WHY WE LOVE A MOMMUNE
For mothers in unequal heterosexual partnerships, mommunes can seem like the answer to everything
I’m not sure if you saw the TikTok that went viral towards the end of last year. A mother posted about how she was “sick AF” but because she lived in a “mommune,” someone had baked her favorite cookies, taken her kids to the park, and cooked her soup for dinner.
The online reaction was immediate. Her post went viral with thousands of comments like: OMG I want that! and How do I find a mommune?
The poster, Kristin Batykefer, doesn’t recommend taking her path, which included a husband who cheated and a need to escape a toxic situation quickly. But from a cursory glance, it seems most mommunes begin with heartbreak, in other words: divorce. A woman finds herself single and in a precarious financial situation, and a fellow mom who has been there offers to take her in, or to join her in attempting to buy a house together. Mommunes are created out of desperation and the failure of the nuclear family to live up to its promise. Yet to mothers who find themselves in unequal heterosexual partnerships, mommunes can seem like the answer to everything.
“...it seems most mommunes begin with heartbreak”
I am sure that issues arise within mommunes (I recently interviewed Holly Harper on my Substack about her experiences). Pick your hard, right? But what I think so many moms are relating to when they dream about joining a mommune is something that I have written about before. The idea that mothers wish they could be mothered. Wives sometimes wish they had a wife. (Read Why I Wish I Had a Wife here).
Why do women want wives? Because men are still not socialized to do the nurturing, the care, the sweep of what might be needed. Alison Daminger, a sociologist who studies gender roles, wrote about this in a post called “He’ll never see it.” “Women consistently perceive more ‘possible actions’ (i.e., affordances) related to household tasks, and those affordances spur them more insistently toward action.”
She gives us a helpful example to illustrate what those fancy words mean:
“Imagine walking into your kitchen in search of an afternoon snack. On the way to the fridge, you note some crumbs strewn across the counter. If you think to yourself, “I should wipe those up,” you’ve perceived an affordance. If you can’t help but pull out a sponge then and there, that affordance is particularly strong. Now imagine your spouse passed through the same kitchen a half hour earlier. They walked past the same crumbs, but the crumbs failed to register, let alone trigger an urge to clean. Same situation, very different perceptions of action.”f
“Wives sometimes wish they had a wife. ”
How can we raise (cis-het) men to perceive more possible actions? How can we socialize boys to see care of the home (and consequently care of the children) as something they are responsible for? Is there any hope for husbands and partners? Or is it too late for this generation?
The reason books like All the Rage by Darcy Lockman and Fair Play by Eve Rodsky exist is because it is hard to shift the weight of care so that it doesn’t all fall on mothers. It is difficult to change behavior that is already set. For men, so many things are done for them. It serves them to not do things because eventually someone else will if they have a woman living with them. If they try, they may do it poorly so that they won’t be asked to do it again. It’s called Weaponized Incompetence.
I think of posts online where the wife jokes about trying to sleep on her partner’s side of the bed because maybe then she won’t hear the baby cry. Why are these tropes so popular? Because they are relatable. Because they are, sadly, universal.
So who wouldn’t want to live with people who had been socialized like you, who have been conditioned to wipe the nose, put away the laundry, hear the baby’s cry from the other room? People who don’t just wait for you to do it? That is what the mommune represents.
Libby Ward, who posts as Diary of an Honest Mom on Instagram, recently shared a reel of her mother-in-law stirring soup over the stove. The words on top of this video said:
“I don’t know how parents feel who get help on the regular but I can tell you how it feels to be mothered even once or twice a year and it’s like finally getting to breathe. When you get a break from being “the Mom” and the weight is lifted even just for a little while - it makes you realize how heavy it's actually been the whole time.”
We want to be mothered and we also want to have a circle of adults around our children who we can lean on for support. For last minute childcare. To help with meal planning and shopping. So that we are not always the one tracking supplies.
I also think we are seeing an upswell of women who recognize that the relationships they have with women can sometimes be more life-giving than the ones they have with their spouse.
The We Can Do Hard Things podcast interviewed Dr. Marisa G. Franco in two episodes. She wrote a book about friendship called Platonic and she unpacks research about how important friendships are to our well-being and how they can even strengthen our romantic relationships.
Anne Helen Petersen, author of the Substack Culture Study, wrote a newsletter investigating why we don’t live closer to friends despite the research that shows it is instrumental to our happiness. She names the ‘fetishization of the nuclear family’ as one of the reasons we are not conditioned to prioritize friendship and its many supportive qualities. It stemmed from this article in The Atlantic.
Jane Fonda has been talking about the importance of her girlfriends lately. She is a woman who has been married three times and thus knows those relationships come and go. But her girlfriends? She credits them with keeping her alive.
When Hoda Kotb was interviewing Jane a few years ago, she asked: Do you think about your next love?
Jane remarked: my current and next love are my girlfriends.
You don’t think there will be another man? Hoda asked, incredulous.
Jane replies: No. I’m worn out down there.
Jane was 81 years old at the time. But we centralize the romantic relationship so fully in our society that it feels strange to allow a woman to say she is done with that. The fact is, she gets all the love and affirmation and support she needs from her girlfriends! Why must she still be interested in, and available to, men?
We are waking up to the fact that men are not the solution to everything (and are often, actually, the problem). The mommune is a manifestation of our hearts desire for community and connection with those outside of our little circles. It is our desire to yet again feel the power of female friendship and to not be the one shouldering so much of the load. It is a return to the way things used to be, when we did have villages, and were not siloed in the suburbs.
And yes, maybe it is also an expression of our exhaustion from trying to get our husbands to step up.
