Читать книгу Parenting for Liberation - Trina Greene Brown - Страница 9

STORY 1

Breaking Apart as a Parent

Mai’a Williams, author of This Is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in the 21st Century

I met Mai’a in Los Angeles around Mother’s Day 2016. She was a brilliant and very matter-of-fact speaker during a panel reading and discussion on the life-affirming book Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Making the trek from Orange County to the venue in Chinatown, I was late, so I stood in the back, smooshed between the kids’ art activity table and the books for sale, in a room bursting at the seams with mothers, caregivers, and children. Mai’a shared her journey as a mother, of moving with her daughter abroad and experiencing surveillance and systemic violence. I recall nodding in agreement, as I had reflected on my own move from South Los Angeles to Orange County with my son. When it was time for the Q&A, I was nervous, but my friend, Dawn Marie, urged me to raise my hand. I shared my struggle with raising a Black boy and requested insights on how to transition from fear-based parenting to liberated parenting. That had been a question that I had been chewing on for the previous year. Mai’a’s answer during that short panel left me longing for more. I followed up with her and asked if she’d be a podcast guest and the rest is history. She was my first official podcast guest. I interviewed her from my home in Orange County while she was traveling for the book tour. In our discussion, we explored segments of her writings and Mai’a shared her radical mothering principles when it comes to safety, boundaries, and resilience from trauma. Here’s a snippet of what she graciously shared with me:

Breaking Apart

“While being a mother—whether it’s during the pregnancy, the birth, or in taking care of the baby; or even when your kid enters elementary school years, becomes a teenager, just somewhere along that path of being a mother—you will be broken apart. For me, that’s me on the floor crying—I mean like there’s nothing left. I’ve got nothing left to give. Every mother, sooner or later, gets to that stage where it just breaks you. To me, whenever that happens, it’s a bursting process. It is a moment of being traumatized. That is actually a moment in which we can make some choices. In the healing from that breaking apart and the healing from that trauma, we can choose to either become harsher, angrier, more bitter, closed off, and controlling of other people—or we can take that moment to see that, even while we are breaking apart, we haven’t been broken. This is actually an opportunity for me to be able to reach out and become more open, more community-oriented. It can be a pathway for us to be able to relate to our children and to other mothers, and be able to create community even more because we’ve had this incredibly human moment.

“This is really hard, while simultaneously being a really beautiful and amazing moment. Unfortunately, we don’t get to talk about the trauma of becoming a mother, or the trauma of being a mother, very often. But that trauma can actually be the ground and the soil in which we sow very different types of seeds—for how we want to raise our children and create community.”

This early conversation with Mai’a raised a couple of points for me regarding trauma. First, the idea that motherhood is traumatic—even though it’s often portrayed as the most beautiful, positive, and joyful experience of a person’s life. In reality, it can be completely traumatic—from infertility and challenges with conception, to complicated, near-death births, to postpartum challenges and infant phases. Secondly, Mai’a reframing trauma as soil for new seeds opened up something for me to see what’s possible because not in spite of trauma. So often we talk about the need to be resilient and bounce back from trauma, but Mai’a offers what is possible in our trauma.

STORY 1

Liberated Parenting Strategy

Reflect

Think about a time when you felt you were “breaking apart” as a parent. As Mai’a shared, it can happen at various states of our parenting journey—from pregnancy, to birth, to elementary school, etc. As you return to that time, getting in touch with how were you feeling, think about what felt possible and impossible? What choices and options were available to you? Read Tupac Shakur’s “The Rose That Grew from Concrete,” a short eight-line poem about rising above one’s circumstances. Using symbolism, Tupac calls our attention to a rose that does not allow dire conditions to hinder its growth; instead the rose proves nature’s law is wrong. Similar to Mai’a’s story, the rose in Shakur’s poem leverages the cracks in the concrete to breathe fresh air. After reading the poem, reflect on a rose that has bloomed from you breaking apart.

Practice

Often, we try to present ourselves as though we “have it together” and when we experience “breaking apart,” we retreat and withdraw, feeling alone and isolated.

As Mai’a shared, our moments of breaking apart are opportunities to be more expansive. Using that past experience of breaking apart to prepare for your next breakthrough, create a break-apart to breakthrough plan.

Write out: Next time you find yourself “breaking apart,” consider it a moment to open up and invite your community/village into your trauma. How can you connect with your community the next time you are breaking apart?

Here are some questions to ask yourself to create a breakthrough plan:

• When I am breaking apart it, looks, feels, sounds like:

• When I am breaking apart, I will not judge myself, I will give myself grace and understanding by:

• A mantra I can say to myself is:

• A care practice I can engage in is:

• A few people I can connect with are: