work of building community requires you to be uncomfortable.

Finding people to be in deep relationship with isn’t effortless. And once you’ve found them, neither is being in those deep relationships. Yes, relationships provide ease and even material help. Community makes this world easier to survive. Community care is a form of self preservation. Community is part of our fundamental humanity, and in its best moments it feels effortless and easy and nurturing. But community cannot be an afterthought. Building and sustaining it by definition takes time, intention, and discomfort. You have to let it take up space in what is surely an always-already-full life. You have to orient your life and way of being in the world toward it being important.

You have to spend awkward moments at meetups with people you don’t connect. You have to plan a gathering everyone bails on. Yes, you do have to show up when you don’t want to sometimes, to challenge the belief that “alone time” is how we restore ourselves from the pressures of living in late stage capitalism. You have to not write off relationships just because you don’t feel THE SPARK; you have be curious about people that at the outset might not seem to have things in common with you. You have to text people spontaneously and have them not be available and not let your disappointment dissuade you from trying again. You have to text people spontaneously and not care that they will see your messy house. You have to say yes to the spontaneous invite even though it means not cleaning or the closet or maybe even brushing your kid’s hair before you go. You will have to make someone soup when it’s not convenient. You will have to host the bookclub. You will have to watch someone’s kid when you’re already overstimulated or clean up a bigger mess from a playdate than you would have if you hadn’t had extra kids over (personally, I find it ALWAYS EASIER to have more kids than less, because there’s less pressure on you to occupy your kids, though, and I’d rather clean a bigger mess than have to think up ways to entertain my kids — but that may just be me). You have to ask for help and admit you can’t do it alone, which involves facing a lot of your own internalized shame and self-judgement. You will have to learn how to navigate conflict and disagreement, which can feel particularly loaded when it’s about parenting. You have to show up for people.. You have to let other people show up for you.

Here’s the thing: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we have to get used to being uncomfortable either way. The world we have built is not sustainable, and the United States’ acceleration into authoritarianism is about to implode in unpredictable ways. It is going to get deeply uncomfortable for all of us. We can get really uncomfortable alone, or we can get a little less uncomfortable together. Practice the together part now. We need each other.

Well, my friends, I hope this little primer gave you some food for thought or encouragement. On a final note, I want to say that many of the relationships I’ve cultivated over my parenting years have become explicitly political: they are the families who have helped my kids organize bake sales for different social justice causes, or marched with me or shut down bridges with me, or watched my kids while I participated in direct action. They are the friends who are still scheming community dinners with me. They are the friends who host English conversation clubs for new neighbors that my kids volunteer at. Their kids are the kids who I’m politically educating. As your kids get older, the possibilities for more “traditional” political organizing will become more accessible. But it’s always easier if you already are rooted in a community who can support you in doing it. In that way, radically committing yourself to the work of community building comes full circle and is in and of itself a tactic toward finding your way toward radical communities you can organize with.

I’d love to hear what you thought of this piece, and — since it is mainly intended as a semi-brief overview — if there’s anything you’d like me to expand upon in future newsletters. Til then, I remain yours, in love and solidarity,

Robina