*I’m looking at you IG*

Whenever I talk about moms being exhausted, I get the inevitable comments; IT’S THE PATRIARCHY! And the ever-present, LATE STAGE CAPITALISM!

I mean, yeah…duh.

But it always feels like a gratuitous comment. Cause are you like…cooking your kid’s eggs in the morning, actively thinking, “Shit. Here I am in late stage capitalism, gotta get to work now…”? I mean aren’t most of us just doing what needs to be done in the moment?

Of course, I do my best in the fight against both those two but honestly, at almost 58, I can say they’ve run in the background for my entire life so short of some cataclysmic things bringing down all of society…I don’t see it changing.

Me? I don’t complain about shit I can’t change. I’m in the business of fixing what I can. Sure, I can hold it in my head that this shit sucks. But also, I’m here to make the most of what I have. And in fact, I’m of the firm belief that moms are exhausted because they’re over-parenting.

I have to say this at some point so I’ll just say it now. I grew up extremely poor and I was also happy. Yes, I wished we had more at the time. And what I now know is that particular bar continually moves. Doesn’t matter much where you are in life…you’re gonna wish for more.

But it got me thinking about all this screaming about LATE STAGE CAPITALISM.

Because I’m thinking back on how things were back in my day…and how different things were. Not better, not worse, just different. And lest I start sounding like a boomer, I assure you. I’m aware things sucked and I’m certainly not trying to paint a blanket rosy picture of the past. More like a comparison to show how fast things changed.

This also has everything to do with my last two essays here about the nuclear family and the village. Because somewhere along the way, it really comes down to this: we just stopped sharing. And that’s when capitalism was able to really take off.

You can’t have capitalism run amok without consumerism that’s also run amok.

To be clear: Housing is brutally expensive in most places. Childcare is off the charts. Healthcare is insane. Education costs, utterly ridiculous. Corporate consolidation is real. Wages and productivity have diverged.

Like I’m not in the “have your coffee at home and you can afford a house” zone, here.

But there is another question we’re oddly reluctant to ask:

When did abundance become the minimum?

What if some of what we call “late-stage capitalism” is also the cumulative result of ordinary people continually choosing more convenience, more privacy, more stuff, and less sharing? Not instead of corporate power, wage stagnation, housing costs, consolidation…but alongside it.

When I was in high school (1982-86) having your own car as a teenager was a big fucking deal. Like rare. And it tended to be motor-head guys who knew how to fix a car up. It was a part of life to get dropped off. To negotiate one household car with three kid drivers. We walked, took buses, crowded more kids into a car than should possibly fit…and occasionally, we missed things.

Of course, some of those things were not cool or even legal. But the larger point is we had to share. There was scarcity of resources…which funny enough is the entire point behind THE VILLAGE.

These days though, I’m continually surprised that every new driver in a home warrants another car. I keep seeing back to school shopping as this major life event. Kids showing their hauls. Travel sports costing 2-5 thousand dollars a season.

But then also…why does life cost so much?

Of course, some of it genuinely costs more. But we also decided every individual member of a household requires an individual set of resources..

We stopped sharing.

Not just cars.

One lawn mower per house.
One snowblower per house.
One washer/dryer per house.

And of course, I understand why. But still it got me thinking...

In the 70s and 80s having your own bedroom was like FANCY. You know what was the biggest flex? A CANOPY BED. Society hadn’t even reached garage-fridge fancy, yet.

But somewhere along the way, we really decided kids needed their own bedrooms and in those bedrooms, their own phone, computer, and/or TV.

Things like tools that might once have been borrowed from a neighbor are delivered overnight because I need my own.

Even within the family, we’ve moved toward individual consumption units living under one roof.

Your food.
My food.
Your screen.
My screen.
Your schedule.
My schedule.
Your car.
My car.

I’ve been shouting from the rooftops that the antidote to late stage capitalism is community…the very village no one can seem to find lately.

Ten families sharing something = one sale.

Ten families believing they each require their own = ten sales.

