Diary of a mothering worker. January 5, 2022.

Post 448.

SCHOOLS, which restarted on Monday, are the big story in parents’ lives this week. 

For children online, it can still be challenging to stay focused, and avoid chatting in a separate zoom or Google chat, or the temptation of video games. Some parents are not able or prepared to provide sufficient oversight. Maybe they are grieving from a covid19 death or depressed from job loss. It was also always a mystery how people were expected to go back to work while their children are home, or expected to both work well and parent well simultaneously.

So we can expect that there are those children with continuing periods of unsupervised internet access who are searching for pornography, answering questions they have about sex, and posting images of themselves inappropriate for adolescents. 

Teenagers are on their devices and phones all the time, whether gaming, messaging, surfing or watching videos. The algorithms are an adolescent dopamine addiction we’ve normalised after all this isolation. We can expect that many lost out on extracurricular activities, including physical exercise, and that’s reinforced screen dependence at a crucial time in social, communication, emotional and brain development. 

Some are still attending school from their beds, rather than a desk, or don’t have a proper quiet space to work, and are probably checking social media throughout classes, particularly when their cameras are not expected to be on. For tens of thousands of others, who are not consistently online or don’t have devices, there’s the well-documented and class-divisive effects on their school marks and future income. Will a nation of adults just accept that they will get left behind?

For those who have returned to school already, or just this week, did the Ministry of Education gather pre-opening data to understand how schools should respond to their surreal range of home realities and needs? 

If we don’t ask these questions and don’t have an education response beyond back-to-academics, to what extent will the return to physical school be a stereotypical example of what and who is lost by business as usual? When it comes to schools, it’s key to think about the profile of the learner whom we picture either having returned to school or about to return in the next months. Is it the one who can best or least cope? What does transitioning such vulnerable students require?

Is this a student with family members killed by the pandemic? Is it one more vulnerable to witnessing or experiencing family conflict or household instability? We know that domestic violence reports rose in 2020 and remained high through 2021. Should students be told that these are expected issues and they can turn to teachers or guidance counsellors? Is initiating these conversations part of pandemic ministry policy? 

Increased rates of grief, anxiety and depression among children are being reported by local psychologists. In the US, schools saw this in crying and disruptive behaviour, increased violence and bullying, and sadness and fear. We are better at paying attention to poverty and hunger, but our education system is poor at social-emotional skill-building, which is why our society is so poor at it as well. US schools also experienced a “river of referrals” for mental health services.

Globally, educators suggest making time to listen to students’ concerns, offering opportunities to reconnect one-to-one with educators. Before opening books and preparing for tests, recognise that some may have difficulty concentrating or returning to routine. That’s normal. Buffing or embarrassment won’t help. Maybe this student was being neglected or sexually abused at home. 

Rather than just lecturing about covid19 protocols, also respond to fears and grief, providing age-appropriate tips for recognising and reducing trauma and anxiety. Reports are that children recover from the isolation better when schools take time to create connection, empathy and community. Finally, provide opportunities for playfulness and fun physical activity, which help students cope with life and stress, enabling them to actually learn. 

Schools are the critical access point to children. The pandemic may have affected their attention, decision-making, how they learn and how they relate to others. It would have been great to see the ministry present a “return to school” social-emotional learning plan, explained with a proper communication strategy, and putting teachers and parents on the same page. Remember, the pandemic is not over and the world feels like a bizarre war zone where anyone could unintentionally kill anyone else in days or weeks. The school transition should recognise children as survivors of an unprecedented disaster who learn best when first guided to emotional well-being.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. November 10, 2021.

Post 441.

ZI TURNED 11 on Monday so I’m entering the pleasures and perils of pre-teen life, and the parenting moments it brings. 

The magic of childhood still lingers, with its uncontrived excitement, effervescent emotions, bubbling energy and honest words from a still blossoming heart. A child in a room of adults still transforms it somehow into an opportunity for being kinder, and sharing in laughter and wonder. 

An 11-year-old appears so grown-up in one instance and then so playful in the next, baby qualities bouncing about, tumbling with growth spurts and hormone changes and features that seem to mature by the day. The pandemic brought that home in a way that long workdays would have eclipsed. It took me a year to make lemonade (or lime juice), as they say, for I realised how much of her growing up I was missing and how much more of me she needed. I learned a lot about mental health and how our brains differently develop and cope, and how easy it is to miss signs of what’s going on with our children’s cognitive, social-emotional and expressive lives amidst the manic rush between home, school, homework, dinner and bedtime on repeat every day. 

When the pandemic began, she was just nine, and a completely different child. We rightly focus on children who need schools to reopen to resume their education, improve their nutrition, provide access to a trusted adult, and create valuable peer socialisation. Zi flourished at home, freed from the stress of traffic, with time to sleep later on a morning and chance to be herself without pressures of bullying. It was a privileged opportunity to feel calmer and safer by us being so consistently together.

I got to know her anew, over lunchtimes and afternoon walks and middle-of-the-day hugs, recognising challenges she’s navigating which I hadn’t noticed and making new decisions about mothering for which I wouldn’t have ever given time. I changed my priorities and responsibilities, increasing my attention to care and cutting back on much else. It made me grow. 

There’s an older adolescence that has also appeared, and interest in an adult world that she and her friends are yet unprepared for. We spend a lot of effort censoring regular pop music for its language and hypersexuality, and these days a regular YouTube playlist is a minefield of problematic socialisation. We are constantly checking for the clean version of songs.

Videos that show up either feature women (or Lil Nas X) writhing nearly naked or, alternatively, depressed and angst-ridden white American music stars. There’s a lot of conversation to have with teens about sex and sexuality, what’s age appropriate, stereotyped and commodified, real and empowering, and what messages are being sold to children. 

Sexuality brings both power and pleasure as well as risk and danger, and girls are most vulnerable to harmful consequences of early sexualisation as teens. They also enter a stage when they become more conscious of their bodies, weight, hair and skin colour, and how their appearance relates to acceptance by peers. 

They are seeing cyclical ads convince women they need to have long eyelashes, and I’ve watched as Zi’s emerging sense of femininity is shaped by the creation of insecurities and the expectation of self-improvement through consumption. 

As the recent Facebook study also confirmed, social media adds to girls’ challenges with self-esteem and anxiety. When you talk to girls, you realise how much they don’t like about themselves or how unsure they are about growing breasts and the onset of menstruation, developing a sense of responsibility and perhaps a sense of shame about both, and how adolescence is both very much like yet so different from our own decades ago. 

We try to use words that emphasise being fit and strong, not thin, and the mental health necessity of time outside, rather than on a device.

Not yet in secondary school, we also started preparing Zi, less for SEA than for pubescent crushes, having friends and cousins of diverse sexualities, and recognising that friends may begin experimenting with identities that cross and redefine old boundaries of “he,” “she” and “they.” From here, it’s like teaching life skills as much as critical thinking ones, a strong sense of self as well as an open, non-prejudiced mind. 

It’s been a year of learning about the world through her eyes. 

Welcome to 11, Zi. May you show us how much still must be changed as we show you how to love who you are inside.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. August 4, 2021.

Post 429.

FOR THE past five years, I headed the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) on the St Augustine Campus of UWI, a department I first joined as a graduate student in 1997. 

Although there was a year still to go, Covid-clo19 stepped in, making me shift priorities as a working mother or, as this column is named, a mothering worker. Putting it this way recognises mothering as a daily practice of ongoing labour and choices, and highlights the responsibilities that so many women actively juggle along with their working lives.

As feminists, we speak about the impact of Covid-19 on women’s livelihood and careers all the time. We note that the publications of women in academia fell more than those of men. We report the pandemic trend of women stepping down from leadership roles. We publicise the data which shows that, even though men in families are performing more care, women are carrying an ever more unequal burden, with implications for their income and independence, and mental and emotional health.

We talk about the care economy as the only one that never shut down, but which had to hold our society together all these months, managing its stresses with love and sometimes on a shoestring. 

Schools closing in March 2020 required a huge shift. Children, particularly primary-school age, couldn’t simply sit by themselves in a room, focusing for hours on their teacher through a screen. It took time to sort out Wi-Fi drops and other technical difficulties. They needed checking on throughout the day. At breaks and lunch time, who else would they talk to if not you? 

The pace with which one could function at a job, without having to be emotionally present for family, was simply not possible. 

At first, I worked like a machine to adapt both IGDS and myself to our new circumstances. 

