Finding Your Tribe

By Teresa Pitman
Issue 102, Sept/Oct 2000

Vicki and I are cleaning out her fridge. The vegetable bins have somehow warped and have to be jiggled out, revealing a slimy green pepper and a distinctly brown head of iceberg lettuce. Laughing at the disgusting items, Vicki holds open the lid of the compost bucket, and I dump in the veggie remains. A minute later my toddler wanders into the kitchen and tugs at my shirt. While I sit cross-legged on the floor and nurse her, Vicki washes out the bins and hands out crackers to her two children and my three year old. Then, with everyone fed and content for a few more minutes, we start on the next shelf of the fridge.

By the end of the day, when our husbands arrive, we'll have cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed all the floors, finished a couple of loads of laundry, and prepared a meal for both families to enjoy. And tomorrow we'll do it all over again at my house.

I'm not exactly sure how Vicki and I first thought of this way of sharing our time. She had worked with my husband, and when she decided to stay home with her first baby, our friendship blossomed. My first child was born soon after, and we both discovered we were incredibly lonely.

The day Vicki brought her daughter home from the hospital she walked into the house and burst into tears. She was terrified by the thought of coping alone with this new baby. I, too, had my own lonely days with my infant son. My husband left for work, taking our only car, before I was even out of bed. The day stretched out endlessly in front of me--changing diapers, washing clothes, cleaning house--with at best the TV or radio as a substitute for adult company. During the cold Canadian winter, even getting outdoors was a challenge.

Vicki and I were spending hours on the phone with each other, but that didn't help. So we hit on this new plan--on one day her husband would drop her off at my house on his way to work. We'd spend the day together, doing housework and caring for our children, and then at the end of the day her husband would come back to our house, and both families would have dinner together. The next day, I'd get dropped off at her house.

The routine continued for several years as our babies grew into toddlers and preschoolers, and then new babies joined our families.

We did not do this every single day, of course, and some days were more productive than others. Sometimes we spent several hours lying together in bed while our babies nursed and older children played on the floor. We talked and sometimes cried. Other days we took the bus to doctors' appointments or to do some shopping.

We discovered that Vicki is a better cook, and I am a better baker. We developed our own categories of housework--I like "wet" work (washing dishes, laundry, washing floors), and she prefers the "dry" variety (vacuuming, sweeping, tidying). We complemented each other. And we always had someone to talk to, laugh with, hold a baby for a bathroom trip, give a hug.

When I read Jean Liedloff's book The Continuum Concept , I realized that we had formed our own, very small tribe. Spending our days together satisfied our need for adult companionship without separation from our babies, and working together made all the chores--even cleaning disgusting stuff out of the bottom of the fridge--more fun.

Eventually our husbands both found work in other communities, and our daily time together came to an end. But I had seen how important this kind of relationship is for me, and I deliberately tried to recreate it with other friends.

Not long after Vicki and her family moved, I was at a church picnic when I saw Lorna for the first time. She and her family had just arrived in our community. Something about the way she held her baby was familiar to me, and I went up and introduced myself.

She, too, was looking for a tribe, as she had recently moved away from her family. Soon my new friend Lorna and I got together every Thursday to bake bread (and sometimes other foods) for our families for the week. She had a bigger house and roomier kitchen, so we generally went there. We split the cost of the ingredients, and as our children played together (by then, I had three children and Lorna had six), we kneaded and shaped the dough. While the bread was rising, we talked and tended to other tasks. I often brought a basket of things that needed mending, so we could work together while we were waiting.

We were there when she miscarried her seventh baby, and she tended to my older children while I was giving birth to my fourth. I still think of Thursday as baking day, even though Lorna now lives hundreds of miles away.

My children are almost grown, but I still work with parents. The theme of loneliness is as strong and prevalent as it was when I sat crying on my bed with my new baby, wondering how I'd cope with no one to talk to. Certainly the desire to overcome isolation is one of the reasons why women return to work; it's a need easily understood by those of us who opt to stay home with our children.

We truly are social animals; we need to be with other people to feel good, whole, and happy. It's worth the effort to create tribes, however small and imperfect they may be.

Often we try to approach this problem by creating playgroups for our children. I think this has to do with our penchant for independence. We try to pretend that we don't need to be around other people, but we acknowledge that our children do. The result is often that the playgroup meets the children's needs, but the adults are still frustrated.