This Mom Created A "Mommune" To Survive The Cost Of Raising Kids, And Now Thousands Of Women Want In

The US fertility rate has yet again hit a record low this year, continuing a decline that began in 2007. While some conservatives frame this as a matter of "selfishness over sacrifice" — suggesting women are choosing careers over families — the data tells a more complicated story. Birth rates are falling across the board , including among teenagers and women without college degrees.

And of course, while the advent of birth control and shifting social priorities all arguably affect the declining birth rate to some degree, for many, the issue is far more practical: Raising children has become prohibitively expensive. With the rising costs of childcare, housing, food, and healthcare, having a family can feel less like a given and more like a luxury. And for those without a partner or in a dual-income household, it can start to feel out of reach altogether.

For Bernie Sinclaire, a 38-year-old mother of two and teacher at an all-girls school in the Bronx, that reality led her to try something different. Enter: the "mommune."

A "mommune," as Bernie describes it, isn't a co-living or a roommate situation. It's a deliberately built household where mothers and their communities can come together to raise their kids — sharing space, resources, and the mental load of parenting — without centering the home on a romantic partner. "I liked this idea of having a village, and you can share resources in a way that's a lot more natural and fluid," Bernie told BuzzFeed.

Bernie has recently gone viral on Instagram, showing how she and her friend, Anabelle, live together in their "mommune" with her two sons and Anabelle's daughter. "3 kids, 2 NYC single moms, 1 Barbie Dream Apt," the caption read on one of her viral videos about the setup.

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"We decided since this was working so well for us when we started about two years ago that this wasn't gonna be something temporary," she said in the video as she put up yoni-symbol wallpaper — "yoni," meaning "womb" in Sanskrit, is often the sacred symbol associated with the divine feminine — in their newly upgraded apartment. "It's not that we're waiting to find a boyfriend or a man or a traditional family. This is the kind of lifestyle that works for us."

In Bernie's case, this shift to find and start her "mommune" was actually a longtime wish. "I mean, this has always been a dream of mine from, you know, as far as I would say, college, for sure. I have letters from me and my first college roommate, drawing a brownstone that we were going to live in together without men," she told BuzzFeed. In college, Bernie studied human rights and lived with matriarchal societies in South America, which led her to return to the idea frequently.

Add to that, Bernie saw firsthand in her childhood what it was like to watch her mom struggle as a single mother. "I grew up in Italy, and my dad abandoned my mother with five kids in a foreign country. We moved to America, and it was an insulting experience how women in need were treated in my experience, and children in particular," she told BuzzFeed. "Poverty does not have to be a humiliation ritual. It's okay to not be high income."

"It was hard watching my mom have to parent in that way," she said. When Bernie decided she wanted to have kids, she found herself in a similar situation her own mother had faced 30+ years earlier. "I was Airbnb-ing a part of my apartment, and it came to the point where I'm, like, eight months pregnant. And I'm like, I can't do this." Bernie said that while she wasn't single at the time, she always wanted to live on her own and have her own space. "It became a choice — poverty or partnership?" she told BuzzFeed.

That led Bernie to try finding other women to connect with and potentially co-live with, but after a few tries, it always fell through. "I tried to find resources online, to find women, co-living spaces. Don't google 'single mom app,' okay? Because it's nothing PG-13," she said. "There was no platform for women to connect."

Then, Bernie reconnected with a friend from grad school whom she had lost touch with, but lived just a few blocks away — both were independently "drowning in single motherhood," as she put it. What began as a casual friendship turned into cooking together, park trips, and spending more time together with their kids. "It was unspoken. We didn't warn each other, like, 'Save me!!'" Bernie said. "It was just like, Girl...girl."

After a few months, Bernie floated the idea of living together. "Our kids got along really, really well. ... I start looking online, and I was like, 'Girl, we could get such a nice place.'" She asked Anabelle to move in together, but Anabelle wasn't ready at the time. "I cried. Apparently, she cried, too," Bernie admitted.

Three months later, her friend called her back — and so their mini "mommune" commenced. At the time, Anabelle moved into Bernie's 2-bedroom apartment, which, while cramped, quickly lifted a weight off their shoulders. "Even though it was cramped and I went from being the only adult in the house with two kids to having a party of five, it was so much easier," Bernie told BuzzFeed.