Later I began to think that bringing those modes of work from the public sphere into the private sphere of family failed to protect how we should be at home with each other, and in fact another pace had to be found. 

School closures made Zi present throughout the day, giving me an opportunity to be with her that I would never have had, imagined possible, made time for or even understood as necessary. Now that we were not rushing to and from school and work, to lessons and through homework, and to a bath and bed, I saw her much more, observed her emotional needs in a way that the pandemic forced parents to notice, and tinkered with how I mothered so that I could spend more time at lunch or on evenings or even between meetings in the day. 

I could talk about the increased demands of housework and childcare, but I’m more grateful for what became precious time together, which I think made her happier and more centred, more responsible and aware, and able to slow down and reflect on growing up. 

Working from home also changed me. With Zi writing SEA next year, I don’t think I would have understood her emotional needs in the way I made time to understand as we were together all this time, in the context of online schooling and a looming high-stakes exam that terrifies children. 

I realised I should lower my own work hours and stress to better be there, knowing that getting children through the pandemic with their mental health intact takes conscious effort and choices. 

In deciding to step down from leadership, I asked myself, what career could be more of a priority?

Over these years, a young generation of feminist women and men who are the new voices of social-justice organising emerged. There’s the Jason Jones case and LBGTI youth unafraid of calling publicly for their freedom and equality. There are men echoing a language of transforming masculinities more than ever before, as we saw after the killings of Ashanti Riley and Andrea Bharatt. 

Women’s organisations collaborated to secure historic amendments to marriage laws, sexual offences and domestic violence legislation. Our post-pandemic survival together is our present challenge, remembering that gender always matters in recovery and holding our male-dominated governments accountable to an inclusive and equal nation. 

The IGDS exemplifies the radical political intellectuals who have always defined our region. For a time, it was a privilege to lead its work and vision. 

Now I’m choosing mothering over the upcoming school year amidst covid19. Families who have been through this know why one makes these decisions.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 2, 2020.

Post 389.

I’m writing this on the first day of primary school, as I start the school year working and mothering from home. I started out the morning feeling like we were on top of the world’s crisis and able to ascend it like mountaineers on the Himalayas, and by midday was significantly humbled.

Even with practice from last term, and better ideas of how to organize Zi’s time and mine, it’s still demanding.

I now pack Zi a lunchkit so that I won’t be in the kitchen in the middle of work hours, and there’s a table in the living room with access to a computer and connectivity. It’s as enabling an arrangement as possible, which is why the stress I’m experiencing, despite all these privileges, is so important to acknowledge.

Losing my work space, and being unable to switch my mind fully to work, has unhinged my focus, productivity and ability to think. Half of my brain is minding child all day, and ten work hours are not as efficient, and yet are more tiring. I leave my desk earlier to spend more time with Zi because she needs more social interaction. She’s entering Junior 4, so her workload will increase, as will the time I’ll need to put to her homework and revision.

It’s been months since I wrote a column with the luxury of one uninterrupted hour, and so I get up earlier or stay up later to find some quiet. By December, my sentences may read like computer code.

Even with schedules carefully explained and daily chores outlined, one eye has to be on their roll-out. Did you drink enough of the water I packed? How much of the sandwich did you eat? I said to read for half an hour, wasn’t that just 15 minutes? This is how you did your chores? Without extracurricular activities, the hours stretch.

Unless children spend excess time on a device, time has to be filled. As every parent knows, too much quiet is highly suspect, suggesting some surreptitious activity, and little happens without parental supervision even while work simultaneously calls. Unless you are in a two-parent household, an unequal burden of care means hour-by-hour attention in two different directions. Even in two-parent households, many women will put in more care work, with impacts on their mental health, work capacity, other responsibilities and exhaustion.

Last term, Zi deeply missed time with other children, reminding me how much childhood is meant for social development, and outside physical play. I have to figure out how to manage our isolation, because this second time around will likely wear her down. Even if we create a bubble with a school friend, as parents looking out for our children’s well-being, how to ensure safety from risk?

And now that children over eight, in a private car with their parent, must be masked, even taking a drive has become claustrophobic.

