I will not be in a zero sum game with my kids

Building alternatives to the scarcity model of childcare and work

New folks, welcome! I’m so glad you’re here. I’m excited to share this post freely with the Folkweaver community. Please take a beat to like, comment, or restack this piece if it resonates—it’s the best way for new folks to find my work. Paid subscribers: I’m including some reflection questions below the essay to explore these themes more deeply in your own life. In whatever ways you’re able, I’m so thankful for your support.

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“Ugh school again? Why is every day a school day! I want to homeschool,” my youngest says to me with a tender plea while we hustle to get her shoes on one morning.

This is a common refrain I hear from her—at least a couple time a week.

She goes to a lovely, play-based school with friends she’s known her whole life from a connection-based playgroup I’d started and facilitated. And yet, even with beloved friends in tow in a loving preschool container, it’s a lot for her little four-year old body to go to school nearly full time. It’s too much, too long, too fast, too loud, she tells me.

I’ve been parenting for nearly a decade now, and this last six months is the first time in that entire decade where I’ve had nearly full-time childcare.

In my bones, I knew that amount of childcare would feel too much for her. I knew she needed me to move slower, to have more home time, to spend more time with me. I knew she wasn’t ready for that amount of care.

The challenge is, I’d already transitioned myself, my work life, and my creative practice to take up the full container of the time I have. I’d already grieved her small years, grieved my at-home time with her. I’ve already closed the door on the chapter of small kids at home, and started to move myself into the chapter of considering how to feed my creative practice—how to let meaningful work fill the shape of this new container of time I have.

But when I hear the words, “I want to homeschool,” my heart shatters a little because I want to fulfill her need for connection and slowness. I want to, but not at the expense of myself.

Where do our kids needs end, and where do our needs begin? How do we untangle the needs of these small magnificent beings from our own, when they once inhabited space within our bodies, within our wombs? How much do I surrender into what she’s asking, versus support her in stretching her capacity so I can keep taking up creative space?

I don’t know the answers, but I do know that we can’t self-sacrificially raise free people, because our freedoms are bound together. If we give up our personhood for our kids’ freedom, they will never become fully free. And they can’t give up their freedom for ours, or we will never become fully free.

I wonder about this tension we feel. Growing a baby within our wombs, our body overtaking by something of us but also distinctly not us. Those tender months in infancy when our babes are bound to our bodies, in wraps and slings, at our breasts and hips, in deep need of our connection and bonding and co-regulation. I wonder about the surrender required within us during that time, and what fissures it cracked in all our ideas of autonomy as self-reliance.

We are a connected species by design. And our autonomy is only possible through deep connection. This weekend in my Sunday letter to Emily I wrote:

Something I know from our friendship and from mothering my kids is that we actually unfurl and root into the depths of being only through our relationships. It’s not despite the tending that we expand and deepen into our fullness—it’s because of it.

The way we tend gives us a glimpse into our personhood and each other’s. Yes, you’re this too, I say to you as you take on navigating a relative in ICU. Yes, you’re this too, you say to me as I fight my urge to crawl out of my skin and surrender into feverish-preschool-snuggle stillness.

Tending small humans and elders through illness is part of the very fabric of our human existence.

This tending shapes us. We are made of and by these experiences of tending each other, and can only truly see more deeply into the chasms within ourselves and between each other when gaze together and reflect back for each other how we live out this key aspect of our humanity.

Even though tending is a core part of our humanity, care work feels oppressive when folks who take on the work of primary parenting bear the entirety of the burden alone. It’s so easy as mothers to lose ourselves in our tending, and maybe that’s the piece so many of us relate to when we itch to bolt out a window toward our independence. But I don’t think that itch for freedom means mothers don’t want to tend—we just don’t want to be the only load-bearing beam holding everything up when it comes to the tending.

There is an unrealistic burden placed on mothers to be the singular, weight-bearing beam for the work of tending small humans, which creates a scarcity model for our time that can easily put us in a zero sum game with our kids.

I refuse.

I went into motherhood with a commitment to fully see my kids for who they are, and find or co-create environments where they exist in the unhurried time and space within a beloved community that supports their own unfurling. What I didn’t expect was how much my intentions around how to be in relationship with them would impact how I chose to be in relationship with myself.

When I started to mother from a place of deep respect and connection—working to fully see and understand my children for who they are—I began to learn to do that work for myself.