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Bernie explained that in her experience as a single mom, there's a constant mental load of always having to be "on." "There's no one else to do it if you don't," she said. "It's a heavy weight to bear on your shoulders to know, like, if you have one off day, it looks like a bomb exploded in the house. And no one's fed. There is no clean laundry. It's like everything falls apart."

But in the mommune, she said that pressure began to ease. "I didn't think that I would have such a relaxing lifestyle with three kids," Bernie said. Instead of everything hinging on one person, the responsibilities are shared, from school pickups to meals to childcare. The kids attend the same school, cutting down on time and logistics, and the household runs on a kind of built-in support system when one mom needs a break. "It's such a nice feeling coming home, because everything is really functional, and like a well-oiled machine," Bernie said.

That support extends financially, too. Bernie says they operate on an "equity" policy, factoring in how many kids each has and how often they're in the home. Rent and groceries are split 50-50, childcare costs are adjusted based on how many kids are involved, and other expenses are balanced out more informally. The result, she said, is relief. She's even able to save and invest money each month, something that felt impossible before.

"I have an extra, like, $1,200 in disposable cash now, compared to before. Before I was, like, you know, kind of breaking even, especially at the beginning of the month," she said. With money saved from working together — splitting costs, helping each other with childcare, and cooking most meals at home — Bernie and Anabelle were even able to save for a family trip to Mexico. "It was everything and more," she wrote in a reel of their trip.

Bernie, who speaks Spanish and English at home together with Anabelle, said she now walks in the door and says, "¡Qué bendición!" — Spanish for "What a blessing!" She said, "Like, it feels unreal. The difference — especially as like, being a default parent, or being a single parent — coming home and you still have your autonomy, you still have your sense of self, you still have your space...but like, you don't have that ridiculous amount of weight."

She also said the shift has been meaningful for the kids, from sharing different languages to forming sibling-like bonds that might not have existed otherwise, to allowing her sons to grow up around girls without gender stereotypes. "That was also really important to me," she said.

A sense of relief shows up in small, everyday ways, too. There's more space to step away, to be alone, to be social with their friends, more flexibility in schedules, and, with visitation schedules with their children's dads, there's even intentional time carved out so each child gets one-on-one attention, Bernie told BuzzFeed. "Every kid kind of has a day where they're an only child," she explained. "But on the weekends, it's all of us." And while it's not perfect — "some weekends are hard," Bernie admitted — the difference is still stark. "I'm not as stressed with three kids as I was with two by myself."

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Bernie thinks the mommune concept is a response, a "third avenue" as she put it, for women raising their kids that doesn't center a healthy family around a romantic partnership, but the children and the sanctity of the mothers first. "Moms are very at risk of poverty. It is extremely unaffordable," she said. "The only recourse that is just for women is a shelter."

"And then what are single moms doing?" Bernie asked bluntly. "They're hopefully looking to eventually meet someone who's a good man so they can have a dual-income household. Nothing is wrong with that, but children having economic stability shouldn't depend on a mother meeting a good man. ... That shouldn't be the only choice to not have to worry about putting food on your plate."

At the same time, Bernie said the mommune isn't "men versus women," or rejecting relationships altogether. Both she and Anabelle still date, and in their situation, the fathers of their children are present and involved in their kids' lives. Just within the home itself, they've set clear boundaries: New romantic partners don't come into the space.

In a way, Bernie said, the idea of a mommune is also a response to what she called the "temperature" of the world for women right now. With patriarchal norms intentionally de-centered inside the home, she sees it as a way to create stability in contrast to everything happening outside of it.

"We're going to have a safe space here in this home, where we can at least temper the patriarchy. This is going to be a place where you might see a whole bunch of crazy stuff out there, and I can try and turn off the news, and I can try and shelter as much, but you're going to have memories at home of your mother relaxing and laughing and rolling around the floor playing with you, and enjoying cooking for you, and being excited to bring you to school because I like the walk together, not because I'm burnt out and I've been exhausted and I have no other choice," she said. "I don't want my kids' memories to be like that."

