Swing trading is a technique that has general application. Therefore it can be applied to the trading of any financial instrument that experiences price changes on the sale of days, weeks, or months. Swing trading can be discussed in the context of Forex, stocks, or even bonds, but it is not a specific tool geared toward any specific financial asset. Once you understand the basic techniques used with swing trading such as moving averages, then you can apply them to any financial asset you are interested in trading.
Swing trading really isn’t a strategy. In fact, it uses the same strategies used by day traders. Rather it’s simply a time frame or style. So the same strategies are used but they are applied to different time frames. This has significant implications of course. Day traders are actually looking for the same types of price moves, just on different time scales. Since a swing trader is willing to hold their position overnight and out to weeks or even a few months, the risk is significantly lower.
Some of the tools and strategies used by swing traders that are also used by day traders including:
Looking for support and resistance
Looking for chart patterns
Moving averages
Bollinger bands
Trending and counter-trending
Looking for signals in candlesticks
We will be discussing each of these in future chapters.
Forex
Forex is short for foreign exchange, and is a market where people trade one currency against another in pairs. Traders seek to profit from price swings of trading pairs and use a technique called long-term trend following. Swing trading also follows trends, but does so over short time periods, but time periods that exceed those used by day traders. On Forex markets, you can expect to hold positions for more than a day to a few weeks. Forex traders that use swing trading as a technique will study charts over the course of days to look for bring price swings they can take advantage of to earn profits.
Swing traders on Forex are looking for volatility. When there is more volatility, there is a greater chance that prices will have larger swings between high and low values, offering more chances for short term profits. Large price swings as well as more frequent price moves can aid the swing trader.
As a swing trader on Forex, you aren’t going to be as concerned with specific currency pairs in terms of what currencies make up the pair, but whether or not the pair offers the types of price moves you are looking for, that is big swings that offer a solid buy-low and sell-high possibility. Moving averages are frequently used when applying swing trading to Forex. As we will see in a future chapter, using moving averages can help you properly identify coming market trends, and therefore find the right entry and exit points for your trades.
Swing trading is quite different than scalping, so you are not looking to profit from small price movements that occur over very short time periods. Scalping and day trading require a lot of attention to the markets that will have to be focused whenever you hold a position. Because swing trading takes place over longer time frames, constant attention to the markets isn’t necessary. Of course you still have to pay attention, but its something that is far more amenable to part-time attention rather than having to go all in. When using swing trading on Forex, you will want to keep track of economic and political news that has the capacity to roil the markets or cause rallies for one currency over another.
Options
Options are a type of derivative that has an underlying financial asset, such as shares of stock. Most option traders are trading stock options. The option gives the buyer the right to buy or sell shares of stock at a fixed price, which is called the strike price. Options that give the buyer (of the option) the right to buy shares of stock are known as calls. If the option gives the buyer the right to sell shares of stock at the strike price, it’s known as a put.
Option trading is amenable to swing trading because options are timelimited. Every options contract comes with an expiration date. The lifetime of an option can be quite varied, lasting from one week (so-called weekly) to a month, to several weeks, and even one year or more. Options that last one year or more are called LEAPs. However, no matter how long an option lasts, they all operate in basically the same fashion.
Unlike stocks, part of the pricing of an option is determined by “time value”. The closer an option gets to the expiration date, the less time value the option has. That adds an extra wrinkle to trading options that other financial securities don’t have – for example you can hold stocks for however long as you like. For details on how this operates, please download my book on Options Trading.
Since options (generally speaking) have a lifetime that fits well within the time periods that swing traders use, they naturally fit within a swing trading paradigm. A swing trader of options can use the same techniques of analysis that a swing trader of stocks or other financial assets will use to determine price swings. Puts offer an opportunity to short the market, so swing traders interested in shorting can use puts for that purpose rather than having to deal with the complexities and risks of using margin to borrow shares of stock.
Options have many strategies that specialists in options trading use to generate income, but those are not of interest to the swing trader. A swing trader will only be interested in using swings in stock price to profit from trading calls or puts at the right moment in time. This is a simpler approach rather than having to learn all the complicated schemes that have been put together to minimize risk with options. Instead, you will use the same tools to look for signals in the market that a swing trader of stocks is using, and then take advantage of buy and sell signals to buy or sell the appropriate options. The main difference will be focusing on the time value of the options and noting how that can impact pricing.
Stocks
Swing trading obviously has application to the stock market, and we will use it for many of our examples. You can use swing trading to profit from the moves of any stock, but high volatile stocks are going to work better, because you are more likely to see large price swings in the stocks that you decide to take positions in. When using swing trading with stocks, there are different ways to approach it. At any given time a stock may be fluctuating within specific ranges, and you can use this information to get a general idea of what the best share prices are to enter and exit trades. Big news can always cause a massive pricing move, and one thing you will look for are earnings reports. Its also important to study company fundamentals, but with an eye on profits during the current and next quarter rather than viewing them through the lens of a long-term investor. Earnings reports can offer opportunities to profit from swing trades, provided that you are correctly anticipating the way the reports are going to go. Most of the time whether or not a company is actually profitable over the previous quarter isn’t as important as to whether or not they fail to meet, meet, or exceed expectations. Something that you will be interested in doing is seeing what analysts are saying so that you know what the expectations are. Keep in mind that it’s possible to make an incorrect judgment in this case, which can lead to significant losses.
Product news and even political and financial news can have a large influence on stock prices. If the FDA approves a new drug, then that could mean a significant rise in share prices. The introduction of a new smart phone might do the same, but if features were not as exciting as investors hoped, it can leave the stock moving sideways or even crashing low.
While paying attention to news is important, you don’t want to give it the most weight. The fact is you are going to be the last person getting the news, long after institutional investors or large hedge funds have gotten the information. At best, you’ll be getting the news at the same time but they are going to be able to react to it instantly, long before you can.
So most of your focus should be directed at looking at the stock itself, and how its behaved over recent time frames and out to a year. You don’t necessarily want to look back too far, since behavior of the stock five years ago isn’t nearly as relevant as the behavior of the stock in recent months.
Some of the tools used for doing analysis on the stock market are the exact same tools and techniques that would be used on Forex. First and foremost, this will include using candlesticks and recognizing various chart patterns. You will also put a lot of emphasis on using support and resistance.
Simply put, support is a price level below which the stock doesn’t seem to fall past. Of course it can fall below the support level, but if a lot of the data from previous charts suggest a strong support level, that means that its going to take major bad news about the company to cause it to drop significantly below that point. This can be used as an entry point for your trades.
Resistance is the upper price level the stock may be unable to break. Like support, its going to take a major change to get the stock to break above resistance. That major change could take many forms, it might be the introduction of a new product, an unexpectedly positive earnings report, or a change of CEO. Therefore you should spend time following the news related to companies you are trading, but don’t let that be the final word, or obsess over it too much. Just use it as one piece of information in your overall toolkit. To see why, go back to the spring and summer of 2008 and see what all the analysts were saying – most of them were dead wrong. Of course that doesn’t mean they are always wrong, they are often right, but you have to take what they say with a grain of salt. So use your analysis and spot trends, know where the levels of support and resistance are, and then pay attention to special news items or events that could cause a major price change for the stock of the company.
If you want to swing trade, you’re going to need to open a brokerage account. A brokerage is just a company that plays the role of middle man. The brokerage maintains an account for you and keeps records of your trades. It also allows you to deposit funds that can be used for trading, and allows you to take out your profits. They will also take care of the necessary tax forms on your behalf. The central role of the broker is to execute trades. So when you want to buy or sell shares, the broker will do that on your behalf. You can also borrow shares from the broker, or borrow money to make larger trades, if you have a margin account.
Before choosing a broker, you’re going to want to decide what financial assets you want to trade. Some brokers might not give access to all types of securities. This might be more important if you are interested in trading Forex or cryptocurrencies, finding good stock brokers is fairly straightforward. However many of the leading stockbrokers will also provide access to trading Forex, crypto, and other assets.
Types of Accounts
The first thing you’re going to want to consider is whether or not you want a full service brokerage or a discount broker. A full service brokerage is one that provides professional financial advisors to help you make your investment decisions. Some may even be able to assist you with swing trading. However, be aware that commissions are going to be an important factor when you trade frequently. It’s one thing to set up a periodic investment in an index fund, and quite another to be making several trades a month. For that reason, most swing traders are going to be interested in discount brokers.
Besides looking into whether or not you go with a discount broker, you are going to want to determine whether or not you open a cash account or a margin account. By law, to open a margin account you must deposit $2,000 up front. The advantage to opening a margin account is that if you qualify, it will enable you to borrow money and shares from the broker. This opens up the possibility of shorting a stock, or using leverage in order to purchase more shares than you could with your cash alone. Typically, swing traders can get 2-1 margin, which means if you deposit $2,000, you can buy $4,000 worth of stock.
Examples of popular brokerages include E Trade, Tasty works(particularly good for trading options), Robinhood (zero commissions), TD Ameritrade, along with more traditional brokers such as Fidelity or Charles Schwab. In each case, check to determine if you can trade the financial assets you are interested in trading. While its easier to have one account, if you are going to have diversified trading such as trading stocks, options, and Forex, you might have to get a different broker to manage your Forex trades. Of course it’s advisable that beginning traders stick to one asset, at least at first.
Expert Advisors
Full service accounts used to only include those with a professional financial advisor. However, over the past decade or so, a new type of full service account has developed that relies on software or “robot” advisors to manage it’s accounts. These often go by the name “expert advisor”. This type of account is managed for you, and the robot will pick stocks/options or currency trades to buy and sell and when to sell them. That may or may not appeal to you, the idea of having a robot running your trading account might be a bit intimidating.
Retirement Accounts
Swing trading methods can be used to grow retirement accounts, such as an IRA or a 401k. However, keep in mind that you will probably be put in a position of reinvesting profits from swing trading toward the purchase of more assets inside the retirement account. So it would not be traditional swing trading in the sense of earning profits in the here and now to cash out. If you cash out early from retirement accounts, you’re going to lose a lot of benefits because of heavy taxes and early withdrawal penalties.
However, swing trading is an intriguing way to grow your IRA from the inside. By law, you can only deposit about $5,000 or so per year, depending on age. But using swing trading, you have the potential to rapidly grow the account by earning profits inside of it. They can then be used to purchase more shares. If you are good at swing trading, you can double or triple the amount by which the account is growing per year, without violating any laws regarding contributions.
It’s always a good idea to have a retirement account as a part of your overall portfolio, so swing trading inside the account can be part of your larger financial strategy.
Opening a Brokerage Account
Opening brokerage accounts is a pretty simple process, its like signing up for an account with anything online. Enter your name, address, and bank account information. Some brokerages may require that you make an initial deposit to get started. If you are a beginning swing trader, consider using Robinhood. This is an app based trading platform that is somewhat skeletal, but also very easy to use. With Robinhood, there are zero commissions and no minimums. So you can limit your deposits to the amount of money that you want to use for trading, rather than having to meet some arbitrary funding requirement.
Keep in mind that if you want to trade options, the broker is going to want to make sure that you understand what you are getting into. Usually, an interview of some kind is required before you can trade options. They are going to want to make sure that you understand that options are speculation and not investment. That means that you are buying financial assets in the hope that the price of the asset is going to rise over a short time period. This is in contrast to investing, where you are sinking your money into a company for the long haul. So you want to explain to the broker that you want to do speculation more than investment and that you understand what it means and what the risks are. Second, you will want to assert that you are interested in short time horizons, and not long term investing. You will also be asked some basic questions about income level and net worth. However, don’t worry about those, they are pretty flexible on those points. Options trade for tens to hundreds of dollars, so you don’t have to be rich to get started.
The main purpose is simply to satisfy the broker that you completely understand the nature of swing or option trading. It does not preclude you from entering into long term investments as well.
Tools Available Online
Many brokerages are self-contained, that is they include all the tools you need in order to operate as a swing trader. At a minimum, you should make sure you have access to the following:
The ability to chart stocks out to a minimum of five years, preferably longer.
You should be able to create candlestick charts, not just line charts.
You should be able to easily switch between different time frames, such as days, weeks, and months.
There should be access to moving averages, especially simple and exponential moving average tools, with the ability to set the number of periods and include more than one moving average on a chart.
Other moving averages may be of interest, such as the Hull moving average.
You will want to be able to utilize Bollinger bands.
You want access to financial statements along with rundowns of cash flow.
If tools like these are not available, you can visit Yahoo Finance where they can be utilized for free. Some trading platforms have practice or simulated stock markets where you can practice trading real securities, without having to invest any money. This is a very good way to start training yourself, but of course without the strong emotions that come when real money is involved, they are of limited value.
Once you’ve setup your account, you’re ready to get started. The next task is to learn how to analyze stocks and stock charts, and look at technical analysis.
