But what I'm doing is rejecting the village, I guess is one way of thinking about it, and possibly/probably the way everyone else thinks about it, her grandparents and father and aunts. If you need help - and you say you need help - then avail yourself of the help that is offered - and stop caviling about how it's not the right kind of help, not the particular help you want. (It would also not be right to refuse the help, even if you could afford to. That would be ungrateful, and cruel to the child, and I'm sure other terrible things as well.) It's not - I think? - that I think her grandparents should only consult my wishes, but that they act as if they were only consulting my wishes but without actually consulting them, and denying that they have wishes of their own. So it's a tangled web of obligation and gratitude and passive-aggressiveness and sheer greediness for the child that we're all caught in - the last of which I do understand, but is somehow not an acceptable thing to say of oneself (except in deprecation) or of others (especially of others).
PS: I don't think of it as rejecting the village, in concept or actuality or sentimentality. But I do sometimes, often, feel - enmeshed - in family.
