Parenting without a Village

PIN FOR LATER

I don’t talk much about this, because I’ve always tried so hard to keep the mask in place. My neurodivergant/traumatised brain has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of keeping up the illusion that everything is fine. It’s been a survival mechanism for longer than I can remember. It does mean though, that everyone actually thinks everything is fine, when I am drowning.

Hyper-independence makes it so damn hard to reach out and ask for help. To let anyone in. To trust and form relationships.

This weekend really brought it all into focus. In all the healing work I’ve been quietly doing over the last two, impossibly hard years, I know that the biggest obstacle I have is to stop masking and just be. It’s proved to be far easier said than done.

This weekend I was sick. There’s nothing new there, living with a chronic illness for the past two years this isn’t unfamiliar territory. I’m used to being ill, used to not being able to plan ahead or commit as I just can’t guarantee I’ll be well enough to do whatever it is I want to do. This weekend was particularity bad. 36 hours bed bound, the most intense migraine I’ve had a in while, unable to eat or drink. And a reminder: there’s no one to call. No backup plan. No safety net. No “can you take them for a few hours so I can sleep.” There isn’t a village waiting quietly in the background to catch me.

The quiet realisation hit me this weekend, and amidst the pain came grief and loneliness. This wasn’t my plan to be so isolated whilst surrounded by so many people. Single parenting without a support network isn’t chaos, it’s endurance. It’s doing the everyday things everyone else does, but without the soft places to land. It’s carrying responsibility without relief. It’s knowing that even when your body gives in, the system doesn’t. Children still need feeding. Life still moves. Emotions still rise. The day still asks things of you.

Sometimes, from the outside, it can look like strength. Like competence. Like coping. “You’re amazing, I don’t know how you do it.” But inside, it’s often just persistence. You keep going because there’s no alternative. You adapt because you have to. You learn how to function through exhaustion. You learn how to carry things silently.

Then sometimes, like this weekend, you lie in the dark, sick and still responsible, and the absence of a village feels louder than anything else.

Building and maintaining friendships isn’t simple for everyone. Being neurodivergent, carrying trauma, living in a body and nervous system shaped by survival changes how connection works. It makes trust slower. It makes closeness more complicated. It can make reaching out feel overwhelming, and staying connected feel fragile, even when the longing for connection is real and deep.

It’s not that I don’t want community. It’s that sometimes my nervous system doesn’t know how to hold it safely yet. I’m just human. Parenting without a village is hard. Single parenting with chronic illness is hard. Doing it alone doesn’t make you noble, it just makes you tired. Wanting support doesn’t mean you’re weak.

Underneath this, there is a longing for community. For families around me. For a life where checking in is normal, where reaching out isn’t awkward, and where you don’t have to be in crisis for someone to show up.

I long for shared kitchens and muddy wellies by the door, for borrowed sugar and last minute dinners, for the kind of everyday closeness where someone notices when you’ve gone quiet and asks if you’re okay, and where people have your back without needing an explanation.

I long for the kind of village that isn’t loud or performative, but steady and human and present, woven quietly into ordinary life rather than appearing only when things fall apart.

And the absence of that feels quiet too. Not dramatic. Not catastrophic. Just a soft ache that sits in the background of life, like a low hum you only really hear when everything else goes still. A noticing. A space. A sense of something missing.