Creating a Village, Creating Community

I don't tend to think of myself as reading a lot of "mommy blogs"; for that matter, I don't particularly think of myself as writing one, although I totally do.  (Not really as much content as I'd like, although I get the feeling that you all prefer photos of the boys anyway.  Still: Mommy Blog.)

But then I caught a post from Kristen over at Mondays with Mac, about a part of the village who is helping to raise her little boy.  And that post, combined with everything else going on in our lives right now, made me think.

M. and I moved up here almost six years ago.  We moved away from the lives in New York City that we had established as single people, the people who had seen us through all the ups and downs of dating, the crazy roller-coaster of our twenties.  We moved to a place where we knew very few people - a couple of people at the school where M. would be working, certainly... and we would be about an hour away from a few very close friends.  But moving into this town was really moving into unknown, uncharted, very-much-not-NYC territory.

And yet... what my mother had once said of me turned out to be true for both of us: we put down roots almost before the first boxes were unpacked.  Friends came from all over to help us unload the moving truck. Our upstairs neighbors introduced themselves... and offered to cat-sit.  In fact, while M. and I were off getting married, just a couple months later, they came in not just to feed the cats who had moved with us, but to check on the recently-spayed half-feral kitten who had adopted us... and we came back to find a wedding gift on our kitchen table, and very happy cats.  When Asa came along, a couple of years later, several neighbors gave us gifts, came over to see the baby, commiserated about sleepless nights.

In the LGBT community, we often talk about "family of origin" and "family of choice"; the latter probably has more weight, more impact in the LGBT community than in just about any other.  We're lucky to be close to both, and to have meshed the two into one large, complex, extended group; yet for reasons that bear on the whole "family of choice" question, we never expect community building to come effortlessly.  We keep antennae up, all the more as our family has grown, for safe spaces and loving people.  We consciously create community as a way of creating a safe space around us, in a world in which safety - physical, emotional and spiritual - is not really a given for us.  We created a village before we had children - starting with our upstairs neighbors (who now consider us adopted daughters) and extending into the amazing network of toddler-parents we have come to know and love.  Asa and Elias have aunts, uncles, and tons of extra parents and grandparents, who watch over them as closely as we do ourselves.

In a month (or so... ah, the joys of limbo), we'll be moving again.  We'll be moving out of our community, out of this safe space that we've created around us and for our boys.  We're moving into something of a ready-made community, certainly, in our new church home, but still: we're moving away from the people who have been our emergency contacts, our babysitters, our extra hands and eyes and ears.  We're moving away from the village that is helping to raise our children.  But as we look around, and realize how incredibly lucky we've been in this community, we recognize in totally new ways that the LGBT community has been on to something really big: because although we're moving, we're not really losing very many people.  Proximity, yes; easy babysitting too.  But while we're losing the village, we're gaining a larger family of choice, a larger group who will be a part of our lives despite distance.

Wherever we land, we're going to need a guest room.  And that makes us really lucky.