When I came to London, I had no family nearby, like so many who build a life far from home. A young family, the long days of early motherhood, and that quiet loneliness that comes with raising small children far from the people you love.
That changed when my daughter started nursery. It’s where I met the women who became my closest friends, all of us quietly rebuilding the thing we’d left behind: a village. One of them used to say, “it takes a village to raise a child.” She meant us. And she was right.
I noticed something else, too. The best carers I ever found came the same way: through someone who’d actually had them in her home, who could tell me the truth. Not an anonymous profile and a row of stars, but a real person I could talk to.
So I built the village I wish I’d had. Not because of who you don’t know, but because none of us were meant to do this alone. A place where families share the people they trust, and where you always have a village to turn to.