In this chapter, we will compare and contrast swing trading with some of the main strategies that other traders and investors use. First we’ll look at day trading, and then we will compare swing trading with position trading and buy and hold investing. Then we’ll talk about buying long and selling short.
Swing Trading or Day Trading
One of the ways that traders are divided is by the time frame over which they enter and exit trades. This is the main differentiating factor between day traders and swing traders, and that has a lot of implications. First lets start from the basic approach used by both methods of trading. Both seek to earn profits from price moves of a financial asset. Swing traders enter their positions and keep them for any time frame ranging from days to weeks, even out to a couple of months.
In contrast, day traders seek to enter and exit their positions within one trading day. In fact a day trader can take multiple trading positions on the same day, but will be out of all of them by market close. While swing traders hold positions overnight, a day trader always exits their positions. This is necessary because day trading involves minute by minute monitoring of their positions, and they enter trades and exit them on time spans of hours. If a day trader were to hold positions overnight, it’s possible that they would lose all the money in their positions from activity over the span of minutes at market open.
Being a day trader requires an intensive time commitment. The trader must keep a close eye on the markets and their positions as long as they’re active. They seek highly volatile stocks, often trading small-cap and even micro-cap stocks, looking to profit on what to others is the noise in the stock market. Company fundamentals play a minor role, if at all, in the analysis of the day trader. In most cases, day traders are looking to earn profits from price fluctuations that result from big players buying and selling shares. Fundamentally, day trading comes down to profiting off the fluctuating supply and demand of shares. Commissions from the brokerage can be a huge expense for day traders, since they may have to execute a large number of trades each day.
Swing traders can invest in companies of any size, including large-cap blue chip companies. Swing traders can also trade index funds, which is probably not something a day trader would be looking at.
As we’ve stated, swing trading involves positions that can be held days, weeks, or months. This has important ramifications when compared to day trading. Over these extended time periods, company fundamentals can become important. Earnings reports, product releases, changes in management, or just changes in the economy at large can impact asset prices on these time scales. That means a swing trader needs to be paying attention to company fundamentals.
In most cases, swing trading can generate larger profits, per trade. That’s just a fact that comes from how things operate when you hold your positions longer. There can be exceptions, but that is the general rule. Furthermore since swing traders are entering fewer trades, they are going to be facing lower levels of expenses arising from commissions and fees.
Despite these differences, day traders and swing traders rely on many of the same tools. These include analysis of chart patterns, trend lines, Bollinger bands, and candlesticks, among many others. But, they are using these tools over different time frames. For a swing trader, the short term fluctuations of a stock within an hour are probably not attract the same level of interest as compared to a day trader.
The two trading styles don’t just differ in technical details like the length that a trading position is held. Swing trading and day trading have different capital requirements, time commitments, and even different mindsets, even though there will be some overlap.
Although you can make an absolute distinction on paper, it’s not always an “either-or” dichotomy. Some traders are exclusively one or the other, but it’s also possible to engage in day trading and swing trading at the same time. That is not an approach that is recommended for most people, and splitting your attention like that would probably inhibit your odds for success.
But let’s take a closer look at some of the differences. The first difference that immediately stands out are capital requirements on the stock market. Day trading is a closely watched activity by brokerages and federal regulators, because it’s believed to be very high risk. In fact, to open a day trading account in the United States you need to have a minimum of $25,000 in the account.
According to the United States government, you are a “pattern” day trader if you engage in four day trades within any five day period. Weekends don’t count, only business days. To be a day trade, you have to buy and sell the same security on the same day.
All trading is risky, but compared to day trading swing trading carries far less risk. The short term minute-by-minute fluctuations that can wipe out the account of a day trader aren’t nearly as relevant to swing trading. One consequence of this is that swing traders have a lot of flexibility when it comes to the amount of time that you are going to devote to trading. While its possible to be a full-time swing trader, many swing traders only do it on a part-time basis. The fact that they are looking to profit on longerterm price movements means that it’s even possible to submit trades after hours.
Another consequence of the lower overall risk of swing trading is that there are no capital requirements. Financial advisors might have recommendations, but you can open an account of any size and begin swing trading.
Day trading is something that requires intense focus, and it’s also a high stress lifestyle. While swing trading can certainly bring stress if positions aren’t moving in the right direction, the longer time frame means that sustained attention to the stock market all day long isn’t required. The overall stress level is also quite a bit lower. Day trading attracts actionoriented “type A” personalities. In contrast, since you are holding positions for longer periods that can require waiting for the right time to make a move, swing trading actually requires patience.
Since Forex is over the counter and lightly regulated, it has lower capital requirements for day traders. You can day trade on Forex with as little as $500. There are not official requirements for swing trading on Forex, but its recommended that you open an account with at least $1,500.
Swing Trading vs. Buy and Hold Investing
Buy and hold investing is a long-term strategy that seeks to preserve wealth and grow it over time. A buy and hold investor is not interested in short-term market fluctuations, generally speaking. At the most, a buy and hold investor will look to purchase stocks when they are undervalued, so they may take advantage of a drop in price. They never short the market, and instead hope to profit over years and even decades from the overall rise in the stock market as the economy grows.
The techniques used by long-term investors are very different from those used by swing traders and day traders. Ups and downs of market prices are largely ignored, and they utilize a strategy called dollar cost averaging to purchase shares at regular intervals, regardless of the price. Over time the highs and lows average out as overall, there is asset appreciation.
The second major strategy that buy and hold investors use is diversification. They want to invest in a large number of stocks so that while individual stocks might have ups and downs, the overall portfolio tracks the market. They are satisfied matching market returns. In fact, many buy and hold investors take this to the extreme, investing only in index funds that track major indices such as the S & P 500. These types of investors don’t even do much fundamental analysis, and it’s a strategy that requires little day-to-day attention.
As you can see, there are many differences between long-term investors and swing traders. While the long-term investor is attempting to build up a diversified portfolio over years and decades, a swing trader may be focused on one or two stocks, and exit the positions in a matter of days. While buy and hold investors are satisfied tracking overall market performance, swing traders seek to beat overall market performance. Swing traders utilize the tools of technical analysis in order to find the right entry and exit points of their trades. Long-term investors ignore them and don’t care about short term fluctuations or swings.
Swing trading or Position trading
Position traders seek to hold an asset for a long period of time, but they are not buy and hold investors. They are traders who seek to earn profit from their trades, rather than holding assets in order to build wealth. Position traders on the stock market can hold positions for several weeks, months, or even years.
Position trading on the stock market can be viewed as a long-term version of swing trading. They will rely on both fundamental and technical analysis. Since position traders will on average hold assets for a longer time period than a swing trader, fundamental analysis plays a larger role in their decision making. Capital is more liquid for swing traders, since they are entering and exiting trades more often. Position traders will have their capital locked up in an asset. This can last for potentially long periods. Since they are holding long-term positions, position traders are more sensitive to economic trends and the overall state of the stock market.
Position trading is not an active form of trading. They are hoping the long-term appreciation of the asset will lead to profits. Day traders may do hundreds of trades per year, but position traders enter into about 10-12 trades per year on average. Swing traders are more concerned with short term fluctuations in asset price than position traders, although position traders need to be alert to trend reversals that could cause losses.
There are many similarities between swing trading and position trading. They both rely on fundamental and technical analysis, and compared to day traders hold their positions longer. They are both trend followers who seek the right entry and exit points for their trades. Overall, it’s simply a matter of trading frequency.
While options are a perfect fit for swing traders, position traders won’t trade weekly or monthly options. However, you can use LEAPS for position trading, since you can hold them for long time periods, even up to two years.
Position trading is also a popular Forex strategy. Fundamental analysis plays an important role in Forex position trading, even including macroeconomic factors like changes in GDP. They will use technical analysis to determine entry and exit points for trades. Position traders also have a wider stop loss, which may require more up front capital. However, position trading on Forex tends to have a favorable risk-to-reward ratio.
Market Participant
Market participants include many people and organizations. Most fundamentally, market participants include the buyers and sellers on a given market who transact to transfer assets. A market participant must be capable of entering the transaction. Other market participants can include:
Broker Dealers who handle trades between buyers and sellers, and may use their own inventory to facilitate transactions.
Clearing Agencies, who clear and settle trades.
Electronic communications networks that automatically match buyers and sellers at specific prices.
Investment advisors that provide advisement for a fee and/or issue publicans on investment recommendations. They can be companies or individuals.
Securities Exchanges are the markets where securities are bought and sold. Stock markets in the United States include the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Options are traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
Transfer Agents maintain records related to securities and record changes in ownership.
High frequency trades
High frequency trading is computer-based algorithmic trading. It utilizes computer software to perform multiple trades per second. There is little human input to high frequency trading. Since multiple trades are executed per second, this can lead to large moves on the market that can seem mysterious to live, active human traders. High frequency trading has been encouraged because it generally increases liquidity on the markets. However, critics complain that high frequency trading puts small retail investors (that means individual investors) at a disadvantage.
How to start trading
The first step is to sit down and do an analysis of your own situation. Begin by deciding what your goals are and the level of commitment you are able to devote to swing trading. This includes the amount of financial capital that you have available to invest, as well as the amount of time you are able to devote to swing trading. This can change down the road, but you should map out your first three months. At a minimum, you are going to need a working computer and a solid internet connection. It can also be helpful to have a smart phone, because many brokerages have apps that can be used as an additional tool. Mobile apps can help you monitor the markets, make trades, and receive alerts. You may also want a printer to print out charts that you can analyze by hand, but many investors just study them on the computer.
Once you have all of your equipment nailed down, the next step is to select a broker. The stock brokers of yore have been replaced by online websites and mobile apps. Each broker has their own advantages and disadvantages. Some of the factors that you will want to consider are:
Commissions charged per trade. High commissions can eat people alive when they are doing a large volume of trading. For swing traders, this isn’t as much of an issue as it is for day traders, but it could still be important. These days there are many options available providing a wide array of pricing and features. Keep in mind that the brokerages with the highest commissions don’t always have the best features.
Minimum deposit. If you are hoping to start small, you might want a broker that doesn’t require a large minimum deposit. The requirements vary, and some don’t require any minimum deposit.
Simulated trading. Many brokerages offer trade simulations that help new traders hone their skills. Going through the process
can help you get a feel for swing trading and you can see what the results would have been, without using real money.
Trading platforms. In today’s world, a broker with multiple trading platforms is essential. You will want a broker that also offers a mobile app.
Ease of use. This one is hard to evaluate without experience. You might want to sign up with more than one broker if it’s possible, so that you can directly test their platform. If that isn’t something that is feasible, you can read online reviews.
The ability to trade options. Even if you don’t go in right away trading options, you will want to have that feature available in case you decide to try it down the road.
Analytical tools. You will want strong analytical tools for your charting as well as for determining potential profits.
In our experience, newer brokerages are better options. Tasty-works and Robinhood are good options, with the latter being an excellent choice for beginners. The main argument against Robinhood is the skeletal set of features. But you can make up for that by utilizing charting on other free platforms like Yahoo Finance. However, Robinhood is very simple to use in order to execute trades.
The science of buying long
Buying long means entering trade when a swing is at a low point or point of support. That is, you are expecting the asset to appreciate in value, so you will buy at what you think is a low price, hoping to profit on coming gains in a swing.
Knowing the best times to enter a trade depends on many factors studied in technical analysis, and we will discuss them in detail later. For now, we only seek a qualitative understanding of the science of buying long. In Swing trading you are hoping for an upward trend in price that can last anywhere from a day to several months. You enter the trade at a low point, and then exit within one swing. Entering a trade means buying the stock in this case, and exiting the trade means selling the shares and taking your profits.In the example below, we see Apple provided an opportunity to win with a swing trade over the course of a couple of months. Notice that the previous highs would provide a guideline for the pricing level when you should sell your shares. The range to enter the trade was actually fairly obvious, because the share price had been much higher recently. If that was a level of resistance you can use that to execute a limit order, which means that your shares will automatically sell if the market price meets or exceeds the price specified in your limit order.
The chart indicates that after falling to a possible low, Apple may have established a new level of support, as seen on the right side of the chart.
The science of selling short
Selling short can be a new concept to many investors. If you are like most people, you’ve only thought about the stock market in terms of buying long. And chances are you’ve been thinking of it in terms of long-term investing over years and decades.
Selling short can be an entirely different ballgame for many people. While the stock market appreciates in value over the long term that tends to average out prices, in the short term stocks can fall quite a bit. The market provides ways that you can profit from these declines. There are two ways to do it, you can short (sell) the stock, or you can invest in put options. Either way, you would do this when you see the stock entering a downward trend.
In order to short the stock, first you borrow the shares from the broker. Then you immediately sell them to get cash in your account. After this, you simply wait for the share price to drop. If it drops significantly, then you can buy the shares back at a lower price. Remember you borrowed the shares from the broker, so you can simply return the shares. Your profit is the difference in prices.