A community becomes nuclear families. The nuclear family becomes individual consumers. And eventually even the child becomes a market.

They need their own bedroom, bathroom, device, water bottle, Stanley, skincare routine, sports equipment, wardrobe, snacks, streaming profile, extracurricular schedule...

Then we all look around at the staggering amount of money required to maintain contemporary “normal” life and say:

How the hell is anyone supposed to afford this?

So yes…some of the answer really is structural. No doubt. I’m not denying that.

But here’s an even more interesting thing to think about and this plays right into the needs of late stage capitalism: all this hyper-individualism requires zero friction.

Having one car means a lot of negotiation (and substantial kissing of mom’s ass).

Houses used to have one bathroom, two were for rich people…and if one of those had two SINKS? Man, you were really rich. But one bathroom meant waiting. And hurrying. And being considerate of other people in the household.

Getting a ride means working around somebody else’s schedule. Eating one dinner means sometimes eating something that isn’t your favorite.

Borrowing something means asking.

Now of course, individually these aren’t much of anything, right? But when we start stacking them it boils down to: practice living among other humans. Then capitalism comes along offering to remove every friction point:

Don’t wait. Don’t share. Don’t compromise. Don’t repair.

Don’t borrow. Don’t accommodate.

Don’t be inconvenienced.

Buy another one.

What I’ve been thinking about is when did convenience stop feeling luxurious and start feeling like a baseline human requirement?

What if the system didn’t merely sell us more things? What if it gradually changed our definition of enough?

When we consistently choose individual convenience over shared inconvenience, replacement over repair, delivery over waiting, private ownership over communal use, we’re feeding the machine we’re complaining about.

I’m pretty anti-placing the blame on single consumer use. I think no one needs to be a billionaire. I think we’re in a corporate oligarchy. I think capitalism works, unchecked capitalism does not. I think corporations can go fuck themselves. I think there’s unfettered greed and evil at the very and not so very top. I am in no way placing all the blame on us, the lowly peasants.

What I’m really interested in though is how we continually fuck ourselves and then be like: wtf happened?!? I like to unravel things to a semi root cause. I also hate when I feel like we’ve been socially engineered to our own demise. This definitely feels like that and we all fell for it.

Village and community are based on need and scarcity of resources. Now, we are all comfortable, like in our little Wall-E carts, but lonelier than ever.

When we insist on hyper-independence, we get screwed in the end. Oh. Yeah. And hyper-independence is a trauma response. Let’s sit on that one for a minute.

We have all heard the shit about The Village: Moms were never meant to do this alone. Everyone wants a village but no one wants to be a villager. Excuse me, but where’s my village? yadayadayada

I’ve noticed something that’s gotten increasingly under my skin lately. And that’s the expectation of what “the village” actually means. I saw a creator complaining about grandparents taking her kids for an afternoon. The whole reel was: I don’t want “the village” to give me a break from my kids…I want them to do all the other stuff like cleaning and laundry so I can spend time with my own damn kids.

Ma’am. You’re looking for paid help. That’s not the village.

I see this constantly in my work; the expectation that the village does housework and provides meals. Or babysits exactly when you want,exactly how you want it. Certainly, a strong village may come through during sickness, strife, or postpartum…Yes, villages shared labor. But when we reduce the village to labor…we completely miss what else it was doing. (I also know for sure that a good portion of moms I work with would, in fact, kill to have the grandparents take their kids for an afternoon.)

I have to be honest…I was starting to get pissy about this whole concept. I’ve always been good at village building, had strong women in my life that I could call upon…and not once did any of them come and clean my house, do laundry, or make meals.

But let’s take a minute to situate the timeline here. If you haven’t read my last essay, How did parenting get expertized, the full timeline is there. Since the scam known as the nuclea- family-hyper-individualized households was sold to us as a marketing campaign in the late 1940-50s, the village has been steadily deteriorating. So I’m going back to before the self-sufficient single family home became the bar.

