I lived with ten women and nineteen kids for a month in Spain.

On hanging out, being held, and anxiety.

Jun 03, 2025

I just spent a month in Spain with 10 mothers and 19 children.

I say that not really believing it. Not really believing I did it.

I committed to this experience in January because I was craving connection with other women – mothers, in particular – and I longed to experience a unique, women-only space. I also wanted to travel with Elena, just me and her. I didn’t know exactly why I wanted these things and I wasn’t entirely sure what a “co-living” “worldschooling” project entailed. I just leapt.

The trip started with a nationwide blackout in Spain. My first message with my roommate, a Canadian woman with a twelve-year-old daughter, was about her being stuck in Portugal and sleeping on the airport floor; a fate slightly crappier than Elena’s and mine of being trapped in Atlanta for 26 hours and sleeping at a Ramada Inn where a plate of egg beaters cost $15.

It took Elena and I a full day and a half longer than planned to arrive in the small town in southern Spain, at which point I promptly realized that I’d signed up for an entire freaking month of living with people I had never met, and I was sending Elena off for half the day to sit on a beach and do who knows what, and what if it was horrible, and what was I thinking??

My nervous system had done a really efficient job of insulating me from the magnitude of this commitment, but successive flight delays and surviving on a single box of Cheez-Its had degraded its defenses. There we were in this tiny town of walled, shaded streets and soaring pines, empty still in the off season, the long lonely beach fortified by red Andalusian cliffs – jet lagged, vulnerable, and possibly insane. I had a panic attack on night one.

To compound matters, over the intervening semester between choosing to do this and actually arriving, our national political nightmare unfolded at breakneck pace and every week I received an email from the university reading something like, “Don’t panic, but we’re no longer hiring anyone or funding any more graduate programs and we will cut the writing curriculum in half! Have a great day and Hail to Pitt!” My job was on the line. My fellowship was on the line. Everything I held dear – the arts, the university, intellectual life – was being decimated in the name of “efficiency.” Would I even have anything in place when I returned?

On that second day, I went over to the house next door and gulped and confided to one of the women, with whom I’d connected instantly the night before, “Maybe I have made a very big mistake?”

“Hold on,” she said. She settled her toddler. She got us glasses of water. She led me to the couch outside. She listened to me as I gushed out all my worries, financial to existential. And she told me, “You’re building a muscle.” Simple as that. By this she meant, the muscle of travel. The muscle of uncertainty. The muscle that flexes when one leaps. It was the perfect thing to say. It was why I had wanted women so badly.

Over the following month, I did many things. I surfed in the freezing Atlantic. I watched Elena surf in the freezing Atlantic. I ate a lot of $1 convenience store prosciutto and $3 convenience store Spanish omelettes. I helped a toddler purchase a can of green olives from a vending machine. I helped my daughter purchase a Brazilian capybara dressed like a baby from a vending machine. I debated the history of Spanish colonialism in Latin America. I danced on a clifftop. I discovered very red, wrinkled, septuagenarian European men lying buck naked as I was seeking shade in a rocky cove. I rubbed Palo Santo all over myself under the light of the full moon. I ate weird, puffy Spanish snacks that were part Cheeto, part Cheerio, and disconcertingly dissolved on the tongue. I ran on the frigid morning beach. I worked while toddlers had sword fights in my front yard.

But of all the things I did, perhaps the most radical, memorable, and transformative was this:

I hung out.

A lot. With women. With kids.

I wandered barefoot over to someone’s patio at 11 am to talk about the education system, or simply how impossible it was to find a decent Spanish snack that wasn’t bizarrely sweet and spongey and also corn-flavored. Sometimes the hanging out evolved into epic, deep conversation, and sometimes it was light, easy, what we used to do when we were teenagers before everything had to have such a clear justification and purpose. What we used to do when we put our feet on the wall and twirled the phone cord around our fingers and talked and talked. (Hi, fellow millennials!)

All of the hanging out felt like being held.

“I keep trying to explain to my husband why my kids are so happy here,” one of the women told me. She’s an American who’d grown up on a farm in Iowa and hadn’t traveled until her twenties. She was bringing her four kids abroad for the first time on this trip.

“I try to explain to him that it’s the community,” she said. “That they feel like they’re a part of something.”

“Like they’re held,” I said.

