He didn’t need training wheels anymore, but there was no way our cautious little boy was going to let us take them off. My husband didn’t say it, but I knew what he was thinking: “The kid will be twenty, and he still won’t know how to ride a two-wheeler.”
Up and down the driveway they went, Steve patiently urging him on, a hand at his back, seven-year-old Henry earnestly pedaling. It was past time for this bird to fly. But he was afraid to test his wings.
So, we did what we always did in our old neighborhood: we turned to “the village” for help. Henry needed a push, and he needed to get it from a dad who wasn’t his own flesh and blood. Which is how it happened that our next-door neighbor Bob loaded Henry and his little bike into their van one summer afternoon and took off, with a promise that they wouldn’t return until Henry was ready to arrive on his own two wheels.
Within an hour we were standing out in the back yard to cheer on our boy as he came soaring down the driveway, a mile-wide grin plastered across his face. Bob was modest, as always, but clearly pleased: another child launched. It didn’t matter a bit that it wasn’t one of his. My husband ached, just a little; he’d wanted for himself the satisfaction of teaching his first-born son how to ride a bike. But he was also wise enough to know that what we had was even better — a web of parents looking out for one another and sharing the joys and challenges of raising our children together.
Our sons grew up knowing all the nooks and crannies, the refrigerator contents, and the house rules of the Cashions and the Wickerhams as well as they knew their own. We had the yard for baseball games and the overflowing basket of dress-up clothes and puppets for theatrical productions. The Wickerhams were the go-to family for backyard bonfires, sleep-outs on the deck, and a reliable bagel supply. The Cashions had the best house for hide-and-seek, dance music, and Slip ‘n’ Slide on a hot summer day.
They were a pack of seven children thrown together by age and proximity, and they forged fortuitous, enduring friendships, just as we parents did. Somehow we all agreed, without ever having to discuss it, that we would be there for one another. We traded kids and meals and driving duties, hand-me-down clothes and hard-won wisdom. There was laughter and tears, lots and lots of listening, plenty of advice, both sought and unsought. Traditions, celebrations, and memories.
The kids are mostly grown now, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-one and separated by geography, different schools, different life experiences. We left our old green house on the cul de sac seven years ago, certain that we were leaving as well our accidental, fortuitous village, the extra moms and dads who had contributed so much to our sons’ lives just by being there, by loving them enough to keep their homes and their hearts open to two little boys who just happened to live next door.
If someone could have flashed me forward then, from the day we pulled out of the shared driveway for the last time, to the summer of 2011, I might not have shed quite so many tears about moving away. I would have seen that friendship can be nurtured and deepened from a distance, that children turn as naturally toward love as plants turn toward the sun, and that the closeness our families created back when we were all just learning how to be families is stronger than the pull of time or distance.
This summer, Jack is working in Boston, an hour and a half from our house in New Hampshire. It’s possible only because the Cashions’ back door is still open for him, even now. Monday through Thursday, he sleeps at their house, where he is fed and loved and driven to the train station each morning by my friend Carol, his other mother.
I’ll always remember how we learned that Lia Wickerham had arrived in the neighborhood, nineteen years ago last week: over our baby monitor, tuned to the same frequency as theirs, only a few yards away: “I’ll change her,” we heard her dad Wendell say on the night they brought her home, “I might as well learn how right now.” Born right between Henry and Jack, Lia was friend and playmate to both. So when she came home the other day after nearly two weeks in the hospital, still struggling with some mysterious digestive illness, it seemed only natural to offer her a few days of R&R at our house in the country, to give both her and her exhausted, worried mom a break.
Yesterday morning, Jack and Lia and I took a walk through the woods. The kids reminisced about old times, their childhood memories astonishingly vivid and fresh. What they clearly cherished most of all was the very fact of their long history together, the preciousness of these friendships that began at birth and have managed to survive all the twists and turns in the road to adulthood. And there was something else too. “We all had three moms,” Lia said. “That was so cool.”
Sometimes I still miss being the 24/7 mother of two little boys and the on-call mom for whatever combination of kids happened to playing out on the swing set on any given afternoon. But I wouldn’t have traded any of those long-gone days for the pleasure of yesterday, walking through a glorious July morning and listening to the conversation of these two thoughtful young adults who trust one another enough to share not only their memories of the past (Barney underwear and backyard circuses) but the very real challenges and questions they face in the present.
This may just be one of the greatest lessons we can pass on to our children — that in this complicated world, neither nations nor individuals can resolve their problems by themselves. Our lives, our destinies, are interconnected. It’s okay to ask for help and a blessing to be in a position to offer it, whether we are fifteen or fifty-two, for someday the tables will be turned. Developing a sense of universal responsibility, we move toward a better life for all. Perhaps I wasn’t fully conscious of that, back in the days when our sons felt perfectly comfortable grabbing an apple out of the next door neighbor’s fridge or wearing a best friend’s outgrown winter jacket, but I know it now. We are here to take care of one another. There are plenty of kids to go around, always someone to nurture, always a child who could use a sympathetic ear, a bed to sleep in, or a meal prepared with love. Being a mother means taking care not only of our own families, but of our neighbors and our global family as well. We need each other.
