I recently had drinks with a group of women to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The honoree’s son and mine, both 22 now, have been friends since they were in second grade. And almost all the other women were also friends from my “I’m [someone’s] mom” era – people I’d grown close to over a shared schedule of school pickups, sports practices, and PTA fundraisers.

It was not a significant birthday, but the occasion did have something of an “end of era” feeling for me. Us elementary school PTA powerhouses at that stage where your kids go off to college and you sell your house in the ‘burbs and more somewhere. The birthday honoree had, in fact, just traded her house for a waterfront condo in Jersey City.

That air of nostalgia has put me in mind of the “it takes a village” notion from the 1990s. I had not yet entered into the real muscle of child-rearing when Hillary Clinton’s book, about the influence individuals and institutions outside the nuclear family have on a child, was published in 1996. My first child was born in 1996, and I was still working full time and sharing a truly marvelous nanny with a close friend.

I didn’t know yet about the isolation a new mom can feel, home alone with only a tiny unintelligible lump of humanity who is totally and completely reliant on her for its very life. I had no idea about how hard it would be to love and support and encourage a growing person for whom you are completely responsible but whose wildest dreams and deepest desires and inchoate imagination are completely opaque not just to you but often to himself as well.

My husband and I muddled through, as all parents do. We did the best we could, and comforted ourselves with the notion that eventually everyone needs some unfortunate incident in their childhood to talk to their therapist about.

And, to my blessed relief, it turned out that we did in fact live in a village and that there are people who will love your child as much as – and on some days, more than – you do. My son spent the better part of his adolescence playing middle school baseball, video games and mysterious Japanese card games with the birthday woman’s son. She thought he was smart and funny and articulate, and she was able to tell him that in ways, spoken and unspoken, that I could not. I loved him in the wild and primitive way a mother loves her child, but she loved him when his articulate intelligence drove me nuts, when his passions and ambitions left me baffled, when his energy exhausted and frustrated me.

Both boys went off to college, and we lost the routines that had brought us together. Now she lives in another town and not in the house with the basement that had housed our son on countless days and nights. But I brought him to the party, and she declared him “the best birthday present” she could have had.

I may be good with words, but unfortunately I’m not usually quick with them. If I were, I would have told her then how grateful I am for the love she gave my son and how lucky I am in her friendship. Any honest parent will tell you that children are a sublimely joyful and supremely heavy responsibility. If I’d been quicker, I would have told her how often she lightened my load and grew my joy.

If I’d been quicker, I would have told my friend B., who loves my daughter in the same way that the birthday person loves my son, the very same thing. If I’d been quicker, maybe I’d have told them both it takes a village and just hoped they’d understand.