For example, suppose a given stock was trading at $50 a share. If a major decline was expected, you could borrow the shares, and then sell them on the market. Later, the decline materializes. Let’s say the share price dropped to $20 a share. You can buy them back at this discounted price, and then immediately return them to the broker. Your net profit would be $30 a share, ignoring commissions.
Put options offer another, fairly straightforward way to bet against a stock. If the price of the stock goes below the strike price of the put option, then the put option will gain intrinsic value. Remember that options have an expiration date as well. What you want with a put option is for the share price to drop below the strike price. That makes the put option far more valuable. If that happens, a trader can exercise the option and use the same strategy described above.
Suppose that once again, we are interested a stock trading at $50 share. We buy a put option with a $50 strike price. Then the stock tumbles as expected. We then buy the shares on the market for $20 a share. Then we exercise the option, which in the case of a put means that we sell the shares to the writer of the contract at the strike price. So once again we earn $30 in revenue from the decline in share prices. When discussing options, you have to figure the option price as well as commission in your expenses.
Swing trading is deceptively simple – you earn profits by going with the trends in the market. To do this, you study a given financial security and look for support and resistance. Support is the low pricing point below which the asset has not crossed. Resistance is the high pricing point, above which a break is not possible. Of course support and resistance are temporary pricing levels, and they are apt to change at any time. On the stock market, a bad earnings report can lead a stock to drop below its previous levels of support. On the other hand, a good earnings report or the release of a new product can cause prices to skyrocket. Part of your job as a swing trader is to keep up with the markets and market news, so you know when such opportunities might present themselves. We will talk about support and resistance in more detail later, when we discuss chart analysis.
Of course prices are moving up and down all the time, so you aren’t always waiting for big news to break. There are opportunities to get in on trades all the time – if you know what to look for. Prices will move “sideways” for long time periods, before making a break to the upside or downside. Alternatively they can be “boxed in” between support and resistance. Even then there are opportunities to earn profits, although they won’t be as large as when there are big movements. We will be teaching you what to look for later in the book.
How to Make Profits from Swing Trading
To understand how you can profit from swing trading, it can be helpful to look at a couple of mock up charts. First let’s take a look at the general idea. Asset prices fluctuate down all the time, and on different time scales. In its simplest form swing trading takes advantages in the swings up and down on the markets – you buy low and sell high.
Of course any investor can say they hope to buy low and sell high. The swing trader hopes to capitalize on a swing, or a single move in the asset price. Swing traders hope to earn profits from breakouts, when the asset price increases to a new level. Alternatively, you can short the asset if its experiencing a major decline. Swing traders can also earn smaller profits as the asset price bounces higher and lower about the median.
This graphic indicates price levels of support and resistance for some financial asset. Our goal in this chart is to look for an opportunity to buy the asset when the price is low, and then sell it when the price rises. There are many techniques a trader will use to estimate the right times to enter a position.
The dashed line at the bottom of the chart represents support. This is a price level that historical data have shown that as the price of the asset decreases, it will stop and reverse and enter into an increasing trend after it reaches the support point. So an asset that is trading at the support pricing level is one that a trader wants to invest in – if there are signals of an uptrend. There are other opportunities to get in on a trade as well at higher pricing levels. A trader will enter a position if there are signals that the asset price will continue increasing to the resistance level.
So, we say that a swing trader will buy at support. This is if you expect the asset price to increase. If you expect it to decrease, then you sell at resistance.
To make a profit, the trader needs to know when to exit a trade. The resistance level provides the best opportunity to do so. Profiting from your trades can take discipline, there is always a chance that the asset will break above the resistance level, and emotions make people anxious to take advantage of such situations. But waiting to long to exit a position can be costly, if the price drops rapidly back to the support level. It’s important to understand that swing trading is not gambling. The trader uses technical analysis to determine the best prices at which to buy and sell, in order to profit from the trade. But the concept is pretty simple for increasing prices – identify levels of support and resistance and buy low when pricing is at or near the support level, and there are indications of an upward trend. Then you sell high at a pricing point that you determine to make profits, and exit the trade.
As you’ll see later in the book, the many tools of technical analysis can give you a solid indication of coming price trends, and the mood of the markets. But it’s important to be realistic and recognize that no tool is foolproof, and you can’t win on every trade. The bottom line is the indicators aren’t right 100% of the time.
Swing traders can also earn profits from declining asset prices. For example, you can short stocks or purchase put options. If you don’t understand how that works now, don’t worry, we will discuss that in the coming pages.
For now, let’s just understand the overall picture. This time you enter your position when the asset price is relatively high, and all the signals are pointing to a coming downward trend. Then when the price drops to a profitable level, you exit the position. Graphically it looks like this.
This is the central idea behind swing trading. Of course in practice, its not that simple otherwise everyone would be doing it and raking in millions of dollars. Becoming a successful and profitable swing trader requires mastering the tools of technical, chart, and fundamental analysis so that you know when to enter and exit positions, and whether to go long or short your positions. We will be discussing all of those tools in the book. For now, let’s take a step back and take a look at the three biggest markets where swing trading is used.
Swing Trading with Forex
Forex is the foreign exchange market where the various currencies of the world are traded against one another. Forex isn’t just in the United States, there are trading markets around the globe, so it’s a huge market, with $5 trillion traded daily – compared to $200 billion on the stock market. The largest markets are in New York, London, Tokyo, and Singapore. Currencies around the world are traded in pairs, so you could trade the dollar against the Great British Pound, or the Dollar against the Yen, or the Euro against the Pound, for example. While all currencies in the world are traded, the focus is mostly on currencies used in the largest economies, including the Euro, the British Pound, the US Dollar, and the Japanese Yen.
Unlike the stock market, which goes through brokerages that charge high commissions, Forex is traded over the counter with small or no commissions. Since there are markets worldwide, it’s open 24 hours a day, 5-days a week. It’s also highly liquid. That means there is enough volume in trading activity to enter and exit positions quickly, making it well suited for swing trading. During any business day of the week, traders can open and close positions 24 hours a day. It’s also possible for traders to utilize a great deal of leverage on the Forex markets as well.
Swing trading on Forex doesn’t require a huge time commitment. You can check your charts a couple of times a day, so its suitable for someone with other things going on in their life like a job, that makes it hard for them to sit at the computer all day long.
Several swing trading methods are used on the Forex markets, including those we will discuss in the book, including candlestick trading, trend trading, range trading, mean reversion trading, chart analysis, and Bollinger band trading. There are also several more that we will discuss in later chapters.
Swing Trading with Options
Options are a type of derivative that allows you to control shares of stock without actually owning them. There are two types of options, calls and puts. Calls give the buyer of the option the right to buy the underlying shares of stock at a price called the strike price. That price is fixed in the contract, and so at any given time may be well above or below the market price for current trading. Since it may allow holders of the options contract to obtain the underlying shares of stock at a reduced price, options contracts can be valuable. However, they come with an expiration date, which means they are also becoming less valuable as time passes. You can think of it as an old style hour glass, with the sand in the upper part of the hour glass representing the time value of the option. As it drains into the bottom part of the glass, the option is losing value, and eventually the time value all drains away. However, if the strike price is lower than the market price, the option still has value and can even be exercised, which means that the buyer of the option can elect to actually buy the shares. Because of that intrinsic value, call options gain value with rising stock price.
Options also make it easy to profit from downturns in stock price. In this case, you would purchase a put option, which gives the buyer the option to sell a stock to the writer. Put options also have a strike price, and they become valuable when the strike price is higher than the market price of the stock. What this means is that the buyer of the option could then purchase low prices shares on the market, and then exercise the option by selling the shares to the writer of the contract. The more the stock drops in price, the higher the value of the put option. Of course put options also come with an expiration date, so the decreasing time value also impacts the pricing of put options.
Options are inherently short term assets, making them ideal for swing trading. The shortest term for an option is one week, so the option will expire a week after its issued. Most options are monthly, but there are longer term options that can expire up to one or two years from the current date. Those are called LEAPS, which means Long term Equity Anticipation Security.
Options can be purchased on many securities, as well as on indexes. They represent a great opportunity for swing traders because they don’t require much capital to invest up front, and there are also strategies that can be used to limit risk. For swing traders, the same tools and analysis that would be used with stocks are used with options, since the value of the option is directly related to the changing price of the underlying stock. However the swing trader of options needs to be paying attention to the expiration dates of any options in their portfolio.
Swing traders who trade options will primarily use the techniques that swing traders of stocks will use.
Swing Trading Stocks
Swing trading stocks is very popular, since there are many highly volatile stocks and stocks tend to breakout to the upside or downside quite often. While the stock market is less liquid than Forex, because of the way the markets behave, stocks can be more amenable to many swing trading strategies. A swing trader on the stock market can profit from price appreciation by going long, and can also short their positions when appropriate.
Swing traders on the stock market will utilize all the strategies of swing trading. This will include trading with the trend, looking for breakouts, Bollinger band trading, chart pattern analysis, candlestick trading, and more. As we’ll see in the next chapter, swing trading has some similarities to other styles of trading and investing, but there are also many differences. Swing trading is not something that a Warren Buffett style investor would be interested in.
Remember that creaky stationary bike your grandma used to have in her basement? Today’s big-ticket home-gym equipment is nothing like that. The treadmills, bikes, and rowing machines listed below are so advanced, you can join live classes or work out with a virtual personal trainer right from the comfort of your own living room. With most of the country currently limiting time outside their houses during the coronavirus pandemic, a home gym is more appealing to a lot of us than it ever has been before. And while this story covers only the best large gym equipment, including cardio and weight machines, if you’d like to add some smaller items to round out your gym, we’ve written about a variety of those, too. And we’ve also gone deep on foam rollers.
If you’re training for a hilly race but live nowhere near any hills, or if you’re just looking for an intense running workout, Steve Uria, founder of Switch Playground, likes that this treadmill “goes up to a 40 percent incline where most treadmills stop at 15.” Plus, it includes access to workouts from NordicTrack’s iFit pro trainers, like runs featuring video from scenic locations around the world. “It also automatically increases speed and incline for you as the trainer leading your workout accelerates or climbs,” says Uria. “All stats are saved so you can monitor your results and gauge progress.”$2,999 AT NORDICTRACK
Running on a traditional treadmill burns fewer calories than running outdoors, because the moving belt helps propel you forward. But this nonmotorized treadmill, recommended by David Juhn, personal training manager at Life Time Athletic Sky gym, forces you to do all of that work yourself. “You can also adjust the resistance for power-development workouts to add variety to your workout routine,” he says. “You can achieve advanced cardiovascular and strength workouts in a short period of time while only needing minimal space for the machine itself.”$9,740 AT TECHNOGYM
Bringing the energy of a group workout class to the comfort of one’s home, it’s not surprising that the Peloton bike is hugely popular. According to Recode, Peloton finished 2018 with more customers than SoulCycle. Personal trainer Harry Hanson, founder of Hanson Fitness, loves it for helping clients get in shape fast, on their own schedules. “Users can go in a live or taped stream and they’ll be in a workout-class setting. This increases the motivation they need to get the workout done. It’s a great way to burn fat, release endorphins, and feel fabulous overall,” he says.$1,495 AT PELOTON
If you’re willing to spend a little bit more, you may want to invest in Peloton’s newest bike, the Bike+, which features a larger screen that rotates 360 degrees to easily follow along with workouts off the bike, automatic resistance adjustments that match your instructor’s program, and full integration with the Apple Watch.$2,495 AT PELOTON
Olson also recommends equipping your home gym with a spin bike. “Cycles are so excellent for cardiovascular systems, have no impact, and are knee-, hip-, and spine-friendly.” This bike’s compact design also takes up less space than a treadmill or elliptical.$2,030 AT AMAZON$1,795 AT KEISER
Old-school, wind-powered air bikes with handles, which were originally popular in the 1970s and ’80s, are having a comeback, according to Nick Clayton, personal training program manager at the National Strength and Conditioning Association. “You’re biking and pushing and pulling at the same time, so it’s low-impact, but as far as working muscles and getting the most out of any kind of interval session, [it’s] probably the best bang for your buck,” he says. Simple to use, easy to set up, and with no motor to potentially break down, it’s a valuable addition to any home gym.$999 AT AMAZON$699 AT WALMART
Technically a “stand-up bike,” the ElliptiGO 8C is a favorite of runners looking for a low-impact way of getting and staying fit when they’re recovering from injuries or want to reduce stress on their joints while still getting a cardio workout. The stationary trainer turns the 8C into an at-home option for those days you’d rather work out inside. “It’s perfect for getting in a quality workout that mimics the feel of running, without the added stress on your joints,” says Isabel Seidel of the running clothing brand Tracksmith. She likes that “you can change the resistance like the gears on a bike,” to simulate hills.