The truth of the matter is that the village is dead. We’re not getting it back because we’ve almost all quietly agreed to the hyper-individualized lifestyle. The true village was multi-generational living, where yes, household tasks were shared. Children were looked after by all and mostly ignored; they had lots of freedom (neglect) but also took hefty part in the family life.

There was a big thing happening underneath all that.
The village was never to do your bidding.

The village was transmission.

You didn’t have to learn motherhood after becoming a mother because you had spent a lifetime around mothers, babies, children, grandmothers, aunties, neighbors. You absorbed what normal looked like. Not rules. Not “parenting advice.” But thousands of repetitions.

What babies do.
What three-year-olds can handle.
When to intervene.
When to ignore something.
How adults talk to children.
How children fit into adult life.
What isn’t an emergency.

You inherited a working model of family life without knowing you were learning it. I’m well aware this wasn’t all unicorn farts and rainbows, so hang tight with me.

Here’s where the lineage broke.

Nuclear-family isolation. Geographic mobility. Smaller families. Changing women’s roles. Technology. Professionalization. Generational rupture. All of it.

And importantly: some of those changes represented enormous freedom and progress.

We don’t have to pretend the old world was wonderful to acknowledge that it transmitted something the new world doesn’t.

The grandmother piece. Yep. For the most part, boomers.

We have to acknowledge that there was a generation of women who lived directly across an enormous cultural transition. Some experienced motherhood/domesticity as the life they were supposed to want while watching possibilities for women explode around them.

This is such a key piece for most of the moms I work with. One phrase I hear fairly consistently is, “I don’t think my mother ever wanted kids.” Have you seen the series Lessons in Chemistry? It takes place in the 50s, where a woman who has all the credentials to be a chemist, ends up as the host of a cooking show. There’s a scene with a live audience of women. They’re supposed to be there to learn how to cook better for their family but one woman stands up and upon questioning, reveals that she would have actually liked to have been a heart surgeon.

So, yeah. I do think a lot of women got stuck and squashed in the 50s and 60s. The potential for women to be more than wives and mothers was there. But some women couldn’t get out from under.

She was standing at the rupture too. This was systemic.

It’s not that boomer mothers failed to transmit it; the conditions that transmitted it were already breaking around them.

Some were miserable. Some didn’t want motherhood. Some absolutely adored motherhood. Some became incredible grandmothers. Some checked the fuck out.

But they were the hinge generation.

Some emerged saying: I did my time. Now it’s my life. But…we, the daughters, didn’t merely lose childcare…

We lost the transmission.

And on top of all of that, for many moms, while their mother might be present, she often becomes another relationship to manage. Many moms have told me that it’s like having another child. Or a major complaining, depressive, negative royal pain in the ass.

Yes. This is where the lineage broke. This is where the historical rupture became a personal mother-daughter wound.

I’m going to ask you to hold the dialectical here. We can have compassion for a person stuck in circumstances beyond their control. We can understand and still be pissed off. This is so important because we want to place our anger and frustration in the right place, otherwise it’s boomeranging around your heart and home.

I can’t state this enough: this started with the nuclear family being sold as the ideal. Our mothers were in the cross fire.

Now it’s modern moms. We put her alone in a house with a newborn. Oftentimes eschewing any help because once again, the ideal is only two people bonding with the baby. Postpartum is the most vulnerable time for a mother. And we’ve been so hoodwinked into thinking you should not have outside help. And/or outside help isn’t helping at all but a fucking pain in the ass, who expect the attention and to be waited on. I get that.

But this new mom hasn’t spent twenty years absorbing babies.

For a variety of reasons, she doesn’t have older women around her who know how to occupy the role.

And we tell her:

Trust your instincts.

WHAT FUCKING INSTINCTS?

She wasn’t supposed to invent all of this from instinct.

She was supposed to inherit some of it. See?? It’s not the village itself that is under this, it’s the transmission.

ENTER THE PARENTING INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.

When transmission disappears, instruction replaces it.

Books. Courses. Sleep consultants. Feeding experts. Parenting philosophies. Instagram accounts. TikTok. Scripts. Pediatric advice for ordinary family decisions.

