When our big energy isn't enough

What's needed for community

Before the pandemic, I was working hard at piecing together a sense of community for my family. We were home educating, had always done, and I’d gone from feeling quite isolated in Bristol to living out the mission I set myself mid-moving when the kids were five, two and baby. 

I’d decided that I was going to be the person to make the first move, to invite people over, to make things happen. And I did. Our weeks were full of playdates, home education groups and activities. It was exhausting to organise.

I found it stressful approaching every week with my phone and doing the dance of texting people to put things in the diary: enough so everyone was guaranteed seeing a friend but not too many that the week was too full. It meant never knowing how life was going to pan out week to week.

Home education groups were hard too. They felt unwieldy, often with a lack of clarity about how responsibility was managed, how decisions were made or even any shared agreements at all. 

I often left groups feeling overstimulated and while my kids loved being with a bigger circle of people, I could see that meeting up one to one yielded deeper connections, generally.

Photo by Levi Guzman on Unsplash

I hadn’t realised how burnt out I was by the whole thing until the lockdowns started. Amidst the tangle of emotions - worry, anger, grief - there was a tiny bit of relief. 

I could get off the hamster wheel for a while. While it hurt to cross things out of the diary, there was also release.

Instead, enforced time at home allowed me to reflect and consider what I wanted life to look like when the world opened up again. I knew I could not go back to life as it was before, feeling like I was single handedly building our life from scratch each week.