The Village Was Never a Group Chat

My friend Alexis Contos sent me an essay this week with a note that said, more or less, this is your whole thing.

It's by Chelsey Scaffidi, on her Substack The Mother Years, and the title is "I love you, but I'm not your village."

I met Chelsey at a Breadwinners event. She wrote a book, The Mother Year, she is awesome, and the two of us ended up in the back of an Uber in Nashville talking about exactly this: village versus community.

I read it standing in my kitchen and I did not put my phone down until the end.

She said the quiet part

Here is the line I keep coming back to:

"A village, at least as we seem to invoke it when we talk about motherhood, doesn't just witness the load. It carries some of it."

Chelsey has community. Real friends, other moms, the voice notes from the car, the dinners when everyone can make it. She loves them. They love her.

And most of them are not her village, and she is not theirs.

Not because anyone is a bad friend. Because, in her words, "they're drowning in their own Tuesday. How exactly are they supposed to save me from mine?"

I wrote almost the same thing to my newsletter list in October, the week I landed from Nashville on four hours of sleep with 90 people coming to my house the next day. I have an amazing community. But my village is the person who can pick up the sick kid when I absolutely can't leave. The person who feeds my family when I land at 1 and dinner is at 4:30.

So reading her write it all down, a few weeks after we said it out loud in the back of a car, felt like being handed a mirror.

Empathy is not childcare

That's hers too, and it might be the best four words in the piece.

"A dinner reservation is not dinner on the table. Someone texting How are you holding up? is not someone walking through the door and saying Give me the baby. Go lie down."

I talk to families every week on info calls, and this is the gap almost every one of them is standing in. They did what they were told. They found the moms' group. They built the friendships. They are surrounded by people who care.

And the laundry is still a mountain, the forms are still unsigned, and nobody noticed the birthday party is Saturday.

Chelsey's line for it: they aren't missing connection. They're missing capacity.

I have a name for the same thing from the other direction. The SUPPORT CEILING is when you still have more in you, but you don't have the support around you to actually use it. Her essay is what that ceiling feels like from inside the group chat.

The part people get judged for

Then she does the brave thing. She says her village is small, and "a meaningful part of it is paid."

Her husband. Their nanny. Their house cleaner. Her parents and in-laws when they can.

And she names the look that comes with it. We tell mothers they can't do it alone, then raise an eyebrow when the help has a name and an hourly rate.

I spent a LOT of years believing this kind of support wasn't for someone like me. I had the spreadsheet, 23 hours a week of running our home on top of a full-time job, and I still waited months before I let myself hire someone, because paying for help felt like admitting I couldn't handle my own life.

That gap, between knowing you need help and feeling allowed to ask for it, is the thing I spend most of my days trying to close. We call it the permission gap. Chelsey just wrote the best description of it I've read this year without ever using the term.

Where I'd push her essay one step further

The village she describes, the old one, was never a feeling. It was a system of shared labor. Someone cooked. Someone held the baby. Someone noticed the kid outgrew his shoes and dealt with it.

The reason the modern version keeps collapsing is that we kept the warm feeling and dropped the system. Nobody owns anything. So it all defaults back to one person, usually mom, who then gets told to go make more friends.

What actually changes the logistics of your life, to borrow her phrase, is ownership. Someone who holds a whole piece of running your home, start to finish, without you managing the handoff.

Sometimes that's a partner who truly takes the mornings. Sometimes it's a grandmother ten minutes away. Sometimes it's a neighbor with real room in her week. And sometimes it's someone you hire for 15 to 20 hours a week, which is how most of the families we work with start. Not a staff. One person, a few days, who owns the parts you choose to hand off. (If you want the long version of what that person actually does, I wrote it up here: what is a house manager.)

Chelsey is right that the ability to pay for that should trouble us more than whether a mother found the right friend group. I'd add one thing. The old village was never free either. It ran on the unpaid hours of women who had no other option. Putting a wage on that work is not the problem. Pretending it was ever free is.

Her question is the right one

She ends with a better question than "have you found your village?"

"What is actually on your plate, and who can help carry it?"

That is, almost word for word, the first thing we do on an info call. Write the whole list down. The visible stuff and the thinking behind it. Then decide what you keep, what you share and what you drop. Then look at what's left and ask who could own it.

Having support doesn't make you immune to being overwhelmed. It gives you more capacity to handle the overwhelm when it comes. That's the village. It was never the group chat.

Go read Chelsey's essay. Send it to the friend who keeps telling you to find your village. Then, if the list on your plate is longer than the people who can carry it, come talk to me.

Sources

• •Chelsey Scaffidi, "I love you, but I'm not your village", The Mother Years (Substack), November 2026: https://chelseyscaffidi.substack.com/p/i-love-you-but-im-not-your-village