There were the beautiful things, the pines and the beach and all that, but really what it came down to was that sense of holding. I saw so many older kids holding toddlers: really cradling them close to their bodies, discovering and cherishing that warmth of a small, dependent creature.

I came across women crying together over Fuze Tea at 5 pm on their terraces, laughing as I peeked my head in. Kids wandered outside after a nap or a snack or a shower and joined the wild, half-naked band of fort builders. I boiled my ravioli in someone else’s kitchen. Elena cuddled on the couch with five other kids to watch Minions. Women showed up on my patio in their socks, holding a cup of coffee, and we chatted about horses.

When I have a problem and I worry and think too much I do one of two things: spiral on my own, or turn to my husband. Both get old quickly, for both of us. But in this month I did something different: I got out of my own head by hanging out.

One of the most obvious immediate responses to anxiety is simply distraction. Many of us seek this in our phones or alcohol. But the best distraction is connection. With another person in front of us, we have to be in the world, right now. Not in our heads, our, fears, our stories. In presence.

On the last day, I remarked to the group, “I don’t think I realize how much time I spend alone in the U.S.” Part of this is by virtue of being a writer. I have no colleagues, no office, no collaborators. But part of it is by the design of our modern lives: in most western countries, we are all stuck in our productivity siloes, working and then tending to our nuclear families and perhaps carving out one little segment of time during the week for socialization.

In Spain, the community was everything. That came first. I worked – I had to work. But the community was there, waiting, and I dipped in as much as I possibly could. I got out of myself. I had conversations I never would have had online, or over drinks with a few close friends. I mothered in community for the first time.

One mother, on the last night, told me how much she admired how the older kids took the toddlers for ice cream. Elena and the two twelve-year-old girls had on multiple occasions walked the five or so blocks to the main road pushing several strollers; purchased ice creams for 2-4 rowdy kiddos; supervised the eating of said ice creams while keeping drama and hijinks somewhat in check (or at least, so we were told…) and walked home.

“It wasn’t my letting go to do,” the other mother told me – her children were still young – “but I witnessed it.” What power in witnessing.

I witnessed other mothers care for their children, carrying them gently and with tenderness as they flailed and screamed. I witnessed them praise, correct, redirect, listen. I witnessed them insist and I witnessed them give in. I witnessed their kids’ little chins nestled on their shoulders: that early, intense love it’s easy to forget when kids grow up.

I also witnessed women say no when they didn’t want to participate in an activity, when I would have assented so as not to make anyone uncomfortable. I witnessed women asking difficult questions, or disappearing for a bit for themselves. I witnessed much of what I grapple with alone in real time: the range of possibilities available to women, which can be so invisible when one is just getting through the everyday, making the dinners and running the baths.

I felt our immense power and also, our loveliness. A woman preparing a women’s circle with flowers and herbs and a pitcher of tea and white cards with a dash of sparkly gold glitter. A woman showing up with perfectly spiced, delicious tofu, proffering a spoon. A woman making mushroom tea when we ran out of coffee. And women traveling alone, without partners, with two or three young kids, inventing their lives. Not fearless – just devoted enough to their curiosity and growth to leap.

One woman, a hyper-competent professional who’d been struck with immense fear for the first time in her life after the birth of her child, confided in me as we were leaving, now I know I can do this.

Becoming a mother sometimes seems to me to inspire the most fear in women who haven’t had any of it up until then. In my twenties, I was hitchhiking alone across South Africa, summiting 20,000-foot peaks with ice axes at 4 am, driving to Ecuador with people I’d met the previous night at the bar. Zero fear. And then my daughter was born and I was scared of lotion. Microplastics. Air. I felt massively incompetent, unmoored. One wrong step and I would ruin everything.

It took me years to learn that I really needed women. Their stories, their intimacy, their strength. During one car ride to a dance workshop in Spain, we talked about birth, and one woman described feeling like a “piece of meat,” her body slapped down on a table, pumped full of medicine, manipulated. There was no true consent, no reciprocity, no sanctity in the experience. It was like much of our modern lives: bereft of spirituality and obsessed with functionality, productivity, efficiency.

At that workshop, we all gave each other massages. The facilitator, a contemporary dancer, asked me what the word for “masa” was in English, and I said, “dough.” She heard it as “dell” and kept telling us to “work with the skin like dell.” I loved this little shift. The definition of dell is “a small valley, usually among trees.” It had so much more intimacy than dough. I worked my thumbs into another woman’s scapula. I rubbed her cheekbones. I dug my knuckles into the tough muscles of her thigh. She wasn’t a piece of meat. She was me. We were each other.