Instead of an elliptical machine, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WHOOP, prefers the VersaClimber, because “it’s more of a full-body workout and you’re also working against gravity.” Athletes like LeBron James love it as well, and Ahmed says you can get a “full-blown, high-intensity workout” in as little as 10 to 15 minutes. Matt Withers, facility manager at Definitions Personal Fitness, agrees that the VersaClimber will give you “hands down the best butt-kicking you can get in under 30 minutes.” He explains that the machine “forces the individual to use not only the full body, but primarily the largest muscle groups in the body — the lats and legs — resulting in a greater demand of oxygen and hence cardiovascular intensity.”FROM $2,095 AT VERSACLIMBER
For a low-impact cardio workout that still burns fat and engages both your upper and lower body, Equinox trainer Or Artzi recommends a rowing machine. Compared to electric models, she says, the water-powered ones have a more natural feel. Eric Salvador, head trainer at Fhitting Room and a certified indoor-rowing instructor, agrees: “A rower is hands-down the best bang for your buck when it comes to investing in a big-ticket home-workout machine. Rowing is truly a full-body workout that uses almost every major muscle group in your body. Engaging so many muscles simultaneously elevates your heart rate and burns a lot of calories.”$1,295 AT MOMA DESIGN STORE
A double-arm cable machine, like this one from NordicTrack, offers a variety of ways to work your muscles with a single piece of equipment. Withers says cable machines “provide a large amount of constant resistance. If the machine has adjustable arms, they can also be pulled from a variety of angles in order to hit multiple muscle groups in different vectors.” The NordicTrack Fusion CST comes with six adjustable cables and a tablet for streaming on-demand workouts.$1,999 AT BEST BUY
Unlike the typical barbell you’d find at the gym, the Bandbell comes with bands on each end for hanging either weight plates or kettlebells, engaging more muscles in each exercise. “The Bandbell is a unique bar that’s unlike any other for injury-prevention, strength training and rehab, or pre-hab,” says Kirk Myers, founder of Dogpound. “It also challenges your core since it forces you to stabilize.” You’ll need a set of kettlebells, too, which lots of trainers recommend having on hand anyway since you can use them for resistance and cardio training. Personal trainer Colleen Conlon likes the competition bells from Kettlebell Kings. “These types of bells have metal handles which are desirable when kettlebell training because they are easier to hang on to and less likely to rip your hands,” she says.$289 AT ROGUE FITNESS
If you’re used to heavy lifting at the gym, a squat rack that holds a barbell is your best option for getting your workouts in at home. “Squat racks are great for those who are interested in lifting heavier weight or those working on Olympic style lifting or powerlifting,” says personal trainer Louise Green. She recently bought her own and loves how it lets her do almost anything she would do in a gym. “The rack allows for easily sliding plates on the barbell while it’s resting on the rack’s adjustable arms,” says Withers. He recommends a half-rack like this one (with two upright posts instead of a full rack’s four) to save money and space. Keegan Draper, a certified personal trainer and fitness specialist at Mindbody, agrees that a rack is the “ultimate tool” in any home gym.“These are great for squats, benching, pull-ups, dead lifts — basically all your larger lifts,” he says. “It also creates a nice place to store items such as weights and bars.”$365 AT ROGUE FITNESS
Body Space Fitness founder Kelvin Gary is a fan of using sandbags for weight training because they’re “extremely versatile and very easy to store.” He likes that the Ultimate Sandbag brand sells a variety of bags that fit as little as five pounds of sand and up to 150. (Just know that you’ll need to buy and provide your own sand.) The bags have seven handles so you can use them for different exercises, including squats, lunges, and deadlifts. “You can change the position of the handles and make an exercise feel different just by the hand position,” he says.FROM $80 AT PERFORM BETTER
After months of missing the bodyweight-meets-cardio classes at NYC-based studio SLT during the pandemic, Ali Finney, beauty and fitness director at Well+Good, decided to invest in a microformer to replicate the workout at home. Like the larger megaformers found in SLT and other studios, the microformer is a sliding platform with attached handles and straps that challenges all your major muscle groups. “The compact, spring-loaded carriage allows me to do all of my favorite moves without needing to leave my house,” she says. “The carriage and platforms are smaller, but I’ve found that makes me fire up my muscles to stabilize myself even more.” The microformer is customizable, and prices vary depending on how many add-ons you want, but Finney says to at least opt for a model with a back platform and one set of handlebars for the versatility to do most exercises. She follows along with the SLT On Demand videos to get as close to the in-person-class experience as possible.
Despite the fact that kettlebells and bodyweight workouts might win the gym popularity contest right now, fitness pros agree: Not only are exercise machines totally fine to use, they might be especially helpful if you’re new to working out.
“It’s true that if you’re using free weights, you have to recruit so many stabilizing muscles,” says Shannon Fable, certified trainer and programming director for Anytime Fitness. “But when you’re getting started, using selectorized equipment (the machines with weighted plates) and just learning the movement pattern is OK.”
Another bonus: “If you haven’t got full strength or balance or full range of motion, machines are much safer,” says Stuart Munro, certified personal trainer for the New York Health and Racquet Club.
For those who have been on a gym hiatus or are gaining back strength post-injury, weight machines are an easy way to get back in the game — without the risk of dropping anything heavy on your foot, Munro says.
And, as you’ve likely noticed, weight machines remove the guesswork since they usually have helpful how-to cards right on them.
With that in mind, here are the top machines the trainers we spoke with suggested. Each one will help you build strength and train your body to use the right muscles, so you can be on the leg press one day and do weighted squats with perfect form the next.
What you’re working: Quads, glutes, hamstrings, calves
Why it’s worth it: All the trainers we spoke with agreed that this was their go-to lower-body machine. “If people use this with correct technique, it can help you move toward squats off the machine,” Munro says.
What you’re working: Latissimus dorsi (“broadest muscle of the back”), shoulder girdle
Why it’s worth it: If you’re interested in ever doing a pull-up, this is a great place to start. You’ll build your back muscles and start activating the entire posterior chain.
“Beginners can start with an under grasp (palms facing you), which uses more biceps and tends to be a little easier,” Munro says.
You can also bring your hands closer together or spread them farther apart (so your arms make a V shape) to make the move more challenging.
I decided the time was right for me to become a mom when I was twenty-nine, except I was not going to become a mom the conventional way. I was single and had been for most of my life. I was doing well in my career. I travelled the world quite a bit; in fact, that was one of my favourite things to do. Perhaps, however, most unconventional of all, given where I was in life, was that I decided I was going to adopt.
My dream has always been to adopt. However, I thought that I would be going through the process later in life, as many people who make this decision do. It was going to be at the point where I had a husband, a house, and a dog. In essence, I was planning to go the route of adoption in what perhaps seemed the more traditional way. Why was this? Well, as much as I had a desire to adopt, I will be the first to admit that I was strongly conditioned by so-called chick flicks. In those films—I started watching Disney princesses and then moved on to romantic comedies (rom-coms)—a single, usually quite desperate woman, whose life is chaotic, meets the man of her dreams and all the pieces fall into place. Then, even if the relationship does not work out right from the start, they find a way, and, in the end, they live happily ever after. In my mind, I extended the scene further, as I always knew that a big part of my happily ever after would be the bit beyond the film where they have children. So I waited and waited, sometimes impatiently, for my own Prince Charming to ride to me through the sunset and for my own happily ever after to begin.
But it didn’t—at least not like I thought it was supposed to. In fact, it was far from what was in the films. I had a wonderful group of friends, a very supportive and loving family, and a great education and, as noted, I was travelling the world. In most respects, I had what from the outside was a wonderful and privileged life. Yet I was only able to dwell on one thing: my constant singleness. As I got older, it got so bad that it manifested itself in the form of clinical depression—I have no qualms in admitting this. I hated myself because I could not work out what was wrong with me, why no one could love me. I spent long days and nights trying to figure out how I could change myself so that someone would finally be able to love me. It did not help that I was emotionally bullied when I was a teenager in school, being often called “a loser.” The more it did not happen, the worse it got, and, finally, the only logical conclusion I could come to was that those bullies in high school were right: I was indeed a loser.
In the meantime, friends around me were having their own happily ever after, and I gallivanted around the world to their beautiful weddings. I was genuinely very happy for them. But with each wedding, I was wondering when it would finally be my turn. People kept saying to me, “Don’t worry. I am sure it will happen for you” or “It will happen when you least expect it.” The problem was that I could not “least expect it” anymore; it was front and centre to my life, and I became convinced that all I needed to find eternal happiness was a man.
After many of years of suffering and my condition worsening, I decided it was time to get help. I am a perfectionist, and it takes a lot for me to ask for help. Particularly in this case because I truly believed that there was nothing clinically wrong with me; no one could help someone not be a loser. Finally, and thankfully, through cajoling from some lovely friends and family who cared deeply for me, I found a wonderful psychologist who helped me think and see outside the proverbial hole I had dug myself. I also started reading again, which is one of my favourite pastimes but something I had not kept up with during the height of my depression. Reading was very important, as it helped me gain some perspective outside the rom-coms I tortured myself with when I was depressed.
After years of working on myself, I was finally able to once again clear the fog and engage in self-reflection. I realized that there was no one else responsible for my happiness but myself. Although this may sound very simple, it was perhaps one of the most difficult realizations I had to come to in life. This was also the time I decided that I was a feminist because I did not need to conform to societal norms of women to find my happiness. I was not only a feminist but a proud feminist, who had to take care of myself and my own internal happiness. The realization that trying to achieve conformity had harmed me was deeply shocking. Being able to finally embrace my feminist identity supported me in other parts of my life too, particularly in my career. Once I had managed this step, I was finally able to pursue my own happily ever after. I decided to try and dissect what my dreams and aspirations were so that I could start putting them into action.
From this, I realized that although I had dwelled on the fact that my happily ever after was marriage, my dream was actually to have children. Thinking through this, I realized that I had always associated having children with finding the perfect man, building the perfect house, and having the perfect life. I finally recognized that I did not actually know what “perfect” meant in this sense; rather, I had to discover what perfect was for myself. Therefore, I went ahead and put my own dreams into action and became a mom.
When I decided to go down the path of adoption, I had braced myself for many things: immense bureaucracy, long waits, as well as the toughness of being a single parent. The one thing I did not expect, which was possibly the toughest part of the whole process, was how openly judgmental people were about my decision to adopt as a young, single mother. Today, as I sit here and write this piece with my most special, wonderful baby daughter napping in the background, I am forever grateful that I did not listen to them. Rather, I am deeply fulfilled with the journey of adoption because it has made me a much stronger woman and better feminist parent to my daughter.
In order to understand my journey, it is important to illuminate some of the judgments I have experienced. In hindsight, it would have been very helpful to know more about the ways that society thinks about a single woman adopting a child and to have been able to prepare myself for what was coming my way rather than, perhaps ignorantly, assuming that everyone would be happy with my decision. None of the parenting books or adoption books I read mentioned this challenge. To support other women who may make a similar decision in the future, I share a set of responses I perhaps should have given at the time:
Comment: Have you really thought it through? Are you sure you are old enough to make that decision? Why don’t you wait a few years until the perfect man comes along?
What my response should have been: Actually, now that you mention it, after having been old enough to vote for more than ten years; after having lived, studied, and worked in eight different countries on three continents; after having been financially stable and independent since university; after having decided to go perhaps the most difficult route to have a child, with my life and future parenting skills being mercilessly critiqued by the government and social workers; and after having to wait more than two years, to have my child—maybe you are right, and I have not thought my decision through.
Not only did I put pressure on myself to conform to the idea that I needed to marry before having children, society also pressured me to conform as well. Society expects women to have children, yet society, at the same time, restricts how it can be done. Aside from not understanding why I chose to become a mother as a single woman, people found my decision to adopt even more controversial. I was told a number of times that even in-vitro fertilization from a sperm donor was more acceptable than adoption.
Comment: Now you are just advertising your infertility.
What my response should have been: Really? That is news to me.
This comment was perhaps one of the most culturally centred comments I received. In Uganda, producing children is a sign of a woman’s status. In fact, the verb “to produce” is actually used when it comes to children. When a woman has twins, for example, her worth, in terms of her dowry, increases as she is perceived to be more fertile. In Uganda, we have some of the highest fertility rates in the world. However, due to high costs of raising children, a large number of children in Uganda are placed in orphanages to receive care; others are abandoned.
Even with this mandate and expectation of women having many children in Uganda, adoption is still seen as a last resort for those women are ostensibly unable to produce. That I was choosing adoption at a young age was seen by people as giving up on having children of my own. I do not know whether I will have biological children or not. In the future, if the right partner comes along, then I may, only if to experience the feeling of pregnancy and birth. But I may also just choose to adopt again.
Comment: You know, now you will never get married.
What my response should have been: Oh thank goodness.
When I mentioned my astonishment about how many people have criticized my decision to adopt, I am told, “I am sure that’s just a cultural thing.” It was not. Such comments came from all kinds of people from different backgrounds, men and women alike. Given my background, it is perhaps the one that, at first, pushed my sensitive buttons the most.