We’re trying to replace relational knowledge absorbed over decades with information consumed individually through a screen.

Of course you are overwhelmed. You have more parenting information than any mother in history and potentially less inheritance.

But here’s where it gets really interesting:

The strays. That’s what I’m calling it. There are lingering strays in the loop.

There are still people carrying pieces of it. Me. I’m one of them. We had shitty situations but somehow still got the transmission. I had a horrific childhood but I was surrounded by women who sent the transmission. They had lots of fucking faults. But I got the transmission.

We’re the grandmothers. Aunties. Older mothers. Neighbors. Teachers. Weird women who walk into a room and somehow just know what to do.

And when a new mother encounters one, something happens.
She doesn’t necessarily remember having it.

She recognizes it.

And this is why you want to fucking HOWL.

It’s because you feel homesick for something you’ve never experienced.

The ache is the absence.

And the occasional person who still carries that old relational knowledge?

That’s the echo.

An echo is something that can still reach you after the original source is gone.

While yes, help with childcare and household shit would be lovely, I think most mothers are deeply missing this component: show me how to do this.

My own mother had an abundance of flaws. She had a solid community of strong girlfriends. None of them did parenting in any way that I would want to emulate.

This is important. Because this cannot become nostalgia for perfect grandmothers or some imaginary 1950s matriarchy.

My mother had limitations. But still there was transmission through all these women.

And because I was single,I couldn’t build the impermeable little nuclear-family fortress anyway. Pascal was in other people’s arms at 3 days old. I needed people.

But I also instinctively knew that people can be helpful even if they rub us the wrong way, have wildly different opinions. And are always going to have unsolicited advice. That is in fact the fucking village.

And only now…like right this minute…am I realizing:

I thought I was unusually good at building the village. Maybe I had simply received enough transmission to know what village was for.

This explains sooo much for me because I’ve been stuck in thinking: scripts are so stupid. Why is everyone just gathering so many tips and tricks? Why is food such a big ordeal? like just put food on a plate.

Oh.

Maybe “obvious” is sometimes just another word for successfully transmitted.

We’re not rejecting something we know.

Some of us never received it.

And here’s the trip. We cannot go backward. The village as it once was is dead.

Women have gained things worth keeping. And for sure, families escaped structures that hurt them. Autonomy. Boundaries. Choices. These all matter.

The question isn’t:
How do we recreate the past?

It becomes: What was worth transmitting? And how do we begin transmitting it again?

Because maybe you didn’t get the grandmother.

Maybe nobody taught you.

Maybe the lineage really did break behind you.

But…
you can become the beginning of the lineage in front of you.

I work with moms who don’t need more information. They’re being water-boarded with information. But they struggle to use the information they have. It’s gotten increasingly worse over the years. If you know me at all, you know I’m a root cause kind of girl. I need to know the why of things. And how far back shit goes.

In the last few years, I’ve become obsessed with Mom Authority. And just how many moms are lacking it.

But first, let me introduce a parallel idea that will all tie in nicely soon enough. I have always thought the nuclear family was sus. As an always-single mom, I realized early on that even though it was only me, I had much more of a thriving village than my married friends with kids. Yes, it wasn’t always easy being a single mom but I was happier and more grounded than my friends. I realized this is because I had no illusion of a 50/50 split and I had no luxury to hole up and depend on one person.

I’ve created so much content on the village and why it’s gone and what we can do to get it back. But I see people struggle with the idea of village next to the hyper-individualized nuclear family taking precedent. We’ve all heard that everyone wants to have a village but no one wants to be a villager. The roots go way deeper than that.

The OG village was a necessity. Because we needed to share capacity and mostly resources. The village used to be multigenerational living…which also means putting up with cranky relatives who give unsolicited advice. And to be sure, some truly toxic and dangerous situations. But the village was never easy, free, or of your exact choosing…and liking for that matter.

So this is where my mini deep dive began. I went looking for “when did experts take over parenting” and found a whole lot more. Let’s look at the time line:

1950s–60s: The Ideal

This is where the image of the nuclear family gets sold. Prior to this, homes were largely multigenerational. After WWII, the economy needed a boost. So the government (oh no! not the government! how shocking.) started to push the ideal of single family living.

