It takes a village to rise a child…
By: Laryssa Borges
Tags: Motherhood, Consumerism, Modern Life, Working Moms, Career Change

A year ago I was rehearsing how praised the power of the communities and announced my twin pregnancy at the same time. Since I remember I wanna be a mom (yes, of 2!) and built a career around the dream of being dedicated as much as possible to early childhood, and for that I surrounded myself with people and knowledge that worked as the necessary support network — and here I recognize my privilege to have a well-structured and wishful family for this generation, including my partner, and although it is another chapter, it’s based on this saying.

I was already devouring books from Sheryl Sandberg to Laura Gutman, I met brazilian projects such as Maternativa, B2Mamy, Children in Curricullum and Maternity in Companies, I exhausted my friends with what our bubble allowed. The feeling of ambiguous guilt was inevitable: exercising full motherhood on a tightrope with her career, and suffering away from the child to dedicate herself to a job or project.

The pandemic came and other perspectives on the topic were wide open: maternal overload and invisibility (which besides work, maternity and home, is still a tutor for online classes without a social structure for that), lack of dialogue at home (and in “the best scenario”, divorces, not to mention the increase in domestic violence), market hypocrisy in terms of person-professional integration (in which videocalls overflow the agenda and woe to the child who screamed in the background!), unworthiness of education services and health as fundamental (because opening a bar and store saves the economy, equipping hospitals and better structuring daycare centers and schools is an expense #beingironic).

A year ago I was rehearsing how to announce my twin pregnancy and praise the power of the communities at the same time. And I was swallowed up by dozens of whatsapp groups full of outbursts, doubts and miraculous product solutions that cut across all development and bonding. “It takes a village to raise a child”, and in my passion for the theme of community, I always read this saying with a collective eye, until I noticed the word village. I was struck by the sudden change in social formatting within the history of human evolution. In the last few decades, families are getting smaller and spreaded geographically looking for “better opportunities”, leaving mothers without a support network. Child development were also swallowed up by the same industry — every mother knows how cruel it can be about our own ability to physically and emotionally nourish a baby at the expense of formulas, courses and devices that throw us in the long term in a conveniently vicious consumption chain almost insurmountable . Women are asked to working as if they have no children, and raising children as if they don’t work (and here I won’t extend into the merit of normalizing male absence that opens up another abyss).

We live in an extremely fast era in terms of production and consumption — from mechanization to online services — and babies’ natural dependence (remember they are just the most vulnerable puppies in animal terms) with mothers, in particular, has become incompatible with current parameters of “success” and “productivity” — maternity leave Brazil ends exactly when the first leap in development begins, at month 4, leaving unreachable the 2 years of breastfeeding recommended by the UN! I was privileged to forseen this incompatibility and to prepare myself for a long period without work. And the isolation allowed me to look for other blisters, to hear other pains, to question other biases.

What dialogues can we bring about “what does it take to raise a child in an urbanized and consumerist society in the middle of a pandemic?”