Mothers tend to assume the majority of child-rearing responsibility. But without communities and multigenerational living setups we wouldn’t have survived as a species
My husband, Dave, and I welcomed a third child into the family in July, and spend much of our days flinging kiddos back and forth, relying heavily on a network of relatives and paid help, and plotting Nasa-level strategies to get out the door. The other morning, as Dave was on his first business trip in almost two years, I found myself nursing the baby while scrambling eggs for my kindergartner and cajoling my preschooler to stop sucking on her marshmallow scratch-and-sniff marker. As I deftly transferred the eggs to a plate, ever so lightly steaming the back of the baby’s head, I flashed back to a conversation I’d had before he was born.
Back then, during the early days of the pandemic, we’d moved in with my parents, something decided upon after their doctor forbade my mother and father from passing the door jamb. We quarantined separately, then hunkered down together for six months. Despite its complications, the experience was wonderful for all three generations, and particularly so for us in the middle, who can always use extra sets of loving hands for baby wrangling. When I found out I was pregnant again, and with the impending tsunami of three-on-two parenting headed my way, I started poking around to see how other people were doing it.
Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age
