I was originally going to write about our struggles navigating the balance of our parenting relationship, about the inequality of emotional labour, domestic labour, and cognitive load. But something I’ve heard often from my mum got stuck in my mind: she believes that her inability to engage in emotional labour is cultural. It got me thinking about whether the differences we are facing in our parenting partnership are cultural, about how all cultures need to decolonize — not just Euro-centric ones — and ultimately, how hard it is to decolonize our minds without a frame of reference; without a village.
As a bit of background, this is where we’ve come from. In that post I mention our isolation as a mixed-culture family in our geographical location, largely due to language barriers as well as the rural setting. Our IRL village is small and feeble. This means we are all but alone when it comes to navigating the complexities of our family setting in the context of our day-to-day existence, a heavy burden to bear on so few shoulders.
As a stalwart of the rights of kids to exist free of adults’ agendas, I believe that they shouldn’t be born to solve adults’ problems, to heal our wounds, or to validate our existences. That said, I’ve discovered that having children is unveiling a mirror of ourselves that we had previously overlooked, intentionally or otherwise. The volume of self-reflection I’ve undertaken in the past 14 months has been a surprise to me. I did not expect that having a child would be so confrontational!1
A theme that keeps showing up in my self-work is emotional neglect. I spent the first months of my child’s life being confronted with the ways I was left to fend for myself as an infant, as my mum made backhanded comments about my refusal to leave my newborn alone to cry or sleep. That insight allowed me to recognize the ways that our entire family dynamic had been shaped by emotional neglect and detachment.2
But I’ve also been confronted by my partner’s similar commitment to perpetuating emotional neglect in the name of culture, and I have to ask myself if I’m the one who needs to decolonize my parenting — or if he is. I can’t assume that my proximity to whiteness automatically positions me on the side of colonialism in our relationship; the complexity of our respective identities means we are both both colonizer and colonized, but we contain very different multitudes and it can be hard to untangle the knots.
At the beginning of this journey, I naively assumed that a child-centered approach could not also center colonial values, but now I’m not so sure of myself. When faced with my partner defending his culture against my concerns, I find more than ever that I am in need of the wisdom of elders and other mothers. I feel their absence deep in my gut, the very place I’ve been listening to for guidance on how to raise our child. I don’t want to invalidate his interpretation of his culture, but I also don’t want to accept that emotional neglect of that magnitude is cultural. How can I practice decolonization whilst policing his claim to his culture? (Spoilers: I can’t.)
This impasse has me wishing that our village was more alive in our day-to-day. Having a widespread network of friends and family connected by the magic of modern technology is wonderful in its own way, but I feel the dearth of collective parenting — and of having our parenting parented. I want to be pulled up for my inconsistencies, shown miraculous techniques for soothing, told to sit down, and reminded of what’s really important. Instead I feel like I have to play all the instruments and conduct the orchestra, whilst being the critic and sponsor and audience.
It just feels really hard to know whether I’m on track with my goals, whether I need to modify or update my approach/mindset, and whether or not I’m actually decolonizing anything at all right now…
All the while, I want to nuture a kind, vibrant, open-hearted child who loves freely and channels his anger and finds the strength to press on when it seems like all hope is lost. I ask myself if any culture that suppresses his spirit is something I want to elevate, colonial or otherwise, and I long for the counsel of someone older and wiser to help me decide.
- As such, I also wonder if I would have been able to address these things if I’d had kids earlier, or if I’m only able to do so at this point in my life after working through the things I already did — we truly will never know! ↩︎
- It turns out that it wasn’t cultural at all. As my baby grew and my miniscule village became accustomed to my ways of parenting him, my mum’s verbal sideswipes turned into misty-eyed moments of realization that this was the way people raised babies “back home”, and her eventual revelation that it had been British acquaintances who influenced my parents to abandon us to our tears and fears. ↩︎
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