How to parent when your village is dead

My top tips for surviving parenthood without family support

If you’re yet to settle down or considering your options, let me give you a little piece of advice. If you can help it, try not to fall in love with someone whose family is as non-existent as yours. Yes, yes I know, to begin with the appeal of not having an overbearing mother-in-law to contend with or having your weekends scuppered with 4-hour drives up North might be pretty strong. But please trust me when I say this. The moment a child (or two) comes onto the scene, you’ll welcome (cling to) whoever is available. I mean, even your previously useless father-in-law, who can’t make toast without burning it will seem like Mother Theresa.

If you can’t tell, I speak from experience. My husband and I have one parent between us. One. My father, who, bless his heart, hasn’t changed a single nappy his whole life. Now this isn’t a sob story. My mum passed away when I was 19 and my husband lost both of his parents before the age of 25 (not that he ever had parents to begin with…but that’s his story to tell). Circumstance has meant that we’ve been stubbornly self-sufficient for most of our adult lives. And apart from the odd wedding, which made us feel like we were in the presence of The Brady Bunch, it has never really bothered us. In fact, we thrived off our daily self-regulating dog cuddles, quiet holidays seasons and the occasional lunch with my father (if only to tick that we’re not quite orphans yet box).

But fast forward to January 2024, and the arrival of an utterly gorgeous but severely collicky baby who would not sleep unless strapped to someone’s chest and could barely feed without shooting up a milky pool over the living room floor. And if that wasn’t enough of a fate to befall us, our sleep-deprived newborn days coincided with the roof above our baby’s nursery giving way and leading to emergency works and one of our gorgeous dogs, Jackson, suddenly being diagnosed with an aggressive form of throat cancer (and passing away four months later). I should also add, to make life even more interesting, the first roof builder we hired did a runner with our savings, and whatever sanity we had left…

When you first become a parent, or even pregnant for that matter, one of the words that seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue is this concept of a village. Strangers will come up to you/your bump in the street detailing at length how hard being a parent is; urging to find your village. Your Instagram feed will suddenly be filled with inspirational posts from second-time mothers, encouraging you to not make the same mistake they did the first time round and accept any help that is offered.

Your slightly neurotic mother is offering to stay for a month after the baby is born?

Take it.

Your husband’s eccentric stepmum offers to pop round with home-cooked meals or to do dishes/laundry/mind the baby while you lie down for an hour?

TAKE IT.

But what happens when you get no offers of help, what happens when your village is dead?

Ironically, being British Indian, I have a huge family. Both my parents are one of seven siblings. I have dozens of aunts and uncles and even more cousins. This meant that my mum did have the benefit of a village. My late grandmother came to stay with us for three months after me and my younger sister were born. And later, while our father worked long hours, Monday to Saturday, we spent blissful childhoods in our cousins’ houses as much as our own.

But this wasn’t my experience when I became a mother.

Now I must stress that I’m not having a dig at my family. But rather addressing an unfortunate (for me) fact of life, that in my generation, many British Indian families have shifted away from a community style living to a more British, nuclear approach. My aunts are occupied with chasing after their own grandchildren. My cousins have busy lives and demanding careers. In the ideal world my sister and I would have been each other’s village, but we rather inconveniently timed our motherhood journeys so that our babies were born within a few months of each other! (My husband, if you’re asking, can count the family members he is in regular contact with on one finger - the one finger being his 93 year old Scouse nan.)

But somehow, in what feels like a blink of eye (although I stress that it did not feel like that at the time), we have made it through the baby phase and now have a fun-loving, energetic 15 month old. Our marriage is in tact, if not stronger than ever. We are exhausted but no longer sleep-deprived, and remarkably have very few grey hairs to show for the arduous journey here.

So how do you do it, become parents without any family support?

1. Become the Olympic team of parenthood. By this I mean, work together at every opportunity. In the early days this might look like splitting up the nights. For example, my husband held our baby every night from 8-12pm for the first three months of her life. This gave me a guaranteed four hours of unbroken sleep, which I could not have survived without. He also looked after her most mornings before he started work so that I could shower and make myself look vaguely alive. Later on when her sleep improved a little, this evolved to us alternating putting her to bed so that the other could cook dinner/tidy up/go to the gym/cobble together some sort of a social life.

2. Be grateful for any help you can get (however small and however surprising). We may not have had hands-on support from family but there are a few people whose generous gestures I will never, ever forget. The most stand out example of this was our neighbours, Jenn and Mark, who despite barely knowing us at the time (we’d only moved into our house ten months earlier) brought round freshly baked bread, brownies and homemade pasta sauce when we arrived home from the hospital. They also held a sleeping B on several occasions so I could have a moment to myself and drink a full of cup of tea in peace.

3. Don’t compare your experience to the experience of others. You will hear many parents complaining that they don’t have a village or even moaning about their existing village. But rarely will you find parents who have no family support at all. In the past, I confess, I did let this get me down. I became resentful and bitter of my mum friends whose parents flew across the Atlantic to be there for their grandchildren and whose mother-in-laws looked after the baby for a night every few weeks to give the parents a well-deserved rest. But resentment only festers within. It taints your own imperfectly perfect experience of motherhood, and trust me, there is something rather wonderfully empowering about knowing that you’ve raised a healthy, happy baby pretty much on your own.

4. Be creative with how you find alone time (as a couple or by yourself). Okay so you won’t have the childfree weekend getaways or regular date nights that your friends will often talk about, but there are other ways of achieving the same result. For example, day dates! As B is at nursery five days a week, my husband and I will sometimes take an afternoon off work as annual leave to have lunch together or start our working days a little later so we can grab a coffee and walk the dogs. I also reserve a few days of annual leave each month as ‘me time’. This means being able to do some of the things I used to do before becoming a mum. Going to the gym. A solo trip to the cinema. Lounging in bed all day with a boxset. Bliss!

5. Take the pressure off during the dark times. By this I mean sick days, of which, I assure you, there will be many. Forget about thriving. Focus purely on whatever you need to survive. Takeaways. Contact naps. Lots of coffee. And screen time. Yes, screen time. Of course there will be parents who religiously advocate a no screen time rule, but they’ll usually be the same parents with a mum or MIL who will be round to help at the drop of a hat. But when you don’t have grandparents to rely on, there’s Ms Rachel. And let me tell you from the mother of a child who started sleeping through the night at nine months, walking at twelve months and speaking a few three-word sentences at fourteen months, a little screen time does not hurt anyone.

6. Let go of the guilt. I can’t tell you the number of times I have felt guilty that my daughter will grow up never knowing what it feels like to have the hands on love and support of grandparents - trips to the Zoo, sleepovers etc. But then I remember, I didn’t have that either, and I’ve never ever felt that I was missing out.

There is so much more I could say about this but I’ll leave you with this - if you find yourself in a similar boat to me and the isolation is too much to bear, please, please reach out. I’ve been there. I am there. You are never alone.

M xx