However, I believe that these comments and experiences have better prepared me if I should choose to partner someday. If a man does not respect me as a single mother by adoption, then I know they are not the right person for me. It took this journey of self-realization and becoming a parent to understand that protecting my daughter’s and my own preciousness is worth more than any partner in the world to me. As much as I may still want to marry and for my daughter to have a father, if a prospective partner does enter our lives, but he does not bring joy to our lives, then he is not worth it and we will do just fine by ourselves.
Comment: But your career is going so well, why don’t you wait for a bit. This may not be good for it.
What my response should have been: Oh does that mean you think that my career is going to go less well in the future?
I am sure that this is a comment that not only single mothers get but all women who are considering having children in general. Long before I pursued my path of parenthood, I received an important piece of advice from a woman I respect greatly. She is quite a bit older than me and ended up not having children, not because she did not want to but because she was always waiting for the perfect time. She decided to wait for that elusive optimal time to come along, putting her career first. In the end, she woke up one day and found that she was too old to fulfil her dream of having children. She advised me, therefore, that there is no ideal time in your life; instead, you make it ideal by resetting your priorities and working around it.
At the time I started my adoption process, my career was indeed going well. I had finally found my passion workwise. In the two years that I waited for my daughter’s arrival, my career only got better. On top of it all, unlike pregnancy, where you have approximately nine months’ notice for your baby’s arrival, with adoption you are unsure when the call will come that will change your life forever. For me, the call came after I had just come back from a two-week trip to Myanmar and the U.S. and I was home for a break before I would be travelling again in the following weeks.
Before my baby came along, I worked insane hours as I only had to focus on myself and my career. However, I realized that it was not wholly fulfilling to me. I have only been a mother for a short while at the time of writing this, so there is still a lot for me to discover. I will say that I was absolutely terrified of being a parent, being a single parent, and of being solely responsible for a little life. Many people told me that I was in for a difficult ride as a single parent. Some made it seem that it would be near impossible. When my daughter entered my life, I braced myself for beautiful but difficult times. However, what I have discovered is that mothering comes naturally to me. My instincts are there to help and to guide me. And with family and friends surrounding me, I am never doing it alone. I know that things will change, particularly when I return to work, and I realize motherhood will mean letting go of some of my commitments. Nonetheless, I feel my life has become so much more fulfilling. Becoming a mother has made me a more rounded person. I also believe that if my career was going well before my daughter, there should be no reason why it should not continue this way, particularly because I am a far happier person than I was before. I fully recognize the challenges I will face as a single and employed mother. However, I now know I have the strength to face these challenges.
My path has not only gifted me with an amazing daughter, it has also made me a strong feminist parent. With this, I am confident I am now able to give my daughter a more robust foundation in life based on the lessons I have learned; this includes how to have a healthy sense of self as well as how to openly and assertively reject insensitive and judgmental remarks. Moving forwards, I want to live our life together drawing upon suggestions from the feminist manifesto I live by—namely Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The final section of this paper, therefore, is a set of solemn promises to my daughter on how we will pursue this together.
1. “Teach her (that) the idea of ‘gender roles’ is absolute nons-ense.” (Adichie 15)
Red was always my favourite colour. I also like bright yellow, orange, blue, and green. Although I will also sometimes wear pink, it is not something I am immediately drawn to. Therefore, less to break gender stereotypes and more to dress my daughter in colours I like, I went out to find her clothes in those colours. I was genuinely astounded that in 2018, this is still a difficult undertaking. Most of the shops are organized in two sections: one in blue for the boys and the other in pink for the girls. To challenge gendered clothing, I bought my daughter clothes from both sections. This was my first and hard lesson on how to overcome these predefined norms.
Most challenges still await me, as my daughter is still only a few months old; she is more interested in staring at my multicoloured bedcovers than any particular piece of clothing. However, I have already begun to prepare for the future. For example, I have ensured that my daughter will have a wide array of toys and books, particularly ones about notable women— Favilli and Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls being my current favourite. I believe that in our home life, together, we will be able to achieve this. The major question for me is how this will develop once she enters playgroups, kindergarten, and school. It is not that I don’t want my daughter to be a so-called girly girl. I just want her to be able to choose that rather than have society choose for her.
2. “Beware of the danger of what I call Feminism Lite…. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in full equality of men and women or you do not.” (Adichie 20)
Being a mom is pretty much equivalent to being a teacher. It is also means becoming a student again. Each child, even as an infant, is different. Everyone’s situation is different. Therefore, I continue to learn from my daughter every day about her needs and my own, too. One thing that becoming a mother has taught me is that being a feminist is not a label one can just carry sometimes. It is true that women are progressing in the world, but we are still far from reaching anything close to gender parity. The reason why, in the past, I did not want to be labelled a feminist was because the term carried some negative connotations. I used to believe there were much more important things to strive for in the world. However, now I know that if I am not a true feminist and do not aspire to full feminist values, then none of the other dreams and aspirations I have for my daughter will happen. Therefore, by being a proud feminist parent, I want to build these foundations for her. One of the major lessons I want to pass on to her is that there is no such thing as feminism lite; rather, I want her, unlike me, to grow up and fight for her rights and equality right from the start.
3. “Never speak of marriage as an achievement.” (Adichie 30)
A major mistake I have made in my life that I want my daughter to avoid is to assume that happiness can only be found in marriage. She has taught me that you can pursue your dreams as an individual and find happiness through self-love and care. Even today, I am told the more determined and independent I become, the less likely it will be I will ever get married. However, if I had not become the strong, independent feminist I am today, then I might never have pursued my dreams and ambitions and I would not be with my daughter. I would have also likely failed at finding happiness because right now, since becoming a mom, I have felt the happiest and the most content I have ever been. Therefore, my success in parenting will be evident if I can raise a daughter who has the ability to think for herself and who does not worry about what others think. If I am able to do this, then I am sure she will not see marriage as women’s only potential achievement but rather as merely another option for her if she wishes.
4. “Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.” (Adichie 36)
Until reading Dear Ijeawele, I had never really reflected on this part of my self. It was one of those illuminating moments that provided deep insight into myself. I have tried to make myself likeable. I would back down from something I truly believed in if I felt that it would make me less popular. I felt I failed if someone decided they did not like me or a decision I took. This quality, I now see, is one that we consciously or subconsciously pass on to most girls, no matter the negative affect on their self-esteem.
I am just learning for myself that likeability is not an achievement in itself. If there is something I truly believe, I realize that I must pursue it, even if someone does not like me for doing so. Although it took me a long time to get here, I know that in raising my daughter, I will not require her to be likeable just to please others.
Drawing upon inspiration from Adichie, I decided that I wanted to immortalize my own promises to my daughter in a letter. Therefore, between receiving the phone call that she had arrived and the day she came home, I wrote her a letter to honour the fact that she made my dreams come true and to enshrine my dreams for her. This is part of the letter I wrote:
To the most special daughter in the world,
After nearly two years of working to put my dreams of becoming a Mama into action, the time has finally come for you to come home and for us to be the family we were always meant to be. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my dreams come true in ways more beautiful and special than I could have ever imagined.
Today is the day, therefore, I pass the magic wand to you, the most special girl, and promise you from the bottom of my heart that my life will now be dedicated to providing you with the foundations for you to transform your dreams into plans and your can’ts into cans.
The reason I wrote this piece is that I did not find any comfort in the parenting books I picked up to prepare for my daughter’s arrival. Quite the contrary in fact—they were terrible and instilled the fear in me that nothing I do would make me a good mother. Coupled with these parenting books, new mothers also receive far too much unsolicited advice and criticism. Therefore, what I hope to contribute to the discussion is that we all do the best we can, given our circumstance. We must realize that everyone’s conditions are different; each parent is different, and, above all, each child is different. You can become a mother and a family in a multitude of ways. And all mothers adapt and draw upon their experiences to build the best foundation they can for their child. The journey I went through in becoming a mother has taught me to embrace all differences as a positive, which are what make individual journeys so special.
Throughout my childhood and before I became a mother, my extended family was, besides being mostly newly and nominally religious, what most people would describe as close. There were three living generations descended from or related to my grandfather who spent a lot of time together at my grandparents’ house, and celebrations like New Year’s Day, weddings, and birthdays filled the rooms and gardens with people and laughter.
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For the most part, the units formed in my mother’s generation by marriage and birth were distinct from the whole, but only to the degree to which we defined one another as cousins or uncles and aunts. The only relatives we didn’t feel a close bond with lived either in Northern Nigeria or in England, and even then, we visited them as often as we could. For those family members who lived in our base of Lagos, Nigeria, the work of raising my generation was distributed on the basis of opportunity and expertise among the adults. As such, for most of my life, “family” was a collective concept—a large group of people whose shared blood fostered goodwill and support.
My grandmother, who had a background in education, conducted or supervised after-school lessons for any of the grandchildren who needed them. Discipline and correction could be meted out by any adult, but the most egregious cases were reserved for my mother and grandfather. (I wager this was because of their impressive ability to unperturbedly watch recalcitrant adolescents beg for mercy, as they stood with trembling muscles on one leg with their arms spread.) Affection was freely given and freely received by the children, and on Sundays after church, my grandfather would pile us into one of his Mercedes Benz cars to go buy ice cream. To my childhood self, it was a happy and mostly safe family, and its conservatism was not apparent to me because I existed within its confines.
Growing up, the implications of gender were rarely readily apparent to me. I was quick-witted and humorous in a way that the adults—especially my grandfather and mother—encouraged. I was a star student, an athlete, and an active churchgoer, eventually becoming a teen leader. My biggest failing was my utter dislike of cooking—a feeling that not even the much-bemoaned hunger pangs of my future husband and children could change. Then I got pregnant out of wedlock in my final year of university and chose not to terminate the pregnancy, and for the first time in my life, I was firmly outside of the boundaries of what my family considered acceptable female conduct.
My grandfather had passed away ten years before my pregnancy, and my mother had been holding the family together by managing his estate and doing the emotional labour of maintaining the kinship bond. Because I had never noticed the patriarchal lines along which my family organized itself, it did not occur to me that her leadership and power within the family might be considered unusual. Despite her being the second child and female, her being in charge was simply what was sensible. She was in a similar line of work to grandpa—the one with whom he enjoyed the closest relationship following the death of his favourite of his two sons—and she alone had functioning relationships with all of her siblings outside of the collective camaraderie. In retrospect, I realize that this was not because my family didn’t quite ‘do gender’, but because my mother didn’t.
In our nuclear family, my mother was also the anchor. My father was abusive and mentally ill—albeit not necessarily in that order. My relationships to my siblings and father mostly radiated out from my and their relationship to my mother; she was a stabilizing force, our centre of gravity. After I had my daughter, people often asked why I didn’t get an abortion since the procedure is quite common in Nigeria despite being illegal. I would respond by saying “because I knew my family would support me no matter what.” Like with the gender question, I didn’t realize until much later that what I meant was “I knew my mother would support me no matter what.” To a certain extent my mother, while she was alive, embraced feminist politics out of necessity. The circumstances of her marriage and career made it such that she simply could not afford to settle into conservative womanly roles, even if she had been so inclined—which she wasn’t.
My mother, who was secretly ill with cancer, died when I was six months pregnant. Until the day it happened, it never occurred to me that she could die, even though in the two weeks we spent together prior to her death, I saw her sicker and weaker than I ever had before. I was in school finishing the first semester of my final year, and my sister later informed me that mummy didn’t tell me much because she felt that my pregnancy was upheaval enough. While I was away at school I had no idea how ill she was or even that she had cancer. She called me every other day, texted me on her Blackberry more than she ever had before, and showered me with love. I thought it was because I was pregnant and scared. In conversations with my sister after her passing, it became clear that it was also because she was dying and afraid for me.
Contrary to what most people around me believe due to the trope of the “single mother who overcomes great odds,” the great difficulty of my life was not becoming an unwed mother—it was losing my own mother in the same breath. Suddenly, I was in the world without the maternal protection I had taken for granted, and it was not long before the cracks started to show. I hadn’t realized that my mother had been almost alone in bearing the responsibility of keeping our family a community or that people within the collective had taken our cues on how to treat one another from her. She had been the central figure with whom they had a long history of love and trust; she was the only one able or willing to do the work of tempering excesses or dampening the hunger to gain and wield power over my grandfather’s wealth and other family members. She was the only one whose life was an undeniable example of female power, autonomy, and leadership.
I don’t doubt that my mother’s fear for my future was connected to her knowledge of what lay behind the shield she had been for me. My mother inherited her father’s no-nonsense, pragmatic, and clear-minded decisiveness; it allowed her to recognize the existence of obstacles just so that she could surmount them. Because she routinely flew in the face of gendered illogic by simply existing and excelling at the intersection of opportunity and expertise, she was the type of woman people called a man as a compliment. Furthermore, any backlash her unyielding nature might have generated was tempered by her clear devotion to her husband and marriage: she was a virtuous woman, dedicated to her God and her man. Her willfulness was, thus, forgivable. Unfortunately, in passing down family traits, my mother endowed me with her iron will but somehow neglected to pass down the faith or fidelity that made her stubbornness easier to swallow. As such, her willfulness was forgivable; mine has never been.