As you know, Katrina, I grew up in a similar web, and fiercely cherish the bonds that endure to this day. Some are stronger than others, of course, but the sense that these people are my family in some kind of way beyond – and more important than – the literal persists. Even more, I’ve found myself replicating this with my own children, creating a small village of families, and watching the intimacy my children share with those other mothers and children remains one of the most steadfast and moving joys of my life. xoxoxo
I had the privilege of witnessing your community during the occasions–particularly Jazz fest– that I babysat for the Cashions. A few years away from parenting my own kids I recognized that what you all had was different–and enviable. Now I live in a close neighborhood that offers it’s own perks–neighbor couples whose kids are grown and who are glad to listen for a napping toddler while I dash off to pick up the 7-year-old; families with kids younger than my own who wear our hand-me-downs, making it a tiny bit easier for me to come to terms with the fact that I won’t have any more babies of my own. Community is so important, and I’m so happy to hear that the friendships of your sweet old neighborhood have endured. Beautifully written, as always.
I’m just so full from this post, as always, that I feel I have nothing to say. Except that I was here, and I’m nodding and learning.
Oh, Katrina, this is so beautiful. To me, though, it is also bittersweet. You describe a place and an attitude that my kids are not growing up in. We have lovely neighbors, but they are neighbors, not family. I find myself lately too easily overwhelmed by the vagaries of life with little ones and wishing for the kind of compatriots that you describe so lovingly here.
It takes a village. I know. I’m just still looking for mine.
Thanks for the reminder that they do exist and they’re worth creating.
Beautiful, Katrina, I have tears in my eyes. I am sending this right now to the moms on Winslow Road, where my children had their extra moms, full of love and laughter and of course, food.
True to yourself and sincere sense of others, Katrina, once again you have been able to beautifully capture that special bond of family,friendships and shared experiences. Some of my most pleasant childhood neighborhood memories are picking The Sibley’s grapes and making jelly all afternoon in the kitchen, around the formica table that had a red vinyl bench seat, or piling into Mrs. Neville’s Rambler going to Rosemary Lake to swim until our lips turne blue or the day that I split my chin open learning to skate backwards with my brother and neighbors rushed to help, make dinner, pick up the other kids while my Mom went to the hospital with me(in Mrs. Neville’s Rambler!). Happy or sad, we shared each other-and we are all better for it.
I was lucky enough to grow up in one of these neighborhoods, the kind where our parents unleashed us early on a summer morning and we didn’t return to our respective homes until dusk. My parents had a brass bell that could be heard anywhere in the neighborhood, and when I the bell rang I knew it was time to come home for the evening. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that bell, and if I didn’t hear it someone else invariably did, which always sent me running. I hope that my daughter can be part of a similar web, but I fear these sorts of arrangements are an endangered species in our modern-day (fear-based) world. What a wonderful thing that your boys got to experience it.
I am lucky to live in one of these villages. There are five boys in the four houses surrounding us, and I love that we as parents can take turns watching the kids and advising them, sometimes, on how to behave.
While I know it is a privilege, I find the 24/7 mothering thing a bit exhausting. Yet at the same time, I try to soak it up, because I’m worried that if I don’t succumb to the slow and ordinary moments, I will have regrets when my kids are grown.
(As an aside, I gave your book to a friend of mine whose boys are in the beginning stages of high school. She was so grateful because she felt like you captured exactly what she was feeling. Though my kids are small, I also appreciated it, and I know I can return to it at a later date and find even more resonance.)
This is amazing. I have to echo Kristen and say that I didn’t think places like this exist! What an amazing community and how beautifully you have evoked it for all of us. And it’s such a statement about how love endures all separations, including geographical ones. You have inspired me to create something similar. Thank you!
Hi Katrina,
This brought back some of my best memories of childhood and my mom’s three best friends who we called “aunt” and their kids, who were our “cousins” (especially to explain having really close friends who were girls when my brother and I were in elementary school), and it also brought back some of my favorite memories and feelings of when my own kids were younger and the constant sleepovers at a revolving set of houses (but still not a single geographical location for it all—that is a magic I’ve perhaps only approached when nine friends rented a house together in college… a sort of parenting of each other through its own developmental step). More than anything I just love the voice and spirit of this post. We do indeed all need each other—and life seems richest when we live true to this.
The neighborhood we live in now is one with NO fences. The kids run freely from yard to yard, house to house, refrigerator to refrigerator. Although they do tend to prefer the lemonade at my house 🙂 But you’re right. It’s a lovely way to live, and harkens back to an older time, when things seemed simpler. Beautifully written.