The time is fast approaching where we will close the doors to join Women’s Circle 2026 for a year. What is Women’s Circle? It’s the founding membership of Matriarchal Blessing where a badass group of women meet each month to watch movies together and discuss patriarchy. It’s all online. Join from anywhere. You have until February 24 to register. All details and discussion questions found here. (Note that Women’s Circle is the founding membership tier and is different than the regular paid membership).
Three years ago, the then Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued a Surgeon General’s warning that Americans are lonelier than ever.
And loneliness isn’t just a bummer, but really, really bad for your health. The loneliness epidemic is a health crisis. Something must be done. So said the Surgeon General.
A year later, Vivek put out another Surgeon General’s warning that American parents are at their wits end burdened stress and overwhelm. There are more demands on parents than ever, coupled with a lower than ever level of support. It has become a health crisis. Something must be done.
Vivek is not the only one reporting on these two significant health crises.
A few headlines on the epidemic of overwhelmed parents:
A few headlines on the loneliness epidemic:
On one hand, parents are stressed beyond belief. On the other, people are lonelier than ever.
Can we use one problem to solve the other?
Can lonely people become less so by forging community with and helping out overwhelmed parents?
I can’t wait to introduce you to Lisa Sibbett of The Auntie Bulletin, who through her writing and actual life circumstance tackles this question. (Spoiler alert: her answer is yes!)
When I first came across Lisa’s writing last year, I felt like whooping and hollering and standing atop my chair yelling, ‘HEY EVERYONE! LOOK AT HOW LISA IS LIVING! LISTEN TO WHAT LISA IS SAYING!”
After reading Lisa, it seems so obviously silly how we divide women into two camps: the “I have kids and I am completely drowning in kid-dom” camp on one hand and the “I don’t have my own kids and therefore have no children whatsoever in my life” camp on the other.
It’s just so extreme.
We could clearly use a middle road.
This becomes especially clear when listening to how intense and gut-wrenching the decision to have kids can be:
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Take this 29 year old woman who walks us through her daily mental merry-go-round of the breakdown of what it would cost for her to have children.
“I’m one of the lucky ones who has a good job, but good god how is anybody supposed to do this? Should I just not? I go back and forth every single day… figuring out how to actually have babies is so fucking hard. You are constantly weighing the pros and cons.”
Or this woman who says she mostly wants kids, but she is terrified of losing herself and her mental health.
A few of the comments on her video read:
“I mostly don’t want kids, but then I think, what do I do with my life then? I definitely don’t care enough about work? Is that it??”
“I’m terrified of losing my mind if I have kids. It happened to my mom. She loves me, but she was never the same.”
“I want to have like an 8 year old, but I don’t want a baby. That’s my barrier.”
“I can’t imagine growing old without a family, but I also can’t imagine raising a child.”
Wouldn’t it be great if the choice didn’t have to be between giving up everything because you wanted kids in your life on one hand OR having no one under the age of 20 in your life at all because you decided you didn’t want to give up everything to kids on the other?
I’m not saying alloparenting1 —caring for a child when you are not the parent— would solve all of these women’s problems. And I’m certainly not saying that women who are clear that they don’t want kids in their lives should be forced to. But I am saying that the fact that alloparenting never comes up as an option?? Ever?
That sucks!
For those who want to have children in their lives, but not all the immense packaging that comes with them, it would be such a nice option! To be able to keep your body, traveling, hobbies, finances AND have kids regularly in your weekly life?
And the benefit of alloparenting to parents is even more obvious. When I was absolutely drowning with babies and toddlers, if I had had an auntie to help share the load?!?! I can’t even imagine the difference it would have made on my sanity. Makes me want to cry thinking of it.
Here’s how Lisa puts it:
“Overwhelmed parents need more kin – more community to help care for their kids and give them breaks and have their backs. Lonely adults need more kin, too – more community to love and be loved by, and to provide ongoing daily connection and meaning in their lives. We need to figure out ways for the overwhelmed parents and the lonely people to find each other, get to know each other, and start to treat each other a bit like family. It won’t be easy. The path isn’t clear. It’s obviously not for everyone. But I think it’s possible that a lot of overwhelmed parents and a lot of lonely people could connect up, build kinship, and help address each other’s central problems.” - A Tale of Two Surgeon General’s Warnings
Lisa lives in a co-housing community, and while she doesn’t have kids of her own, kids are in her daily life. She picks kids up from school on a weekly basis, has dinner with them 4-5 times a week. Kids are regularly in and out of her house.
After reading The Auntie Bulletin, the answer seems so obvious and beautiful, it’s shocking that this isn’t more common.
But let’s hear Lisa’s story and wisdom in her own words.
Feel free to watch or listen to our full conversation above, or read the edited, abbreviated snippets below:
Lisa: “Initially my partner and I had not intended to have kids. Then I went through that experience a lot of people do where I suddenly did want kids.
Then I had a bunch of miscarriages in a row, and we weren’t able to have children.
We eventually decided not to pursue IVF or adoption. And that was a painful experience. We spent a long time kind of in this ambivalent—should we have kids or should we not have kids—place.
Should we keep pursuing this thing that has been painful and stressful and hard or not?
One of the things that really allowed me to let go of having children, which was the right choice for me, was to know that I could have kids in my life anyway…
I have this friend who I’ve known since second grade. He married an urban planner who studied co-housing urban planning in Denmark and Sweden.