All new realities with which children must discover how to cope. Beyond my walls are women who cannot work from home, and have nowhere to leave their children, with no plan from the State nor from employers. Working women with children with special needs. Women whose partners may be essential workers and who, therefore, cannot leave children with grandparents as they used to, because their family is now a risk. Women working from home, with more demanding child care responsibilities than mine, whose employers may not be understanding. Women without the quality of online teaching that Zi will get, who will have to work, care, teach, revise, and balance everyone’s needs at the same time. Women who are not working, whose children do not have internet and computer access, and those who may be living in violent conditions or with others whose behaviour is unsafe. For many of them, this was Day 1 too.

The majority of UWI students are women, and some of these mothers may be in my classes. As I prepare to teach, I’m thinking about Ziya’s context for learning, and adapting to theirs too. This term will be a daily learning experience of how to be more organised, care for families’ health, and stay sane.

I keep telling myself that none of us know how to do this well, or at all. It’s like regular parenting: mostly you improve because you’ve made mistakes.

On just Day 1 of this challenging school year, as a working mother, I’m recognising how much survival will require realistic expectations of ourselves and each other.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. July 15, 2020.

Post 383.

The school term finally ended, one like no other in our living memory. The experience our children had will connect them as a generation for the rest of their lives.

Ziya’s school taught classes every day, covering some math, English, Spanish, social studies, music and PE. The children learned a lot, both about distance and connectivity.

As a working mother, I was grateful. It’s challenging to work and parent simultaneously, and school provided a few well-organised hours of focus. I’d listen with one ear while the teacher chided the class for not knowing all the words to the anthem, reminded them not to eat at the computer, repeated the importance of learning to listen, and tried to instill all kinds of manners. With their voice present daily inside my home, I grew grateful for how much teachers contribute, freshly appreciating their daily commitment to filling gaps in our parenting. Teachers, like nurses, should be better paid than CEOs.

Meanwhile, soon after knocking water over her laptop and frying its electronics, Zi became computer-proficient. She could type, upload her assignments and check her own e-mail. Suddenly, she understood e-mail. I loved seeing her upskill even as I noted our own entanglement in the expanding digital divide.

There’s no doubt about it, computer and internet access are a privilege, and will deepen systemic class distinctions in exam results and school places. They will exacerbate unequal opportunity for children globally, which is why access to the internet is increasingly considered a human right. Our children are in a world so different from our own childhood.

One evening, when she was resisting a rule I had insisted on, Zi even threatened to put me out of the “Zoom meeting.” It was like a newspaper headline marking a historical moment. We were lying on her bed, not actually in a Zoom meeting, and I could only shake my head at post-covid19 lingo for punishment for giving trouble. Imagining the new vocabulary that will define school chatter and news-carrying in September makes me smile.

Zi loved dressing up in clothes she chose, attending class in shorts, eating breakfast leisurely, having lunches together, and being near to us all day. She missed her friends and wandering the hall in her school terribly, but when term opens, it will be clear that there was much we gained during this time.

Prior to schools closing, she was racing from school to extracurricular activities to her grandmother’s or her dad’s, and then home. It seemed we were always arriving back late from my work hours and hustling to bed, or getting home and spending the evening doing homework. The whole week felt like a rush. It was a joy and labour of love, but pace.

Being freed of traffic, experiencing school without stressful demands and the anxiety of tests, inventing ways to occupy herself on evenings, and simply staying in one place seemed to enable her to mature and mend. We cooked, gardened, took walks, and it genuinely felt like she exhaled. She just needed to come off the treadmill and its breakneck haste.

I began to think about the costs of our emphasis on achievement. Seeing her now, more loving, independent, settled and calm, I know her heart would not have grown as much at the speed she was functioning, with the rotation of activities she was doing, or with even the number of people she was interacting with on a weekly basis.

You have to know your child. Some need greater stillness and quiet, time between transitions from one place to the next, less pressure and fewer personalities, and the room they are given becomes filled with emotional growth.

I wonder how many children are like her, keeping up and even thriving, but with inner needs that our world undervalues or speeds past. I think about the children whose aggression would subside, whose silences would break open, and whose capacity to navigate difficult feelings would improve if they had to manage a little less for enough time, could fit into themselves, and, without fear of failure, slow down and breathe.

I’m in awe at how little I understood this, perhaps because there seemed simply no chance to stop until everything ground to a halt. I’m alarmed by the fact that I would have pressed her through, which at the same time would have held her back. What she lost in schoolwork, she found in her heart. After a term like no other, it’s the lesson I’ll remember.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. May 12, 2020.