And at the end of the day, Bernie said the mommune is really about putting the children first. "You are inundating a mother with an immeasurable amount of responsibility and work hours. You're depriving a child of the present mother," she said of traditional frameworks. "The mommune reframe is if everyone collectively focused on what is best for children, if children are at the center of the argument, then everybody benefits. And I think, like right now in our culture and in the political atmosphere, it's this gender battle, and we're still forgetting the most vulnerable of our society, and no one is talking about the kids."

Bernie's perspective has resonated with many online. As she began sharing her non-traditional mommune structure on social media, her videos quickly went viral, with thousands of women flooding the comments asking how they could build something like it for themselves.

There were even some other success stories. In one comment, a user described how she knew two women who raised their children together, bought a home together, finished school with each other's support, and started businesses — only later considering whether a male partner might fit even into the life they had already created. "[T]hose women built wealth together," the commenter wrote.

"I was not trying to promote the mommune," Bernie said of her posts. "I was just like, 'I'm happy as hell.'" But after her account tipped up from about 160 close friends to now 37,000 followers within a few weeks, it was clear she had tapped into something much bigger. "Women were asking in the comments. Like, 'Is there anybody in Connecticut?' 'Anyone in New Jersey ?' 'I'm in Brooklyn.' Like, Houston, Atlanta. They were just calling out cities. It was incredible."

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When women started exchanging locations — and when a "we need an app" reply blew up in her comment section — Bernie responded simply: "I'm on it." Hundreds of women started commenting, imagining versions of their own shared homes. Some described an apartment building, imagining the amenities like a half-courtyard-half-playground, a rooftop garden, and an on-site daycare.

"It was super cool to see," she said. "It was so, like, you know, a girl's girl's dream." Now, with the help of a friend and her mommune village, Bernie has turned the concept into something more concrete: a waitlist and the beginnings of an app designed to connect women interested in building similar living arrangements. The project, still in development, is fittingly called "Mommune . " Bernie hopes the app goes live by the end of June.

Bernie says she is excited by the opportunity to grow the app and community, but even more so at the chance to share her knowledge of non-traditional family setups with other women. "I've lived it and tried to do it for so many years that it's easier for me to think about different features and things that will benefit moms and different stages of motherhood. Also, women that, like, don't have kids but want to live as part of a family. Aunties welcome," she said.

"The crazy thing is that there is so much feminist rhetoric about this already. Like, like old theory," she added. "It feels like we're just hitting the iron while it's hot. We have all the research, the theory has been out there — raise women economically but also emotionally — but we've never created a structure for it."

Bernie says perhaps a "mommune" structure for women is a small act of smashing the patriarchy that's actually achievable right at home. "We talk about matriarchs in this really, like, lofty, dreamy way, but it could also just be that women are running the household. It doesn't have to be, like, this upheaval — you don't have to wait for a female president to start a revolution."

To those interested in a mommune setup themselves, she's quick to note that building something like this isn't as simple as matching with another single mom online. "It's not a roommate seeker app... It's a community," she said. Her advice: Start by building genuine friendships, spend time together as families, and ease into it. "I would recommend taking a weekend trip, start, you know, have dinner together. You know, not just one time, like, actually practice being together as a unit," she said. "Not all moms are the same — it's human relationships, right?"

As for the future, Bernie says the response online has already expanded her vision to what's possible for other moms and women looking for an alternative path. "Since this happened, my dreams have changed," she said. "I want a giant mommune — okay, not like the world, but like in New York — I would want, like, a block. Let's get a couple of brownstones next to each other."

"Could you imagine a block that is owned by women? Like, I guess my dream has been inspired by my followers who dreamt up this bigger vision of what I could even imagine at the time," she said. "And so I, yeah, I think I share that dream with them now, too. I'm like, dang, that community garden sounds nice."

For now, Bernie's mommune exists in one apartment in New York — shared, imperfect, still evolving, but filled with love, community, and genuine support. And in her comments, in the Mommune app waitlist, and in the conversations the mommune concept sparked, it's already become something else, a question about whether the way women and mothers are expected to live is the only way they actually can.

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