In the historical Oyo Yorùbá world-sense, as described by Oyèwùmí, Oyèrónké in her seminal work What Gender Is Motherhood?, there is no higher status than that of Iya—the mother. Conceived as both a biological and spiritual role, motherhood and mothering conferred an unquestionable, fixed seniority—and, thus, immense social value—on the mother. The birth of children was constructed as divine in the society; children were received as the ultimate objective of life itself, and the raising of children was considered a collective effort of utmost importance. Questions of marital status and the paternity of children were secondary considerations, which could not impinge upon motherhood status and which did not significantly affect the support offered to the mother or the care received by the child.
However, this mindset barely survived the incursion of colonization or its deliberate delegitimization of local ways of thinking, which favoured hierarchical and dehumanizing logics. The combination of patriarchal subjugation of people understood to be women, a perverted insistence on regulating consensual sexual contact, and the promotion of monogamous, church- and state-sanctioned heterosexual marriage as the only valid outlet for (men’s) sexual desire proved lethal. Almost inexorably, the concept of the legitimacy of children—and by extension, of motherhood—took hold.
Because the birth of children outside of wedlock results in immediate devaluation of young women (making abuse of said young women even more acceptable than the norm), young unwed mothers in Nigeria often leave the responsibility of raising their children to their own mothers, with the children frequently believing their birth mothers to be their siblings. Pregnant young women are also often hastily married to the father in order to restore some sort of respectability to the mother, child and family.
My daughter was born amid my family’s unchecked collapse into flagrant patriarchal conservatism. Or perhaps the birth of a female child to me, an unmarried young woman, in the absence of my mother simply provided an avenue for what had always been there to reveal itself. In any case, we were the easiest and most logical targets for filial recalibration. First, my grandmother’s siblings tried to manipulate the father of my child into marrying me at a family meeting, to which my body but not my input was invited. After perhaps an hour of being carefully chided for his role in devaluing me as a potential wife to someone else, my daughter’s father mentioned that he had repeatedly asked me to marry him and I said no. My great-uncles and aunts looked at me properly for the first time, their faces contorted in confused shock. The meeting dissolved into chaos when I confirmed the claim, and I was shepherded outside so they could convince themselves that I didn’t know what I was saying.
My refusal to marry the man was not a feminist decision, not in any conscious way at least. But I had known even while sleeping with him that I didn’t want a future with him; getting pregnant due to a convergence of inadequate sex education and failed coitus interruptus had not changed that. I had taken for granted that my family would be there for me in the same way it always had, so I was oblivious to the whisperings and grumblings that surrounded my pregnancy. I was completely ignorant of the great upset that was my having brought my grandmother’s first great-grandchild into the world without having first been transferred into the ownership of a man via marriage, but my obliviousness was only natural. My grandmother had jumped to her feet and danced when I told her the news. My mother had asked me, somewhat rhetorically and with a voice full of sadness, “how did it happen?” and then she had taken me to buy amala when that was all I wanted to eat. To me and the women who raised me, my pregnancy was merely a bump in the road, so it did not occur to me that other people saw it as a full stop and resented me for not feeling the same.
Over the years, I slowly learned how naive I was, how unwed mothering in my society is in many ways an exercise in navigating abuse, and how much of that abuse comes from within the family. My mother was a single mother for several years after she kicked my father out for his violence, but she did such an excellent job of shielding us from the social impacts of that decision that it never occurred to me that there was something wrong with single motherhood. Thus, the expectation that young women who have children out of wedlock must perform shame and offer their lives up to be controlled by external parties, especially their families, was new and quite absurd to me. I also resented the fact that because I had gotten pregnant by accident, I was perceived to be totally and permanently irresponsible and, worse, incapable of directing my own life or making important decisions about my child and her care.
My awakening to feminist politics coincided neatly with my daughter’s infancy, and in the first year of her life, I decided that I wanted to raise my child as free of abuse as possible. To me, this meant not hitting her, not talking down at her, not trying to control her, not shaming her about her body, and not promoting harmful gendered ideas in her upbringing. I wanted her to feel even freer to explore the world and claim space in it than my mother had made it possible for me to feel. I observed how differently people treated her when they thought she was a boy (which, until fairly recently, happened often). Noticing how much more open people were to her high energy and mischief when they misgendered her made it even more important to me to find ways to circumvent their predispositions towards limiting her due to her gender.
My feminist politics also informed a strong aversion to the way in which children’s choices and bodies are violently policed in Nigeria, such that any evidence of autonomy or will is treated as disobedience or insolence deserving of severe punishment. Also of particular concern were the ways in which people minimized or dismissed inappropriate physical contact and sexual misconduct or abuse, despite or even because of how pervasive it is in this country. Finally, I was committed to maintaining my identity as an independent individual, alongside my motherhood status. My desire was to be a good mother and a fulfilled person, so I continued to pursue personal happiness to the best of my ability. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize quite how costly these ideas and decisions would be. I didn’t know that my clear-mindedness about what I wanted for myself and my child would be received as arrogance and disruptiveness deserving of violent pushback.
As a feminist, I am committed to rejecting patriarchal ideas in their entirety. My mothering is led and guided by my child’s individual needs and development rather than by externally dictated norms. It is crucial to me that my child understands that “girl” can mean something different to her than it does to the rest of our society. This is why I encourage her freedom by modelling the same at whatever cost. This is why I indulge her curiosity, her pleasure, and her awareness of her body as a vehicle that must be cared for rather than a gilded cage from which she must regard an undiscoverable world. I refuse to teach my child to shrink herself. I also refuse to send her the message that her version of the world must be a shrunken one in order for her to be safe. I encourage her to trust her own mind and intuition by validating what she thinks and feels. I try to remain open to the lessons she offers me in how to live with kindness and integrity, and I teach her about her own power to shape the world by telling her stories about powerful women, including her grandmother.
If patriarchy is the logic of social organization, then anyone who rejects patriarchy is a threat to social order. By the time my daughter was two, the treatment I received at the hands of my family and other older adults who had been part of my life through my mother had deteriorated significantly, especially as it became increasingly clear that I was intent on choosing the course of my life regardless of social norms or pressure. The support I received upon my daughter’s birth was slowly and systemically withdrawn in the wake of each of my so-called transgressions. I was punished, in various ways, for each deviation from the path of repentance or respectability: refusing to marry; failing to display that I was ashamed and had learned my lesson by abandoning a social life and my male friends in particular; entering into a new romantic and sexual relationship when my daughter was eight months old; refusing to end that relationship simply because my family considered it improper; getting birth control; abandoning Christianity, etc.
I was asked to move out of the home of the relatives who took me in after my mother’s death and my daughter’s birth because they felt that I might corrupt their teenage daughter. Family members made this decision despite being fully aware that my daughter was only five or six months old. I was earning a pittance at my first job—my daughter’s father was not supporting us financially or otherwise—and the only housing option available to me at the time was my late mother’s home, where my brother and mentally ill, treatment-averse father lived, who also had a well-known history of physical violence.
About a year after my aunt asked me to leave her home at her husband’s behest, an older family friend who was considered an aunt physically assaulted me, locked me in her home for two days, and seized my mobile devices because I had left Christianity and also refused to end the romantic relationship that was one of my few sources of comfort and support at the time. When I made it clear that even if I ended the relationship, I would not be returning to church, she told me “sinners” were not welcome in her home.
I was forced to move back into my mother’s house, despite knowing it was potentially unsafe for me and my child. Unfortunately, my mostly good relationship with my brother, who also lived there with his family, then began to deteriorate almost in direct (inverse) proportion to my levels of certainty about what I did and didn’t want for my daughter and myself. He increasingly saw no problem with crossing my personal or parenting boundaries; he would shame and verbally abuse me for not cooking for or cleaning up after him, or attempt to convince me that I deserved to be unhappy for having a child out of wedlock. He also made serious threats of physical violence on more than one occasion, including in front of my toddler, for reasons such as my having gone on a weekend getaway with my then boyfriend (while my daughter was safe with my sister), my refusal to let him hit my child as discipline, or my refusal to let him intimidate a male visitor of mine.
My brother, despite having been raised almost exclusively by women in general and my mother in particular, ended up being one of the first-line enforcers of patriarchal control in my family. It was increasingly apparent as I became more serious about the boundaries of his influence in my or my child’s life that there was no physical, emotional, or psychological harm that he was not willing to threaten or commit in order to demonstrate my subordinate status in the family and in society. I eventually severed all ties with him when in an argument that started because he refused to take instructions about my mother’s company from my older sister since he “could never defer to a woman,” he tried to silence me by screaming that I “hated men” because I had been raped.
After this incident, I moved away to my grandmother’s already crowded house with my then two-year-old daughter. I thought it would be safe for both of us because it was the same house I had spent so much time in as a happy and mostly unencumbered child. Unfortunately, I was forced to move out again not long after when I found out that one of the distant relatives also living in the house had sexually abused multiple children. I was horrified to learn that several members of my family were aware of this and my aunt had, in fact, taken one of his victims to the hospital, but no one considered it necessary either to enforce consequences for his actions or to inform me so that I could limit his access to my child. When I confronted the aunt who had taken this teenaged abuser’s victim to the hospital, she asked me to “give him the benefit of the doubt.” All of these incidents reified the idea I already had: my family—like many families in conservative, hyper-religious Nigeria—is in many ways inherently unsafe for women and girls, and to parent my child safely and in safety, I would need to distance myself from them.
In navigating the minefield that my family became in the wake of motherhood, feminism has been a double-edged sword. Early on, it provided me with the tools to recognize the ways in which my abilities and experiences were delegitimized because I was an unwed mother. It helped me to envision and enact ways of loving my child that validate and protect her. But it also reinforced my new social location as an unruly and transgressive woman, which made the withdrawal of support and protection justifiable to those who should have offered it. Still, being able to parent my child in this way—rather than accepting harm for choosing to be a mother or allowing my child to be exposed to abuse—is worth it to me. I believe it is better to be without blood family than to capitulate to ideas of fictive kinship that require me to accept ongoing violence while indirectly teaching my child that this is what it means to be a woman in the world.
Parenting in this way has taken a toll that rarely offers relief besides the reward of watching my daughter thrive, especially since like much of my own family, her other blood parent generally chooses not to contribute meaningfully to the effort. Not only have I had to parent with the support of no family members except my sister, I have also had to dedicate a good amount of my emotional energy to protecting both my child and myself from my family’s harm. Without my mother, whose presence would have acted as both shield and source of support, my family is no longer a safe place, and my need for support, community, and guidance has been treated as negotiable or secondary by the people who would ordinarily be my first port of call. If mothering is generosity and if mothering requires giving, nurturing, and depletion, where do young unmarried women who often come to motherhood scared and doubting themselves go for replenishment?
Unfortunately, as long as Nigerian families remain unquestioningly founded on Eurocentric ideas of marriage and hierarchical gender relations, as long as kinship is organized around notions of love that cannot exist without domination, and as long as women’s status within the family is conditional upon our silence in the face of abuse and our willingness to conform to social norms that hurt us, it will be safer for mothers like me to parent outside of the family. Thus, I have evolved away from my childhood idea of family as a blood-based tie. Instead, my goal is now to envision and build a family community for myself and my child that does not require, in exchange for its support, my bruised and bloodied acquiescence to our dehumanization.
Instead of my blood family, I look to the communities of women that I have found and created for support, guidance, and healing comfort when things get difficult. In teaching my daughter that “girl” can mean whatever she wants it to, and in grieving and honouring my mother who made “woman” whatever she wanted it to be, I am fashioning “family” into what I need it to be: a place of safety and love—at any cost, no matter what.
When my daughter turned one year old, an acquaintance asked me if I shaved her hair because I did not want her to look like a girl. Perplexed, I asked her why she would think that. In all seriousness, she answered, “You remember how you told us not to buy you presents for your baby shower that would make her look like a girl, so I figured…” It was not difficult to remember that my colleague was referring to the fact that I had asked them not to buy her princess dresses. My wish to have my daughter wear a diverse range of clothes, not only stereotypical pink ones, was translated to me not wanting her to “look like a girl”. It was, hence, logical to assume that I had shaved her hair for the same reason.
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How to deal with societal expectations regarding visual represen-tations of gender is only one of the many choices parents have to make on behalf of their children. Others include the way we encourage and support our children, the activities we encourage them to take up, how we discipline them, the expectations we place on them, and the way we make them understand these expectations. Others still concern the way we teach them about their identity, including their physical and behav-ioural boundaries, and how we teach them to define these for themselves.
