It’s Thursday morning at 4:00 a.m. You know your alarm is two hours away from going off, and another day of solo parenting while working full-time is about to begin. Lying next to you is your four-year-old son, who crawled into bed an hour ago, and through the monitor, you hear your eight-month-old start to cry again. It’s been going on for three hours.
Your husband has been on a work trip since Monday and won’t be home until tomorrow. You also found out earlier this week that your youngest has another ear infection, which explains why he’s been waking for hours every night. You know he’s in pain and needs to stay home today to rest. You also know you’re on day four of a back-to-back calendar at work.
You start to get anxious. You toss and turn, already overwhelmed, because you’re not sure how you’re going to do it all again. You finally close your eyes… and your alarm goes off.
Through a flood of tears, you think: This would be so much easier if our village lived next door.
People say it takes a village to raise a child, and we have a village. The best village. They just happen to live three hours away, which means our support system looks like text messages from people who would help in a heartbeat if they could. It looks like grandparents on FaceTime during bedtime, talking to my older child while my husband and I try to tag-team the baby’s routine. And it looks like relying on daycare every single day. Honestly, raising kids without family nearby completely reshapes what support looks like.
I’m grateful for our people. Deeply. But doing the day-to-day without anyone nearby comes with a mental load I never understood until I was in the thick of it. The juggling of schedules, meltdowns, groceries, careers, and the quiet wish that someone, anyone, lived close enough to say, “Hey, I’ve got them for an hour. Go breathe.”
I don’t share this to complain. I share it because I think a lot of moms carry this quietly: the gratitude for a village, and the grief of not having it close. Sometimes I wonder if my husband and I unintentionally make our lives harder by living out of state. When I get on social media and see friends back home with grandparents nearby, on another weekend getaway, a random date night, or Sunday family dinners, I can’t help but feel envious.
Most advice I hear is, “Why don’t you just move home?” Or I read suggestions that say you should “redefine your village.” And while I know those are meant to be helpful, it’s not always that simple.
Maybe we’ll move home someday. But right now, the numbers just don’t work with the housing market and cost of living back home. And as for redefining our village, our friends nearby are in the same boat, with family far away too. We are eternally grateful for our daycare teachers, but that support only covers the workday. Finding and vetting a babysitter you trust feels like another weight on an already heavy mental load, and not to mention another expense on top of the already obscene cost of childcare.
So, what do we do?
I’m not sure I’ve figured out the answer yet. What I do know is that raising kids without family nearby forces you to get creative about finding space to breathe.
For my husband and me, it looks like constant divide-and-conquer. It looks like knowing what the other person needs that day or week to refill their bucket, like a workout, a thirty-minute nap, or a night out with friends. It also looks like using PTO while still sending our kids to daycare, not for a vacation, but just to catch up on life and get housework done uninterrupted.
Since date nights don’t really exist for us right now, we take what we can get. On the occasional Friday when we can wrap up work early, we’ll head to a restaurant nearby and split an appetizer before we pick up the kids. It’s not glamorous, but it’s something. It’s us trying.
Mostly, it looks like my husband and I being teammates.
I hope someday when I look back on my motherhood journey, I don’t only remember the long days of exhaustion or the nights I wished my village lived next door and could give me a break. I hope I look back and see what my husband and I were able to do on our own, and how we showed up for our kids, gave them the best childhood we could, and stayed in it together through it all.
As I wrote this, I wondered if there was supposed to be a lesson in it. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that isn’t really the point.
The point is for the moms raising their kids without their village next door to feel seen. You are not alone. You’re not ungrateful. You’re not dramatic. You’re doing something really hard, and you’re doing it every single day.
I think what makes raising kids without family nearby so complicated is that it’s not a lack of love. It’s a lack of proximity. And those are two very different things when you’re in the thick of motherhood.