Post 374.

As Ziya distractedly watched TV, I watched her pour extra sesame seeds from some crackers into a bowl. I counted how many likely fell on the rug, and thought of how I’m constantly cleaning throughout the day even while I’m home working full-time.

I paid less attention than I should have when she went into the kitchen, pulled out flour and poured water, while I again prayed simply for minimal mess. Half an hour later, she had made dough with parsley and rosemary picked from the plants she had helped pot over the last weeks, and covered it all with a cloth. My nine year old made bread.

Each family is different. Some mothers are simultaneously remote-working, cleaning, caring, supervising on-line schooling, and engaging in extra-curricular activities at home. Some describe feeling like they are failing. Where they are teaching, schools have cut down on workload, yet working and single parents may be barely managing. Those reeling from economic shock are worried about their children’s nutrition and schooling. Thousands of mothers are now back at work as part of this phase of opening, and worrying where to leave their children.

Still, each of us has small victories at this time. We need to notice them as signs that, amidst more effort and less productivity, and more stress and less certainty, there are precious moments that provide a bridge from one challenge to the next.

Now that it’s daily and not just on weekends, Zi has washed more dishes, folded more clothes, helped with cooking, taken walks, biked, made art with whatever supplies (including all the masking tape) she could find, and had to learn to deal with a different reality where places are closed, friends are distant, and health is at risk.

On the days when I was too busy to notice what she was doing, there was more television, boredom and loneliness. That’s life for children of working mothers. Eventually, she would figure out how to survive – learning life-long lessons in independence and resilience.

In many ways, her capacity, calm and creativity improved now that we were not rushing out each morning, spending evenings on homework, and then rushing her back to bed. Her complex personality began to flourish because she needed to achieve less, and life became a little less demanding for her even as overlapping responsibilities increased for me. She experimented more with everything, even empty boxes, because she had time. I loved the break from the academic rat-race.

Meanwhile, there is no substitute for seeing each other throughout the day, having a chance to hug up, eat lunch together, and for much more conversation. It’s taken me time to appreciate that as a gift. I’ve had to grow from an old pattern of treating my family as an obstacle to my work deliverables to remembering that they are and should feel like a priority. I’ve recognized that maybe, the whole time, I was out of sync with the emotional beings now in front of me.

The newspapers are full of economic analysis, but I retreat to reading how other parents are managing, laughing with their stories, learning from their strategies, finding community with those who are happier to give children space for self-directed learning, life-skills or just to be, as well as feeling compassion for others overwhelmed by children home with little to do and fearful of their future failure. Such stories provide a qualitative picture, and point to realities and priorities, in a way that statistics can’t.

If the PM and his ballsy recovery team thought of workers, not just as having families to feed, but as parents with nowhere else to leave their children, how would they incorporate recognition of childcare? What multi-tasking stories would they hear?

Tens of thousands of children are usually in school at this time, often attend camps during school holidays while their parents continue to work, or in a usual year are at greater risk of sexual abuse and neglect because safe and affordable care options are unavailable. A child-centered approach would highlight the responsibility of care during economic recovery, draw on how children are coping and growing, and consider what they need.  

Zi and I are both learning, earning small victories. I keep thinking that, by September, we will finally have worked out a routine, just when she has to go back to school, and I’ll deeply miss this time with all its messy mix-ups, sacrifices, tinkering and fears, and combinations of string, glue, paper, and crumbs everywhere.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 23, 2020.

Post 368.

Name any number of stresses and you would find most of us are now dodging several of them daily. What are the implications of such higher stress when we are locked inside together? On the other hand, what are the implications for so many people who are living alone, and now without options for human contact?

Having rightly closed down bars and other public recreation spaces, mostly frequented by men, how will they cope? Men dominate public spaces, whether playfields, streets or rum shops, which are also spaces for establishing masculine identity and camraderie, and setting boundaries on the spheres of men’s lives within women’s control.

What happens to men, women and families when such spatial distinctions collapse and men are locked indoors? What new conflicts over time, power and decision-making are emerging, which we should publicly talk about and protect ourselves from inside our homes?