Postwar prosperity. GI Bill. Cheap suburban housing. Consumer boom. TV enters every home.

Donna Reed, Leave It to Beaver, Better Homes & Gardens. This is the Norman Rockwell trope. The vacuous smile on the mom-in-an-apron. Funny enough, I learned in another deep dive that more moms stayed home than any other time in history!

It was also when valium was heavily marketed as “Mommy’s Little Helper”… Sit with that for a long minute.

The message wasn’t just “be a mom.”

It was, “ a good mother creates a self sufficient household.” Self sufficient. Again, sit with that for a minute because the village started disappearing way farther back than we all assume.

1970s–80s: Reality Hits

The ideal stayed. But reality changed.

Women entered the workforce in much greater numbers for a mix of reasons:

Second-wave feminism expanded educational and career opportunities, inflation in the 1970s squeezed household budgets, housing costs rose, divorce rates increased, more women wanted careers, and many families simply needed two incomes.

But...

Nobody removed anything from Mom’s job description.

Instead we added another job. She was expected to become both:
The picture perfect Donna Reed and a modern professional.

This is where “having it all” emerges. And we kinda know how that fucked us.

1980s–90s: Parenting Professionalizes

This is where things get really interesting. The Internet as we know it, wasn’t there.

But experts absolutely were.

There was an explosion of: parenting books, child psychologists on television, parenting magazines, developmental milestones, early childhood intervention, educational toys, Baby Einstein-style products (late 90s), parenting classes

The message slowly shifted from: raise your child to optimize your child

Parenting became increasingly technical. Knowledge that once flowed through families started flowing through institutions.

Grandma wasn’t necessarily wrong. She was increasingly viewed as outdated.

But still, all this parenting information wasn’t in our face all day, every day. Maybe you had a friend who recommended a book or a magazine. But it wasn’t information shoved down your throat.

2000-2016

The World Wide Web aggressive casts its net. This isn’t when the problem begins; it’s when it becomes exponential.

Instead of one pediatrician, you are hearing from 50. Instead of one parenting book recommended by a friend, you have 10,000 at your fingertips, instead of your mother disagreeing with you, you feel the weight 4 million strangers judging your decisions.

The mechanism is the same. But volume explodes.

2016-2020

Sarah Ockwell Smith writes about gentle parenting.
It was always intended to be about authoritative parenting. Which means strong ass boundaries with kind, firm leadership (aka: Mom Authority).

However the internet ran wild with it and it got misconstrued as permissive parenting. IMHO, this was one of the worst things to happen to parenting.

I want to be clear: while this totally fucked up parenting, it was a societal error. I truly and honestly believe we all, as moms, set out to right the wrongs in how we were parented. I think we all over shot and fucked up with the best of intentions and the most love in our hearts.

But with permissive parenting running amok, we truly did need parenting experts and help, because permissive parenting has awful outcomes for everyone involved.

2020-2026
A perfect storm of global pandemic and the explosion of Tik Tok which
then fueled the short form content, spawned the influencer mom, and the absolute firehose of information, targeted at vulnerable, isolated moms.

Short-form content is really when it all went haywire. Working with families consistently over the last 25 years, I can honestly say that kids born through or after the pandemic are built different.

But they’re not. Moms are built different. Short-form content is tied with misconstrued gentle parenting for the worst thing to happen to Mom Authority.

We also built para-social relationships which can feel like a village but are not.

Did intuition disappear?

No. But nature hates a vacuum. When we remove a mom’s community, add higher expectations on her, then isolate her, with a shit ton of experts and information flying in her face…

Confidence gets outsourced. Instinct leaves the building.

Because surely with so many experts opinions, I can’t possibly know more about my own kid. I do believe Mothers still have instincts. I think we’re all just increasingly taught to verify every instinct against external authorities.

And I don’t want to be that external authority. I’d much rather help you find yours.