She was really interested in co-housing.
I was really interested in co-housing.
At the time, my partner and I lived in an apartment for 10 years, I almost never talked to my neighbors. I’m an introvert. We never hosted anybody.
(And now we have six to 10 people eating dinner at our house twice a week and it’s great…)
But women get placed in this binary where either we have kids or we don’t.
And women who don’t have kids get placed in two buckets—we are either involuntarily childless which is seen as a sad, tragedy (and very often is.) Or we are sort of carefree, childless people who travel a lot and have a lot of disposable income and don’t give a shit about children.
And for me, none of those categories felt like they were a description of my life.
I felt like, well, I’m not childless. I’m not child free, but I’m also not a mom.
I’m trying to cultivate a child-full life.
… which feels sort of illegible to other people.
It’s been through writing my newsletter that I’ve come to a more explicit understanding of what my partner and I have chosen to do, and what it could mean for society if it were more normalized to make this kind of choice.
It would be socially transformative if we had a society where auntie-hood was legitimized as a really good path for women and people of all genders.
Me: Say more about that—what do you think would change in society if this was more normalized, accessible, and publicized—if it was an option for girls to be able to envision a future like this from a young age?
Lisa: I have a lot of negative stuff to say about the compulsory nuclear family ideal that we get kind of defaulted into in our society.
It’s so isolating…
So much of both the parental overwhelm and the loneliness and disconnect and crises of meaning and all of those problems that we have as a society come from this structure of compulsory, default nuclear family.
It coerces us into this container of self-reliance and independence where it is seen as a weakness to ask for help.
We are looking out for our family and no one else. And any difficulties that arise in our family are ours alone to deal with.
If we lived in a society that really had reciprocal interdependent community, we wouldn’t need to do what the nuclear family has to do, which is buy its way out of all the problems: pay lots of money for childcare, pay lots of money for your own house, pay lots of money for all the tools and resources that otherwise could be shared.
We could be living more economically and sustainable lives together.
But also more spiritually, emotionally and physically supported lives.
A lot of women are recognizing after a decade+ of marriage that they got married to somebody who wasn’t really willing to be an equal partner, especially as a parent. They defaulted into a system that isn’t serving them.
And I just wish that young women could feel like they have more options than just defaulting into this nuclear family.
Me: We’re definitely on the same page about the nuclear family. Its so overburdened. This one unit is supposed to meet every one of our human needs—connection, safety, financial, community, intimacy—everything is supposed to be met by the nuclear family. Which is why parents often put so much pressure on their young adult children to settle down— that’s our society’s one path it provides for community—for guaranteed human connection.
And then people feel the need to stay with this one person they chose when they were maybe 20 because if you leave, there goes your best shot at human connection our society hands us.
I would love to see how the world would be different if stories like yours were way more mainstream. Really strong examples of community who have each other’s backs regardless of whether or not you are partnered or have your own children. Your ability to have “a people” not being contingent on those things. It’s so inspiring.
So take us through your weekly life in your co-housing situation.
Lisa: Four of five nights a week we all have dinner together— my partner and I, our friends with kids and one other couple, we all live next door to each other or in each other’s basements.
We take turns cooking, so I get meals cooked for me a few dinners a week—which I cannot recommend highly enough. My fridge right now is full of food that other people cooked for me.
You feel a lot of security and support when you have a lot of good food ready to eat, you know?
So we eat meals together.
I pick up the kids after school one day a week. They come over and hang out.
The kids are in and out of our house when they feel like it on a pretty regular basis. And when the weather is nice, all the kids in the neighborhood are in and out of our house when they feel like it.
We combined our backyards, so in our backyard we have a tree fort, trampoline and rope swing that all the kids in the neighborhood like to come hang out on, which is delightful.
Something that is really nice for me and my partner who don’t have kids is that we know all the families in the neighborhood.
We also get to know the families at our public school because of being an auntie to these kids.
Then when we’re walking around we say hi to lots of people. We get to know everybody. Kids are a great access point to community. It’s really lovely.
If someone’s car breaks down, there’s always a car to borrow.
We have a shared lawn mower, shared chest freezer, shared backyard shed.
So we save on resources.
There’s this narrative that community is so hard and there has to be a lot of sacrifice and friction, but also and less discussed—the more community you have the easier your life gets.
People cook for you and can help solve problems and people can loan you stuff you need.
And you feel connected and supported.
That has really been true for me.
It makes my life much smoother.
And don’t get me wrong we are having a rough and intense time in our country right now, but when I read about people feeling isolated and disconnected and unsupported, I just don’t experience that very much.
I know other people who live in community-oriented ways who also don’t experience that.
I wish we had more of the kind of infrastructure and policy in place to help everybody have more access to community living set ups.
If you want to hear Lisa answer exactly how her co-housing community got started, what its like for an introvert in a co-housing community and how they deal with conflict—listen to the full interview above.
And be sure to follow Lisa Sibbett to hear about even more inspiring people living in community with each other. She has a monthly column called “Such Interesting Aunties” where she interviews all different kinds of “Aunties.” Just this week she wrote about a queer parenting collective in Queens. More of this in the world please!
And if you are looking for a little community of your own to discuss patriarchy with each month- consider joining our Women’s Circle :) Registration closes Feb 24.
Alloparenting is caregiving where individuals other than the biological parents provide care, protection, and resources to offspring.
