On women, exhaustion, and building a village

There is something no one tells you honestly about motherhood.

Not the soft part. Not the photos. Not the romance of new life.

It is this: the moment you become a mother, it becomes visible how much you were actually carrying alone.

When I held my daughter in my arms, alongside love I felt a sharp clarity. I had not only given birth to a child. I had given birth to a woman. A future. A mirror.

And suddenly the question became unavoidable: what kind of ground is she growing in? In a world where women have to be everything? Or in a world where women carry one another?

I grew up in Rotterdam-West, among women from the PALOP community, with roots in Angola and other parts of the African diaspora. I saw how they gathered in kitchens smaller than their stories. How they talked while they cooked. How they corrected each other’s children as if it were the most natural thing in the world. No one called it “community building.” It was simply life.

But somewhere along the way, we lost what used to be natural.

The neoliberal dream convinced us that autonomy is the highest good. That success is individual. That strong women do not need help. Meanwhile, we are collectively exhausted.

Without a village, women become efficient but not fulfilled. We become competent but not nourished. We keep spinning, performing, caring — and we call that strength.

Bell Hooks wrote: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

That is not a poetic thought. It is a political statement.

Because isolation is not an accident. It is a system.

When women do not meet each other, when spirituality is reduced to individual self-care, when care is privatised within one nuclear family, we become cut off from an ancient structure: the village.

In many African traditions, motherhood was never a solo project. A child belongs to the community. Grandmothers, aunties, neighbours — they form a network of hands. Spirituality is collective. Rituals are shared. Grief is spoken in circles. Joy is celebrated loudly.

What happens when we lose that?

We get women who cry at night from exhaustion but function during the day. Women who think they are failing because they cannot do it alone. Women who make themselves smaller so as not to be “too much,” when in reality they simply have too little support.

When I became a mother, I noticed how thin my margin was. How quickly softness turns into irritation when rest is missing. How little space there is for spirituality when you are constantly overstimulated.

The village is not a nostalgic ideal. It is nervous system regulation. It is mental health. It is cultural memory.

But a village does not appear on its own in a society that rewards individualism.

So we have to build it.

That means actively inviting women in. Not waiting until it is perfectly convenient. Eating together, being silent together, dancing together. Not hiding African spirituality in private spaces, but making it visible. Naming ancestors. Practising rituals without explaining them to those who do not understand.

It also means allowing discomfort. Because community is not only warm and harmonious. It rubs. It confronts. It asks us to take responsibility for how we show up.

Still, the price of isolation is higher.

My daughter is growing up watching how I live. Does she see a woman trying to carry everything alone? Or does she see a woman who needs other women and does not see that as weakness?

The strength of women is not in endlessly enduring.

The strength is in connecting.

And connection is not a side note. It is resistance.

When women form circles, when they celebrate spirituality together, when they remind each other of their dignity — they undermine a culture that would rather see them tired and divided.

I do not only want to be a strong woman. I want to be part of strong women.

You build a village intentionally. With time. With honesty. With presence.

And maybe that is the most radical choice we can make right now.