Evelyn Birkby started having children a few decades ago, when prospective mothers had no recourse to supportive virtual communities on Facebook, Twitter, or Google. “Honey,” she tells me, “all I had was church. I knew nothing about babies when I first started being a mother. So, I depended a lot on the women at church. We didn’t go to coffee together or spend a lot of time on the phone, because we still had a party line then. Sunday mornings were my life line.”
For a young mother, church was more than religious education—it was Birkby’s community. “Some weeks, I only left the house to go to church,” she tells me. The women in the congregation shared cold remedies for babies, which, according to Birkby, involved “steam and some molasses.” They also shared sleep-training techniques. When I ask Birkby to elaborate, she laughs: “Oh you don’t want to know what we did in the old days.” The church was also where they shared recipes. “We were always swapping zucchini and squash,” she says. “Church was our community center.”
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