They are saying it takes a village to boost a baby.
For some divorced and single moms which means close-knit communities dubbed “mommunes.”
Kristin Batykefer and her now 4-year-old daughter moved into her two friends’ four-bedroom home within the Jacksonville, Florida area when she lost her marketing job and her marriage failed.
Her best friend, Tessa Gilder, also went through a divorce and moved into the house, bringing along her two kids, now ages 5 and 1.
While some of these living arrangements are nothing latest, especially in nonwhite communities, they’ve grown in popularity amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Women can share expenses and help one another with childcare.
“In Latino cultures, there’s this concept of a co-mother — a one who supports you and helps you raise your kids,” Grace Bastidas, editor-in-chief of Parents.com, told the Latest York Times.
“At the peak of the pandemic, all of us began creating these pods of individuals, so that is just one other iteration of that sort of partnership.”
This also signifies that Batykefer’s and Gilder’s daughters — who occur to be the identical age — all the time have one other kid to play with.
Batykefer herself grew up in a mommune where her mom and aunt raised her sister and cousin.
“We were told it takes a village, but it surely’s not all the time there, and single mothers especially are juggling rising costs of living and reduced childcare options,” she told the Times. “This is a component of the larger trend of fogeys stretching traditional boundaries of what a family is, and taking matters into their very own hands to seek out creative solutions.”
Documenting the perks of mommune life on TikTok has also gained interest in the approach to life. In a clip posted in December with over 1.2 million views, Batykefer claimed the opposite women stepped as much as make her fresh-baked cookies, vegetable soup, and taken care of her child while she was “sick AF.”
“Once I had to depart my husband, all I could take into consideration was how I now needed to work out find out how to do all the things by myself — buy a house by myself, pay my bills by myself, and lift my child by myself,” she told the publication.
“I never thought of finding one other single mother to live with and do it together. We just fell into it. But now, it’s like, why isn’t it more common for us to affix forces?”
In Batykefer’s most up-to-date TikTok, she claimed that live-in mothers also get to experience concert events, movie nights, and residential salon days together on weekends when their kids are with their estranged partners.
“That is your sign to start out a mommune,” she wrote on top of a video of the ladies in swimsuits, taking in a sunset.