Part of feminist parenting is the theorizing and the thinking, whereas the other part is the practical doing. In that vein, beyond attempting our best to educate our children, I believe that they learn from the way we live our lives as parents. When we have children, we do not suddenly acquire new identities as parents that are isolated from our identities as people. And I believe that the way we parent our children, beyond our conscious choices, is deeply rooted in who we are. Fundamentally, I believe that our parenting is informed by how we relate to other people, particularly to the ones who surround our children the most, including our children’s other parents. As a white, European mother of a child whose father is a “local” in the African country we live in, and who arguably was socially and economically less well-positioned than me, I was privileged. This privilege was informed by many features, including gender, “race”, culture, and class. Having lived with my daughter’s father for many years before she was born, we were acutely aware of many of the implications that this intersectionality had on our lives. Although personal characteristics arguably shape some of the differences between individuals, I believe that our views on the most important aspects related to becoming parents and to parenting are largely influenced by socialization, education, and exposure, which act as a prism through which these intersections are reflected. Many parenting issues concern the question of who does what and why, and, hence, relate to ascribed rights, responsibilities, and duties in the family. Perceptions about who is in charge are deeply rooted in societal norms—particularly gender roles. I believe that one of the most complex aspects of social norms is that they inform our perception of normality. Whereas we are usually aware of our values or opinions, and able to define and defend them, we are often only partially conscious of our expectations of what is obvious and supposedly normal to us. Subjective normality is, thus, so difficult to negotiate because it typically manifests itself in the ways we act when our actions are not formed by conscious effort and when our “normal” clashes with someone else’s “normal.” Assumptions about normality in terms of responsibilities and decision making in parenting, for instance, manifest in how to ensure a healthy pregnancy, about the kind, place, and process of giving birth, about everyday care for the baby, about individual parent’s activities and engagements outside of the family, about personal freedoms, and, crucially, about the redefinition of the couple. These assumptions also manifest in the big choices we make on behalf of our children, including matters related to religion, culture, and overall identity. Although both the big picture and the small picture decisions are fundamental for a family, parents often fail to negotiate their expectations and make conscious decisions about them because they assume that it is obvious how to go about them—until they clash. And most parents eventually do.
Despite having gone through many rough patches as a couple, my daughter’s father and I had gotten used to overcoming our crises throughout the years. By the time I was due in October 2015, I thought we were prepared for our child. Conventional wisdom has it that the arrival of a child brings gender roles to the fore, which, in our case, translated to preconceived ideas and expectations about what it means to be a mother and a father, and ultimately about the rights, responsibilities, and duties of each of us. Often, the supposed innate ability of women to take care of their children is taken for granted—women give birth and, thus, most women are able to nurture their children. Considering the dependency of their child, most women have no choice but to ease into the role—some comfortably, others with a lot of difficulty—of becoming a mother. Many men, in contrast, whose immediate importance to their babies is perhaps not as tangible, seem to struggle to become parents. Although I reminded myself to be patient and to give my daughter’s father time to somewhat grow into his new role, ostensibly without him ever wondering how I grew into mine, I witnessed him develop in a way that differed—literally violently—from my expectations.
My daughter’s father and I have always had a complicated relationship. In hindsight, I often wonder why I did not end things with him before I finally did. There were too many red flags in our lives, broken promises, and broken dreams. Yet I hadn’t taken the time, or mastered the strength, to really change my situation. We had built so much together and gone through so much together. The truth is also that I was so busy pursuing my professional life and attempting to have some balance with friends, culture, and arts over the weekends that we did, in fact, spend little time together. For many years, I was balancing writing my PhD, a work of passion but with little supervision and guidance, and a fulltime job, which was interesting, taught me invaluable lessons, and prompted me to confront my own reservations and self-doubts but that also did not always fulfil me intellectually. I was, quite frankly, exhausted. I had such little time for our couple. The little time we did spend together was often in our home, surrounded by friends who adored and inspired us. Music, arts, joint cooking, and a deep sense of family and community that I needed so much far away from my home were in utter contrast to the tiresome expectations I was facing in my professional life. When we were alone, we often fought. Fuelled by what I now understand as his narcissistic and manipulative behaviours, I was unable to imagine a life without him. I tried, several times to free myself from this life with him, but I always gave in when he seemed to show remorse and promised better behaviour. Beyond that, I was too vulnerable to the idea of belonging somewhere, of not having been wrong about my previous life decisions, and of not having given years of my life for nothing.
Just a few days before I found out I was pregnant, I finally decided to leave him. It wasn’t the first time, but I felt that I would really do it this time. I had felt myself getting pregnant but ignored my senses. When I found out I was indeed pregnant, I was overwhelmed. I had not planned to become pregnant, but I also knew I would not ever have formulated a wish like that due to how tormented I felt about our relationship. When I told him I was pregnant, he literally refused to speak with me for three days. It was awful. Yet I could not imagine not having this child. From the first second I knew she was there, I could not have decided not to have her. I am unequivocally prochoice, but I have also always known that it was unlikely I would ever decide not to have a child if it so happened that I got pregnant. After a few days, we decided to stick it out, as we always did, and to take this pregnancy as our chance to finally become the couple that we aspired to be. Or so I thought. Throughout my pregnancy, we had intense ups and downs. We had many good, tender, and loving moments that made me dream of that family I had almost given up on ever being. By the time I was due, I thought we were in a good place.
The baby’s arrival, however, changed all of that immediately. When my labour started, he wanted to sleep it away; when we got to the hospital, he was too exhausted to accompany me, and he relinquished all responsibility to me and the doula. After having been in labour for several hours, I asked to have him woken up so that he would not miss her being born. By the time he came into the delivery room, taking pictures of me and the baby during delivery rather than comforting and supporting me, I already felt completely disconnected and lonely. Then, in the two days I spent at the hospital, I was mostly alone despite having booked a family room that explicitly allowed him to stay with us. I remember the desperate feeling that overcame me when rolling the baby cot into the hospital bathroom a few hours after giving birth, fearing to leave her alone, but eager to take a shower. I remember not having a clue about what to do. On the third day, he finally picked us up six hours after I had been discharged from hospital. On the first day at home, he accused me of not having treated his mother with sufficient respect, who ostensibly had come to welcome the baby because I had gone to rest and not cooked for her. I remember the crushing loneliness that ensued—lone days, lone nights, lone walks, tormenting doubts and questions, overbearing worries, lone family holidays, and lone last days before having to return to work. When I tried to address any of it, he got aggressive and either did not want to talk about it or told me that he did not care. Becoming a mother made me see to what extent I had previously closed my eyes to the ugly realities of my relationship and to how alone he left me in our new family enterprise.
The more time passed, the more I understood that not only was I miserable but I would also not be a suitable role model for my daughter as long as I remained in a relationship with her father— who was an intelligent, talented, and charismatic man but had numerous addictions and, I am convinced, psychological disorders and who had little consideration for what I felt or for what I wanted from life and from him. Having a child opened my eyes to my own reality, which would undoubtedly form her perception of normality. An uncomfortable truth started dawning on me—I could not provide her with a family life that involved her mother and her father being together if I wanted her to grow up in a household that values respect, honesty, and accountability. Moreover, although I believe that it’s important to live in a way that is inspired by patience, trust, and flexibility, I knew that I did not want her to grow up believing that she should ever accept to be treated the way I was treated. I did not want to fuel a perception of normality that involves women having to carry the entire mental load and sacrifice themselves for the sake of family unity. But I frankly had no idea how to deal with the situation. And I was so overwhelmed with resuming my fulltime job while expressing milk at the office three times a day and having the sole responsibility of caring for our daughter once I stepped into our home and relieved the nanny of their duties. I felt as if I did not even have space to breathe, let alone think or act.
One night, the opportunity to change my and my child’s lives presented itself, and I grabbed it with both hands. That night, I returned from prolonged travel to attend a course at a Canadian university for three weeks. Since my daughter was barely seven months old at the time and I was still exclusively breastfeeding, I had secured a scholarship to travel with her and my mother as her caregiver. While taking a course that brought together a wide range of activists and professionals with a passion for dignified, agency-based development from all over the world, I experienced a feeling of community that overwhelmed and inspired me. I was both touched and shocked by how people whom I had never met before could be so much more present, interested, and supportive than the man who called himself my family. After our graduation, I got sick and had to postpone my flight home for a few days. Pressured to return to my work as soon as possible, and barely healthy enough to travel, I finally took a flight home, alone with my daughter. That night, I had to wait for him to pick us up at the airport for an hour with my sleeping daughter strapped to my belly, barely strong enough to stand. When we finally got home, there was no food at all. Our house was dusty and had not been cleaned in a long time. And the bedsheets were still the same ones I had left six weeks earlier, including hers, which were even soiled. He responded with cheap excuses to my shock and terror. That night, I knew that nothing in the world could excuse or justify how little he cared for us—and my not stepping up for myself and my daughter.
Shaken by his most recent display of indifference and completely uncertain about how to deal with the situation, I proposed to move out of our home with our daughter; I was still hopeful that the physical distance would help us to become more mindful about each other and our new roles as parents. Her father, in the meantime, seemed neither keen on seeing her nor interested in taking any kind of responsibility for her, or for me. He hardly came to see us, and when he did come, he often came close to her bedtime and was often drunk. On several occasions, he became rowdy and threatened both me and the child, and I had to call on neighbours to get him out of my apartment. Our situation deteriorated quickly. It went from trying to free myself from a destructive relationship, while attempting to maintain a space for my daughter to be with her father, to having to question what I needed to do to make sure she was emotionally and physically safe. I was compelled to share intimate and painful details of my life with the security manager at my work place and even the police. And yet, I continued to be uncertain about what to do.
Due to my own upbringing, having both a mother and father around when growing up was normal for me and, hence, desirable. I did not want my own hurt feelings and disappointments to interfere with my daughter’s choices. At the same time, I also had to acknowledge that it was up to me to protect her from getting hurt. But what does that really mean? It was an especially relevant question, since her father continued to deny the negative impact he had on both of us and continued paying lip service to loving his child. What more did I need? He loved his child. He loved his child, right? They say actions speak louder than words, and his actions did not entail a trace of love for her but a trail of neglect. After a particularly violent night, it started dawning on me that I could no longer remain stuck in inaction and hide behind not wanting to keep her father away from her; I had no choice but to make decisions on her behalf. I had to protect her and myself. And I had to let go of the idea of his being part of her life.
Scared but elated by my newly found strength, I started facing life as a single, foreign mother in my daughter’s father’s country of origin, far away from my own family who could have provided us with structure and a place where we belonged. So I had no choice but to make it a home for both of us. Our situation had various practical, ethical, and also legal implications. And I had to confront all of them. Some of the practical implications involved deciding who would care for her, which school she would go to, or whom she would socialize with. It also involved finding ways to raise my child to explore, know, and embrace her mixed roots and, hence, deciding which cultures, religions, and languages I taught her as being hers. One of the things of primary concern to me, in that context, was how to teach her about her Africanness without engaging in cultural appropriation and without distancing her from her localness by taking up too much space in defining her identity, which would push her in the role of a bystander, excluded by my foreignness and my relative privilege.
Being a foreigner in our country of residence also had legal implications, which forced me to seek painstaking legal redress. The most appalling part was that despite being her mother, I had no right to remove my daughter from the country’s territory without her father’s consent. At the same time, having a child who bears the nationality of my host country, alongside my own, does not grant me residence, or even a visa. Since my country of residence has a reputation for corrupt civil servants attempting to benefit from personal miseries, and due to the fact that white women figure among top-suspects for child trafficking in this region, I was very worried about involving the authorities. My embassy’s warning that it would be child abduction if I left the country with her made me understand that there was no other way out. I had tried to settle things with him out of court through my lawyer. But he refused any kind of consensus, any kind of agreement. After months of weighing options, I decided to take him to court. Against my expectations, the judge granted me custody of my child alongside freedom of movement.
Despite everything I had gone through, I continued to find myself exposed to prejudice and accusations of having failed in my presumed womanly responsibilities to maintain my household at any cost, including by some of the people whom I had counted as close friends. One of these supposed friends even called my mother and told her to make me drop the court case, or else he would have me killed, adding “you know, this is Africa.” Beyond everything else, the loneliness in my empty apartment, far away from the neighbourhood in which we used to live, was crushing me after having shared our house with friends and family for years.
Being a single parent is difficult. And having so much power over my daughter’s life is terrifying at times. How to deal with her father, who will always continue to be part of her, has been one of the toughest decisions I have continuously had to make—about her level of involvement with him, how to portray him, and how to verbalize his absence. After cutting him out completely for almost a year, I have allowed him to see her several times in the past months, and it was ok. Above all, she seemed happy.
