By Cynthia McMurry
At home in the US, I often feel tired and frazzled. I’m always running to the next thing: getting up early to exercise before my 4-year-old and 2-year-old kids wake up; getting them to eat breakfast and get dressed and put shoes on and get out the door and get to school so I can get to my first Zoom meeting on time; getting from my last meeting to school pickup on time (otherwise I’ll get fined $3 per minute for lateness); getting them back home and fed and bathed and into pajamas and into bed so we can wake up and do it all over again the next day.
I know I should appreciate the wonderful, fleeting moments of their childhood before they’re gone, but it’s hard to do when so much of my day feels like a checklist, a marathon, another surface that needs cleaning or toy that needs to be put away. I’m not seizing the day, I’m just trying to get through the day. I don’t even sit down during meals, because I can multitask more when I eat standing up. I so rarely take time to just sit and appreciate my family, my surroundings and my life. I’ve always rolled my eyes a little at the saying “It takes a village to raise a child,” because I don’t have much family or community helping me raise my kids. If you Google “where’s my village?” you’ll find countless modern American parents who feel similarly.
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Spending three weeks in Benarrabá with the Rooral community turned my life upside down in the best way. My husband Nat and I worked nights to be on a US timezone, which left us free until 3pm each day. We woke up without alarms and spent our mornings wandering the town with Bea (4) and Asa (2): playing football in the street, chatting with local abuelas, feeding carrots to the horse next door, harvesting pomegranates and walnuts from our backyard, and looking for the fresh fish van that comes to town on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
We went rock climbing or took advantage of the world-class trail system around Benarrabá almost every day. On weekday afternoons, our incredible neighbor Carmen came over and took care of the kids while we worked from the village co-working space. She’d take the kids to the park or to spend time with her own family. More than once, I’d be walking around town with the kids and would introduce myself to someone I thought was a stranger, only to have them tell me they already knew my children (and to have Asa yell “¡HOLA!” at them at the top of his lungs with a big grin).
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At home, there’s a very distinct separation between activities and places that are “kid friendly” (playgrounds, parks, restaurants that serve chicken fingers) and those that aren’ (everything else). This means that in our regular life we default to doing “kid friendly” things, and we hire a babysitter whenever we want a night out. Seeing how integrated local kids were into daily life in Benarrabá was truly inspiring.
At the village’s annual Feria de San Miguel, little kids were out in the plaza listening to the live band and jumping in the bounce house at midnight while their parents and grandparents danced the night away. It was wonderful to see three or four generations sharing that space and that tradition, and it challenged my assumptions about which parts of our lives we could include the kids in.
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I’ve spoken Spanish since I was a kid, and it’s been an important part of my personal and professional identity for as long as I can remember. Speaking another language has been such a gift for me; I spent almost a decade working and/or living in Latin America, and I treasure the connections I’ve forged with people from very different backgrounds thanks to shared language.
In an effort to pass along that gift, I’ve been working on teaching my kids Spanish since they were born. They understand it well, but I’ve never been able to get them to speak Spanish consistently. After one week in Benarrabá, Bea switched to speaking Spanish almost all the time, narrating her day and telling me the names of all the kids and animals whose paths we crossed in perfect Spanish (“Ah, ese gato vive por aquí y se llama Titi”, “Ese perro que está ladrando es de Carmen, se llama Cometa”, “Él es Juan, es nuestro bebé y le queremos mucho”).
My kids felt at home and in their element almost instantly, and everywhere I went, people were happy to see them and patted them on the head (or asked me where they were, if they weren’t with me). Towards the end of our stay, I ran into the mayor at the supermarket and he suggested that we stay longer and enroll the kids in school.
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We’ve been back home in the US for a week now, and we’ve all held onto something from our time in the village. Bea will talk to me exclusively in Spanish now; yesterday we had an hour-long conversation about the Earth’s rotation and why we experience day and night. Asa continues to yell “¡HOLA!” and “¡ADIOS!” at everyone he crosses paths with. Nat has opened his mind to the possibility of living abroad as a family for an extended period of time (and he can drive a stick shift car now!). And I’m a more relaxed person and parent.
I spend more time living in the moment and enjoying my kids, rather than always thinking about the next thing that has to happen. My house isn’t clean, but it doesn’t bother me as much as it did before. I even sit down to eat sometimes! This past weekend, I brought the kids to a late night dance party at a friend’s wedding, and it was an incredible experience to watch them laugh and dance with three generations of friends and family. It feels family work-life balance.
I’m beginning to think that the saying “it takes a village to raise a child” is about THIS village, Benarrabá. I’m beyond grateful for the time we spent there, and while I miss village life, we all carry a bit of that village spirit around with us now. I can’t wait to go back.
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So inspiring! I want have a village raise my daughter too!