My warrior-poet eldest was my mirror. As I started to learn of my sensitive, strong-willed, highly creative kiddo, I began to see in myself those traits that I’d so thoroughly masked and deprived of they oxygen they needed to unfurl—traits that I actually need to center to guide the life I live if I want to better align my personhood with the way I exist in the world.

Through motherhood, I began to see into the chasm within myself. I began to learn about my own deep empathy and sensitivity. I began to learn of my own deep need for slowness and green space. I began to understand my own need to drive my own work and my long-dormant longing for creative expression. I began to see my own need for unhurried time, my own capacity to hyperfocus. I began to understand my wiring, and my need for finding aligned, community to create a life that cohered with my both my neurotype and my values.

The construct of motherhood is so often talked about in language that alludes to a zero sum game between children and mothers. The martyr mother, who gives up her career to be home with her kid. The working mother, scrambling to work and caretake all at once. The harried and hurried mothers, running around doing all the things to keep the world together for their kids.

But what happens when we opt out of that narrative?

I’ve started to practice refusing that scarcity story on the daily, with more success some days than others. The key to that practice? I refuse to do this work of mothering alone.

When my eldest was six months old, I was mothering her full-time and feeling so alone in it. I couldn’t bear parenting her in this way—day in and day out just her and me. Even though our existence was so excruciatingly isolating, the thing I couldn’t bear more was the idea of leaving her to return to work.

After a measly eight weeks, my doting partner was back to running at full-time work in an office at a tech startup, to both our dismay. I had no childcare, and even less parenting community. My friends were still transient and kid-free, working hard to make careers take off. Our parents and siblings lived across the country. I was, in effect, left to the task alone, at least from the hours of 8-6.

In my youngest years, I was raised co-living with my Egyptian family cousins and grandparents, so I had a different way of parenting coded in my bones. This let me know a different way was possible. Desperately, I sought out aligned community, and stumbled upon a countercultural connection parenting playgroup, which met twice a week in the free nature spaces of San Francisco. This playgroup became my lifeline, my first go at co-creating something different, and eventually led to many years of formative memories, including co-founding our cooperative forest preschool.

Co-creating a deep, interdependent, values-aligned parenting community is messy and complicated, because humans are messy and complicated. But I still look back at those years in community fondly, because they gifted me a circle to learn to parent in connection with, life-long friendships I still co-evolve into emergence with, and my first practice at what interdependence can feel like in motherhood. Co-creating this community became an embodied example that, yes, my child and me can both thrive together in connection and freedom.

Mothering in community in this way was not based in scarcity—but reciprocity, connection and abundance. It allowed me to unplug from the pre-kid perfectionist demands of do-good social justice nonprofit work that was running me into the ground, and to give myself permission slow down enough to understand my children, which let me better understand myself, and helped me co-create an ecosystem of community around us that helped us all thrive in a way that deeply aligned with our values.

As Robina Khalid, Pakistani-American Abolitionist midwife, says in her beautiful piece,

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.

What would it be like if we, as a society, prioritized the connection and freedom needed for mothers and kids alike to thrive like that? What kinds of communities and structures and support systems would we create around that premise? How might they look different than what already exists out there?

It might, to start with similar to how our playgroup started—with isolated mothers knowing there is a different way to exist together in the world. It might look like more robustly weaving the elders and grandparents and aunties into those communities, so we could give elders back their rightful place in this society as wisdom keepers, while giving mothers a break from the tending so they can take care of themselves, shower, nap, or reconnect with their creative passions. It might look like soft ramps back into work life and schooling for both mothers and kids, without financial pressure forcing anyone to move at a faster pace than the dyad might want or need.

And yes, while it would be so ideal for it to look like paid parental leave, universal basic income for primary parents, and robust support for these types of communities, we can’t wait for the systems to change in our favor to build what we know is possible, most especially now.

I think about the connection and freedom that I’ve had the privilege to live out in some shape or form in different chapters of this motherhood journey, and then sit with the reality my youngest and I are living out today. What would it be like, to pull her out of school more days, when the majority of the playgroup community we created together already goes to school with her? Who would we spend our days with? What would that mean for the community we’d need to create? What would it mean for my work and creative practice? How would I center the idea of reciprocity and abundance, if I feel stretched on my own time?

How do I create a life with her—with all of us—that allows for our deep connection and our deep freedom to co-exist together?

I don’t know the answers, but I’m here with you, asking the questions.

In curiosity,

Sara

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