sarahmichelef

Not too long after M and I were married (probably around the time Josh & Jacy moved to Cambridge), he commented that he thought it would be lovely to share a house with them at some point.  At the time, I was so opposed to the idea that it wasn't even funny - I had recently spent 5 years (my senior year of HS and all of college) living with roommates, not all of them of my own choosing, and often with moderate to major conflict.  I wasn't interested in sharing space with anyone but him, even theoretically.

And then we had TRex and moved to a city where we knew no one.  It's no secret that the first year to eighteen months that we were here were really REALLY hard for me.  Super-extraordinarily, soul-crushingly hard.  I don't make friends all that easily, and I was working from home most of the time; efforts I did make to form relationships with people didn't pan out (the Itinerant Sociologists Club of Buffalo, trying to socialize with acquaintances from baby swimming lessons and/or toddler gym class, the neighbors down the street who always say "we should get together" but then nothing ever happens).  Over time we got to be friendlier with SCA folks (hi kiersey, hi rapierlady) and started to have some semblance of a social life - me being head of the textile guild helped me feel like I had something of a group of friends.

But I keep coming back to that idea of "community", the impulse that I assume was at the heart of M's comment years earlier.  The clichéd "it takes a village" came up in our discussion of child-free/breeder issues a couple of weeks ago.  More and more I'm coming around to the idea that it really DOES take a village (a village where everyone's on board with it being a village, of course), and that a village is important not just for those of us with kids. 

At this point, I am to some extent attempting to CREATE that village, that tribe.  No, I'm not in a place where I want to have a big communal house.  But I could see a world in which a number of families came together for a huge group meal once or twice a month.  I am cultivating, or attempting to cultivate, friendships with like-minded families (the family of TRex's friend J being the most notable example - it helps that they live only a couple of blocks away).  This is at least part of the reason that I'm excited that the P family have moved to Buffalo, even though they live probably 10 minutes from us by car. This is why I bothered chasing down the contact information of a local woman we met at a wedding last weekend.

I will build my village.  Will they come?