In a region where men, particularly older men, may also be among the higher numbers of those living alone, do we understand the realities of our different needs, coping strategies and levels of risk?

Behind our closed doors has become more complex than ever in a world where home may already have been lonely or unsafe, or a rest stop between places where one would rather be. Some may have already begun to lose income and are tense, with nowhere to turn.

Some are beginning to feel trapped or out of control. In response, they may turn to threatening and controlling behaviours as part of expressing frustration. Cases of abuse and the severity of violence in families might increase while options for running to family or friends are closed. For those victims, physical distancing can occur even while those around them help prevent the greater dangers of social isolation.

As with any crisis, women remain particularly vulnerable, whether because they dominate the service and retail industry as workers, and are at risk of losing those jobs, or because they predominate as nurses, and are taking risks that leave them distanced from their families, or because there is deepening isolation for those already being separated from friends and family by abusive partners, or who have been isolating themselves because of shame.

Girls’ risk of sexual abuse is especially high now that uncles, step-fathers, cousins and other men are more present and difficult to escape. The vulnerability we are all feeling right now can make victims feel even less able to report or leave, particularly if they are also women and girls with mental or physical disabilities. Many women in the Caribbean are also primary breadwinners and single parents, and the impossibility of balancing parenting and their profession will fall on them unequally.

Ziya’s school has shown a model response this past week – ‘live’ online sessions every day, three a day over the next two weeks on both mornings and afternoons, and assignments every day, but there’s no chance that, as a working mother and primary breadwinner, I could match their expectations and also accomplish my job.

It’s felt like going insane. The assignments come through a non-child friendly system where they must be downloaded, completed as word files or printed as PDFs, and then photos taken and uploaded. All week, I’ve wondered why primary schools don’t adopt a more empathic approach to learning, think about the child friendliness of the software, consider the realities of the learning environment children are in, send a package of material that could simply be done in the afternoons when office work is completed and two hours can be found to do assignments, and encourage home schooling approaches that don’t require a stay-at-home parent attentive to curriculum throughout the day.

While my mother is concerned about surviving, my friends reach out across their feelings of disconnection and my family panics about declining income, I worry about the implications of opting out of Zi’s school’s zealous teaching strategy or the implications of barely doing my job, when the days seem to demand one or the other.

Many people are protecting their health, but are deeply affected by the psychological and familial challenges of this time. Addressing them is as important as the health and financial responses.

Schools should remain closed after April 20th or we risk an infection spike that could particularly put the elderly at risk, for many of us can only work because grandparents provide after-school care. In the meantime, we need to rethink our assumptions about parents and homes, and our educational philosophy. We need to emerge, not only alive, but intact emotionally.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 17, 2019.

Post 355.

Vincentian feminist Peggy Antrobus once told me that women can have it all, just not at the same time. There are life stages, she cautioned, and knowing your stage grounds your choices.

The thing about elder wisdom is that you don’t necessarily agree until you reach the life stage where you do. In the meantime, you debate the advice you get and, as they say, hold a meditation about its relevance and worth.

Over the last year, I’ve been wondering if indeed Peggy’s right. I’ve discovered that, not only is it not possible to have it all, but that the choices you make determine the next stage, foreclosing options, and that widespread expectations of womanhood and motherhood are not incidental to these choices. The ‘all’ isn’t about having money, luxury and leisure, it’s about basics that women have a right to, such as both family and a career.

As I’ve become more responsible for Ziya as a working mother, I’ve become more aware of the job sacrifices I’m making, my lower expectations for my abilities, and reduced capacity for leadership.

This is common for professional women in their forties, who are primary carers of their children at the same time that they are in their most important years for professional advancement. Every ambition has its costs and you start aiming for what’s merely realistic as if schoolgirls’ aspirations are just a modern fairy tale.

In making these choices, I’ve become more attentive to the older women around me; the ones who delayed achieving their degrees until after their children grew up, the ones who took less demanding jobs so that they could get home earlier, the ones who start their work day at 4am so that they can do school pick up at 2.30, the ones who took on three jobs despite the extra exhaustion so that they could pay for extra-curricular activities, and the ones who reliably go to pediatricians, parent-teacher meetings and counseling sessions with their children knowing that their best chances for development and emotional resilience have to be planned, communicated, managed and honestly reflected upon.

