Ms. Dillon has been in the United Arab Emirates since 2013, but divorced her husband in 2019. In the first year of the pandemic, she said, the isolation was crushing, and caring for her two children — a daughter, 12, and a son, 13 — was challenging while juggling a social life and a full-time job.
Ms. Winchip, her colleague, was facing a similar struggle. She had lived in the Middle East for 13 years, but when the pandemic hit, she was newly separated and alone with her son, now 12.
“I told her I wished we all lived in a place where the kids could play together,” Ms. Winchip said.
In September 2021, they began renting a three-bedroom apartment in a gated community, splitting the rent evenly and taking turns cooking and watching each other’s kids. The arrangement isn’t forever — Ms. Winchip and Ms. Dillon both have new partners, and plan to eventually move out and start new lives with them — but after living through a pandemic in a foreign country together, they say their partnership has been essential.
“I wish we had done it about two years earlier,” Ms. Dillon said.
Back in Florida, Ms. Gilder and Ms. Batykefer also don’t plan on staying in that four-bedroom house in Jacksonville area forever. The duo hopes to buy and remodel a fixer-upper of their own in the coming year, and to allay costs, they’ve signed a deal with a television producer who believes the process of renovating their new mommune could make for entertaining reality television.
But whether or not those small-screen dreams come to fruition, Ms. Batykefer said the little community she’s built in her current house has helped her not just recover from heartbreak, but give her peace of mind. She said she is more present and focused as a mother.
“When I had to leave my husband, all I could think about was how I now had to figure out how to do everything on my own — buy a house on my own, pay my bills on my own, and raise my child on my own,” said Ms. Batykefer, whose divorce was finalized in February and now splits custody with her ex-husband. “I never thought about finding another single mother to live with and do it together. We just fell into it. But now, it’s like, why isn’t it more common for us to join forces?”
