Village

I have devoted the majority of my years caring for children or raising them.  The years spent with kids have been a humbling experience. One can learn a lot from time around them.

I have seen all the fads. When I started babysitting as a teen, spanking had been the norm. I could never bring myself to spank a child.

My freshman year of high school, I had been hired to work at a small daycare within walking distance from the school. Spanking children had started to fade and a new way of raising children erupted in the late eighties and continued well into the nineties. Instead of spanking, we were encouraging to give time-outs and redirect.

I worked at a progressive center once in an upscale suburb of Detroit. Their philosophy had been to let children do whatever they wanted without any repercussions, long before we had the term, free range.

After seeing it all, I took an À la carte approach. I handpicked what I had felt were the greatest ways to raise a child. My practice came when I opened a daycare center out of my home. I wanted it to be organic. It would be a place for kids just as good as home, even better. I saved a percentage of openings for the children who needed it better than home.

One perk of an in-home daycare meant I could work from home. My kids would come home from school and I would be there for them. That appealed to me, because I  wanted to be the one who raised my kids.

It had been around this time we were told we needed a village to raise children. I didn’t need a village. I knew everything about taking care of a child. I knew how to feed them, keep them safe, teach them and most importantly, how to love them. I didn’t need no stinking village. Then came the day they placed my daughter in my arms for the first time; my mind went blank. I. Knew. Nothing.

I became a fierce mama bear. I kept her safe. I worshiped the ground she drooled on.  I stayed up with her every night when her coughing had been so bad her lips turned blue. I picked her up and dusted off her pants and told her to get back out there whenever she fell down. I cheered her every accomplishment and wiped every tear when she cried.

I stood by her side when her first boyfriend dumped her for another girl. Money had been tight but it didn’t stop her from looking like a princess at prom. I bawled for days when I dropped her off at college.

I never needed a village; I had raised a pretty smart and beautiful young lady who had been sent out into the real big world. I did it without a village. Or did I?

Village is a part of child rearing whether we want it or not. There are the everyday influences of friends and family, the time spent working at a job, afterschool activities, and let us not forget the influences of mass media.

Village is a learning of the real world, like the time she asked for a day off from work to go camping and her boss told her no because they needed her that day. Her music teacher was a part of her village. He gave her the gift of bravery every time she played her guitar in front of a crowd of strangers. The seniors citizens at her church are part of the village with their wisdom and sage advice told through their stories.

She evolved into the village when she saved money for a dog shelter or tipped the coffee barista fifty percent because, she knew how hard it is to bust tables. She was the village when she made free lunches for the kids in town who might not have had a lunch that day. She became the village when she cooked a casserole for her friend who just had a baby and had been well past sleep deprived.

A village is all encompassing and we are all the village.

I raised my daughter well. I’m beyond proud of her. She is out there in the village, right now, being awesome, because it took more than just me to raise her. It took a village.