The very women who can’t have it all are simultaneously at the center of making so much happen, like magicians coordinating a whirlwind, at risk to their sanity, self-care and self-definition. I’m not saying that dads are not important. I’m just saying that the unequal burden of care is real and it’s at the heart of a life stage many women reach.

Working mothers, whether on their own or not, often have to be on top of all the details, from Diwali and Christmas concert contributions to knowing where the uniforms are for each week, and the mental room this takes up is taken for granted whether they work in KFC or have PhDs.

Looking on, we often say to ourselves, I don’t know how she does it.

I’ve listened more for the everyday sacrifices; in health, in self-confidence, in savings, in sleep, in dreams. I deepened appreciation for the crucial role of women’s sisters, mothers, neighbours, children’s friends’ mothers, long-lasting friends, and compassionate co-workers.

Working mothers depend on understanding, encouragement, help, patience and time from a widespread network just to get their family through each day. Women everywhere could barely achieve what they do without the other women who invest in enabling them to.

I always saw these women around me, fitting the common character of the strong Caribbean mother, without really seeing their inner lives, difficult decisions, necessary relationships or wearying stories. Now that I live it, who feels it knows.

In a sense, I have had to decide what I want to excel at, what I am prepared to do my best at, however badly, and what I simply won’t accomplish this month or year or the next. The consequences are ones that will settle into experiences of acceptance and regret that accumulate with age.

In having to spend more time with my daughter this year because that’s the life stage she is in, I have come to recognize that motherhood means her needs determine my life stage for me. All further decisions follow, however this sets other achievements back.

It’s not a complaint, it’s an adjustment to embrace, like a soucouyant who would forever soar the night skies in fire if only daylight didn’t compel her into the confines of her skin. Daybreak has brought knowing what it means to sacrifice for your child as a life stage and as more than a line women so often say.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. October 30, 2019.

Post 348.

Parents often hurt children in ways they never realise or are willing to acknowledge. Later on, when the relationship between them breaks down, parents can feel unappreciated, rejected and frustrated. It’s as if the child was always so uncommunicative, so difficult, so angry and so cold.

A little honesty and self-reflection, and investment in listening, both of which are harder than they sound, would explain so much to parents who find their children’s behaviour inexplicable as they grow into adults.

The hurts are often unintended, but they begin from young, in how adults speak to children and discipline them, pay insufficient attention to their feelings, or fail to acknowledge their own wrongs. Those hurts bury themselves deep and become the knife that slowly tears bonds of trust.

Adults rarely apologise to children for their behaviour and rarely take responsibility for the many times they made their children feel rejected, abandoned or unsupported. They rarely acknowledge the dysfunctional contexts that children have had to grow up in or the instability created by everything from divorce to depression in the adult relationships around them.

We pretend that children are unaffected by our personalities and stresses, despite the fact that they live with us every day. We expect them to be grateful to us to the point of negating their protective strategies. We expect good behaviour at any cost. Mostly, adults feel that they did their best and can be unwilling to hear children’s experience of difficulties and struggles, as if doing their best ends any further conversation.

When parents reach a place where their children don’t think that there is any point opening up, for they will either misunderstand, disagree, deny or blame them for having those feelings, that’s when trust is nearly irreparably torn. On the one hand, parents grieve. On the other they insist that everything should still be normal, as if this is what respect entails.

Parents can hardly deal with blame at this stage in their life when past decisions can’t be fixed and are possibly already regretted. Children are not interested in their regrets or their explanations. All they want is to have their hurts acknowledged. For every disappointment a parent expresses to his or her child, there are many that children could validly respond with, but are not allowed to.

The other day, I shouted at Ziya for making me tell her a dozen times (or it felt like a dozen times) to do something. She got upset and said I told her to tell me when I do hurtful things. She said I didn’t tell her I was getting angry that she wasn’t listening. I was exasperated, what did she expect would happen when I had to tell her the fifth time?

I’m a child she said, you need to explain these things to me. How else will I know? I decided to listen. We took a walk and held hands. I apologised for yelling. I said it was wrong. I explained I get frustrated, especially when I’m tired, and she needs to do things the first time I tell her. She said I should tell her when I’m getting angry so that she will know that’s how I’m feeling. I agreed. I thanked her for being willing to talk, for helping me to become a better mother, for trusting me enough to believe that we could improve things together.