At the end of each massage, we were to toss our partner’s arm in the air until it was so loose she’d let it drop freely, trusting we would catch it. We did. Again and again until we laughed at the letting go, at how tightly we’d held on.

The dell, the valley of women.

Now I know I can do this. I can take my kid on the ferry. I can take my kid on the train. To the beach. To meet a brand new pack of international kids. I can take her to witness women “haciendo brujería,” as we joked – practicing witchcraft. If we define witchcraft as refusing to accept that our lives must fit within certain parameters. If we define witchcraft as sharing olives, stories, lives, kids.

On our last day, Elena and I took the train from southern Spain to Seville, changed into shorts while sweating profusely in the luggage storage center, crammed our massive suitcase into the tiny locker, raced into town for ramen, roamed the streets for exactly 2 hours before catching the packed 32 bus to the train station, fetched our luggage and hauled it in the 100-degree heat up to the airport bus stop, caught the airport bus, and checked in for our flight to Copenhagen. After we’d boarded, I overheard the flight attendant say, “I’ve never felt as scared in my life as I did on that landing.” Despite wanting to actually vomit with terror upon hearing the one thing you never ever want to hear a flight attendant say, I kept it together. It was just me, after all – no one else to rely on or keep Elena safe. But also, I had the women there. I had that whole month of holding behind me. The flight ended up being fine. The flight attendant felt so bad about me overhearing that conversation (I later asked her with what must have been naked, tearful horror about turbulence) she gave me a free beer.

The first weekend we were in Spain, my roommate drove her daughter, me, Elena, and another woman and her toddler to a nearby town. Elena and her daughter (who is 12) spent almost the entire ride trying to master the verses to Coldplay’s “Fix You.” I had no idea that was the song at the time; I just knew I was enduring an hour of two preteen girls and a three-year-old earnestly crooning, “When you try so hard but you don’t succeed…when you get what you want but not what you need…” Thank God for the Spanish acceptance of one (or several) glasses of wine at midday.

This song became an ongoing refrain and joke the entire rest of the trip. The girls sang it so often that my roommate and I took to shouting a knee-jerk, “No! No!” as if we were being attacked by ants. I’d hear the refrain from far away in another corner of the garden and shudder. The three-year-old would greet his older friends with a soulful rendition. “Stop sending me this message, universe!” I joked, only half-joking.

Then, during the final “talent show” the kids put together, the two twelve-year-old girls sang the full song. I’d only ever heard the chorus and really, only those two lines of it, sung endlessly with a child’s infinite tolerance for mind-crushing repetition. But then I heard:

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you…
if you never try, you'll never know
Just what you're worth

I realize this newsletter is right now earnestly quoting Coldplay and I apologize for that and also I have to say to you, dear reader, that once you’ve heard a song 7 million 947 times, in cars, in kitchens, outside, inside, at 8 am and midnight, it becomes an anthem. I had assumed the whole song was about loss and failure. When you try so hard…But no. It was about repair. And in the context of our little co-living, to me, the repair that comes from other women.

When I left, I sought out my friend, the one who’d comforted me the first week. I looked at her packing her suitcase and burst into tears. “You saved me,” I said, and I meant it. Of course, I will fail and fuck up and struggle and have fear and all the things over and over again, but I will always remember that moment of presence with her, when she told me, “You’re building a muscle.” When she showed me what a woman can do for another woman.

During a full moon gathering – brujería! – we all wrote ideas or stories or beliefs we wanted to burn on little slips of paper, put them in a bowl, and set them on fire. The small flames were extremely satisfying and we all cheered and ahhhhed. Then we needed some epic, conclusive way to scatter the ashes. So two women volunteered to walk them down to the beach, releasing them as if we’d had a bonfire.

By that point, it was nearly midnight. The rest of us wrapped up and returned to our houses and prepared for bed, and then the women sent a text of themselves – women from different countries, races, and backgrounds, who had met just weeks before – holding hands on the beach. Just two women, the moon, and the ocean. They had taken our fears, our pain, our old tired stories about ourselves and our weaknesses – and thrown them to the wind.

Terms of endearment

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