Now, when I’m getting to the weary, fourth-time-I’ve-told-you point, I remind her of our conversation. Just as she told me to, I tell her I’m getting frustrated, and she gets up and goes do what she’s told. It’s not perfect, but it works. There’s one less tear that may never mend.

There will be many other times I unnecessarily hurt her feelings. That’s life. None of us is perfect as people or parents, but saying that to a child is simply a way of not taking responsibility. I understand that I did my best, but that imperfection has its costs.

Such acknowledgement would protect the threads of connection, communication and trust between us. It would enable me to thank her for emerging into a strong and smart adult, and for deciding to forgive me as many times as she will, despite my failings over her lifetime. Such honesty would make me a better parent in the present.

Children want parents’ love and protection, but not when their trust in us is broken. If this feels familiar, and you don’t understand why, it’s your turn to listen.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. October 22, 2019.

Post 347.

For a long time, I wasn’t into school work. Ziya was barely seven or eight years old. My own expectations didn’t fit the overly academic approach of Caribbean education. I disagreed with the teaching philosophy and psychology that gave children homework at ages five and six, required revising for tests, and substituted chalk and talk for learning through play.

I disagreed for many reasons. Primary schooling undervalues emotional development and social skills. It often leaves children bored and stressed, and emphasizes competition and hierarchy, rather than compassion and collectivity. A fear of making mistakes or doing anything other than what you are told sets in, leaving children less inclined to ask questions than to reproduce established answers. Children are being trained for a single, ultimate survival of the fittest that could determine their life chances. Dreaminess has no real place and certainly no rewards. There’s a formula they must learn to fit in.

I also disagreed because I teach bright university students who are worried and intimidated by everything: getting in ‘trouble’, what others will say, being seen as ‘weird’, and the risks of challenging power, injustice and hierarchy of all kinds. What’s the point of being smart, but passive or high achieving, but individualistic or imaginative, but afraid?

Finally, I disagreed because I remember being good enough in primary and secondary school, but not particularly high-achieving. I remember feeling less smart and less of a success because of it. None of that was necessary. I began to love my classes and naturally excelled at university. I was determined not to reproduce pressure, that at best is pointless and at worst causes harm, from a failure to recognize that children don’t have to always do well to do well eventually.

So, Zi and I would trek to coasts and rivers, and spend hours adventuring on weekends. I didn’t pay attention to her school marks because she’s a child and, frankly, they do not matter. I admired homeschooling, but as a working mother and breadwinner, couldn’t manage. Our compromise was a brief, blissful period of being in the school system, without being bullied by its demands. Providing a bohemian break from regimented reality during our time together was my personal priority.

You have to know your child in a way that no one else will, and commit to her developmental needs, her need for free time and outdoor openness, her obliviousness to scores and rank, and her dreaminess in a way no one else may value.

Then, last week, after her school’s achievement day commemoration, she came home with her certificates, and said she wanted to do well enough for a trophy. I wondered if all this time I had prevented her from being as proud of herself as she could be, but knew it was best that I waited for her to be motivated on her own and ready.

So, this weekend we began. We by-passed the beach and spent the day on math and grammar. It was long, but she had a goal, and my role was not to push, but to support her. On Monday, when tests began, I could see her greater confidence and certainty. She had grown up a little while I wasn’t quite looking, in her time and in her own way.

She came home, proud of her test results and prepared for more revision. I started to think about what it would mean for my time, my career and my sacrifices to be with her every step of the way, not because marks matter, but because feeling good about the results of aspiration and hard work lights a spark which lasts a lifetime.

How remarkable to catch when your child enters a new stage, requiring reflection on how you must grow too. My dream is to enable her to avoid the pitfalls of subordination to school, to empower her to excel but also to know how to escape, to emerge with fearlessness, kindness and dreaminess intact, and to nurture her instinct to learn from Orisha festivals, feminist marches, waterfalls, museums, and groups as diverse as market vendors, Jab masters, URP workers, and LBGT activists.

While Trinidad and Tobago stumbles through its myriad inequalities and failures, there’s one small person that most needs what I can uniquely contribute. This seems unimportant to write about in the face of national headlines. Yet it matters, for so many mothers like me lie awake at night thinking about what we can get right one child at a time.