How to engage other significant persons—including the man whom I slowly understand as my new partner—in her life is another important matter. Some persons in our environment offer mostly unsolicited advice and caution me to ensure that she knows the difference between her father and my new partner, who has been caring for her much more than her biological father. Obviously, many people assume that being a father is a position acquired solely through transmission of genes, hence excluding those whose fatherhood is defined by love and dedication rather than biology. Others push me to “reestablish harmony” so as to “allow her to grow up in an intact family”—somewhat encouraging me to subjugate my decisions and my sense of temporality to my presumed responsibility to provide her with an ideal-typical family structure, even if it does not involve her biological father. Although I deeply wish that my daughter grows up in a house of love, togetherness, and family, I remain aware that some of the most important things I want to teach my child are freedom of choice, a right to happiness, and the understanding that life does not always go as planned. Specifically, I want to teach her that being a woman does not automatically imply having to do more, accept more, but get less. I want her to know that her wishes, interests, and preferences are legitimate, no matter what. I hence try to resist my socially acquired and deeply internalised urge to reestablish balance and try to allow my personal disequilibrium to inspire me to choose a path for myself at my own pace; I do not allow other people to define the “right” way of going about my situation or to subdue my personal life to the presumed needs of my child. I know I may make a lot of mistakes along the way, but I try to do me and her justice, and I hope that one day, she will understand. Ultimately, I remain convinced that my strength will make her stronger and that my having an identity outside of motherhood empowers me to better take care of, as well as protect, my daughter. And I continue to believe that the most important role we play as parents is to live our lives in a way that we hope our children will live theirs one day—unapologetic, authentic, and passionate. Although this is certainly true for any parent, it matters to me that she learns that a woman can do whatever she sets her mind to do and that she should not allow anything to prevent her from living in her truth.
Reflecting about my experience, I think that I learned invaluable lessons about both parenting as a process and about how we can support other parents. Being a parent is difficult, and we will make many mistakes throughout our children’s lives; some of them will be genuine because we do not know better, but most of them will be because we are tired, overwhelmed, and impatient—because we are human. And that’s ok. Whenever I feel that I have failed my daughter, I remind myself to be patient and forgiving with myself. She has to learn that people are not always perfect, that people make mistakes, and that they can get angry, but that they still love her. I also believe that it is important to accept the responsibility of being ourselves and of learning how to negotiate ourselves, flaws and all, with our children. In the same vein, I also consciously resist the urge to cover up how I feel. Although I am careful not to expose her to the depth of those feelings, I believe that it is important for her to learn that people cannot always be happy but that they get better as well.
Asking for and accepting help, as a single mom particularly, are other important things that I have had to learn. I cannot always do everything on my own. And that’s ok, too. Having a loving caregiver with whom my daughter spends most of her time on weekdays has been invaluable for me. Luckily, it is the absolute norm in my host country that families across the social spectrum have house help and that most children are coraised by nannies from a tender age. Although having someone in charge of my daughter whom I have to employ obviously implies that our relationship is hierarchical, despite our good connection, and entails a plethora of complexities, I also work on resisting the urge to micromanage people who take charge of her. Despite there being some important ground rules, I believe that children feel whether someone is their authentic self or not. And I want my daughter to learn how to interact and deal with different people, as well as their character and their ways of doing things. By letting my nanny be herself—and by encouraging her to treat my daughter “normally” and to raise her according to her own standards—having a local caregiver also provides me with a crucial opportunity to give my daughter access to her own localness. This is ultimately also why I have continued to pursue the possibility for her to safely meet and interact with her father. I also encourage her to explore him in herself as much as possible rather than attempting to shield her and forbid her from wanting to see her father’s reflection in herself. At the same time, I continue trying to protect her from his difficult sides while remaining vigilant not to transfer my pain and my disappointments to her and not to ever make her feel as if she must choose between him and me. Despite everything, he is her father, and I want to allow her to love, cherish, and admire him if she wishes to, but I also plan to be as honest and fair in my conversation with her about what happened when she is old enough to ask about it.
With other children’s questions about her father’s whereabouts, seeing fathers in books, and meeting her friends’ fathers, my daughter clearly understands the normative belief that a father should be part of a family. The power of labelling things and people struck me the day that I decided to tell her that the man whom she had just met for the first time in months was her daddy. Seeing her face light up, exclaiming “I want daddy,” I felt at peace with my decision. Despite hardly seeing him, I observe that knowing that she has a daddy, just like her friends, gives her peace. At the same time, I also try to be confident that children grow up more healthily when they are raised and surrounded by people who are healthy and happy. So, I am consciously allowing myself to pursue my personal happiness and to date without holding myself to societal standards of how and what family is supposed to be. While accepting to make a space for her biological father in her life, I try to show her that surrounding yourself with loving other significant persons is great, too. Building, accepting, and sustaining solidarities with different people independently of their label is an important part of an emotionally, psychologically, and socially healthy life. In the same vein, I also do not restrict her too much in terms of whom she socializes with. It requires a lot of small and sometimes painful acts of letting go and relinquishing control, especially when I feel that others exoticize her, for instance by wanting to touch her hair and skin. At the same time, I want her to develop a sense of what she is comfortable with and how to deal with people in her space from an early age.
Another completely different but important issue in the context of supporting her self-determination concerns how I teach her about food and eating. Having grown up in Europe, where most women have complicated relationships with food and body image issues, I am trying to foster a healthy relationship between her, her body, and food. I see how much she mirrors me and how she savours foods she sees me enjoying. Being a rather healthy eater myself, I make sure we eat together as much as possible. Beyond that, I allow her to stop eating when she tells me she is full because I believe that a lot of health and body image issues are related to people having unlearned to listen to their bodies. One way we teach our children to be out of touch with their bodies is by forcing them to eat when they are no longer hungry.
Considering the changes that technology has brought to us in the course of the last two decades, I am hoping I will be up to the task of teaching my daughter to resist the urge to be likeable in a pursuit of attention and instant validation. In the same vein, I hope to be able to convey a sense of compassion, dignity, and frustration-tolerance in her in the face of artificial intelligence pressuring us to capitalist performance-based evaluation of nearly everything in life, including ourselves.
Beyond thinking about practical tips for parenting, I believe it is important to be mindful in our interactions with parents and single parents, particularly. As much as we can, we should strive to support them, ask them how they are doing, and be there for them. We should spend time with them and help them get through the loneliness. When they need to vent, we should let them, but we should allow them to change their mind without holding them to some self-imposed rigour. Parenting and single-parenting are hard, and parents are likely to change their minds about the stuff that matters because there is no certainty. This is particularly true for how they interact with their children’s other-parents. If possible, we should respectfully and mindfully support single parents to find ways of working on a path that allows their children to know those other-parents. When single parents tell us they are lonely, we should not look at them in surprise and tell them “but you were the one who left”—particularly when they survived and left an abusive relationship. We should support single parents when they want to get back out there and when they are ready for love, and not remind them to constrain their own lives for the presumed sake of their children, which supposedly would not allow their children to get over a new partner. There is no finite pool of love for different parents that requires a gatekeeper.
Parenting is difficult in any circumstance, since certainty is a social artifice. For me, parenting is an infinite journey. It is an attempt to find ways of teaching my daughter to be kind but not nice; to be disciplined but not submissive; to be respectful but not silenced; to be empathetic but not to lose a healthy sense of judgment; to be humble but not to accept to be taken for granted; to have self-respect but not to be self-righteous; to be courageous but not careless; to be ambitious but not dismissive; to be assertive but not aggressive; to be innovative but to know and honour tradition and history, and the list goes on. I wish to guide her but not impose choices on her, to provide boundaries but let her be free, to allow uncertainty but make her feel safe, and to teach her that the world does not exist in predefined binaries. Ultimately, I hope that I am able to show her that she will always be part of me while allowing her to be herself and to let her choose and have her own preferences, even when they are not mine.
When my daughter was one year old, I was thinking a lot about the big and small picture of what it entails to parent a child to be a decent human being. Back then, unlike the image my acquaintance portrayed of me, I did not attempt to disguise my daughter’s femininity; she simply did not have much hair, and it would not have occurred to me to frame that as primary matter of concern.
In this chapter, I share my experiences from being a part of two generations of a Muslim polygamous household and how those exper-iences, coupled with the social, political, and economic nature of my country, have affected my understanding of feminist parenting; my intention is not to degrade the institution of polygamy but to understand it. The chapter also discusses my concept of feminism, which is African, intersectional, Islamic, hijabi, womanist, and humanist. It is important to me today to make such distinctions because often time, feminism is placed in a box that is centred on first- and second-wave of feminism, which is radical and often based on Western ideas. Because my feminism is intersectional, its conceptualization is based on one’s experience and the vantage point from which they speak. I also argue even though there is no conclusive to-do list for parenting feminist, experiences from one’s upbringing can have a toxic, wholesome, or somewhere in between impact on one’s parenting style. The opportunity to relearn and unlearn previously held concepts of “how to” can be liberating, but, most importantly, encouraging behavior change in patriarchal societies by men (and women) is where the real revolution lies.
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I grew up in Liberia, a country that has had periods of prolonged conflicts. Prior to the political upheaval in 1990, both my parents worked outside of the home. Household chores were shared among the children regardless of sex. Chores were given based on one’s capability. For example, my older siblings would fetch water, cook, and clean until I was old enough to do my share. However, I would help out as I felt necessary. It wasn’t required. Dad seldom chimed in. For the most part, my mother was the early bird, as she woke everyone up, including Dad, for the morning prayers and breakfast that she prepared. Our family was a nontraditional Muslim family as expected by the society in which we found ourselves. Schooling was a requirement for all, including the girls. Unlike my family, some parents, particularly in rural communities, made choices to send their boys to school and not the girls. Girls were groomed to prepare for marriage. There is a particular Liberian phrase that says “a woman’s kenja (loosely translated as “load”) cannot be left by the wayside”—meaning women are the property of the man. Every woman is expected to be picked by a man, some kind of man. There is a particular timeline that women are expected to go through: be born, grow up, join the traditional society (sande), get married, and have children. In traditional societies, men, too, have their timeline: be born, grow up, get educated, work hard enough, marry wives, and provide for the family. Such practices are common not only among Muslim families but all families, including Christian ones. Despite being a predominantly Christian country, customary and statutory laws operate in the same space.
My feminism from an African perspective values African traditions that respect both girls and boys and that seeks to protect and support women and people of society. It also respects Africans traditions that promote the diversity of the continent. Although racial inequality is important, our challenges as women on the continent are seldom racial. An intersectional feminist approach means understanding that from my particular standpoint as an African feminist, I may be privileged or disadvantaged by a particular situation. I do not claim to know or represent every situation or oppression that women of different cultures, identities, and statuses face. Our identity as African feminists stems from our unique perspectives as women who are dealing with inequalities at different levels and whose experiences cannot be simplistically generalized. In my case, being an African Muslim woman in a predominantly Christian country who wears a hijab adds different layers to my real or perceived oppression. It is from those perspectives I speak.
An Islamic perspective provides me an opportunity to engage with my religion and to understand the place of Muslim women in an effort to contribute and decipher discourses that continuously stereotype Muslim women as subordinate to men. Using religion is a powerful tool that can contribute immensely in reclaiming our narrative.
Islamic-Muslim feminists support hijabi Muslim women in general, especially as current political discourses continuously draw Muslim women and the wearing of the hijab into heated debates over their rights to or not to cover. In countries like mine where religious fundamentalists are seeking to ostracize minority groups, identifying as a hijabi feminist serves as a mode of empowerment, as hijabi women are constantly drawn into political discourses about religious terrorism. For example, during our 2017 presidential and legislative elections, I was nearly denied registration because of my head scarf and my refusal to remove it. Other women were denied registration at polling centres across the country. It is empowering as a feminist and a hijabi to stand up, galvanize, and mobilize other women with similar situations, as we took the National Elections Commission to court. Muslim women who do not cover were not subjected to such political discrimination. In Liberia, Muslim women who cover face discrimination in education, healthcare, and public spaces.
As a feminist who is also a womanist, I promote womanhood and the associated characteristics of being a woman. I respect and support other women’s choice to define themselves using their femininity. Being a feminist working to smash patriarchy, I believe in the construction of an ideal society that promotes equality for both sexes as well as the need to include both men and boys in such a goal.
Polygamy is a rite of passage not necessarily based on religion but on tradition for the sole purpose of reproduction and increasing a family’s labour force. It was customary to marry multiple wives. My grandfather married several wives, whereas my grandmother was one of four wives. Neither obtained former education, but each was traditionally educated. Granddad went to the traditional school for boys, and Grandma did the same for girls. As the result of the war, I don’t have many memories of my grandparents, as both were persecuted and killed during the crisis for their religion.
Like my grandparents, my husband’s grandparents are also from a Muslim family who fulfilled the right of passage. His grandfather married multiple wives, and his grandmother was also one of many wives. My mom and dad, however, were born in a different era; they both received formal education. Mom obtained some college education, and Dad completed his master’s. Dad was committed to breaking away from the tradition of polygamy and Mom chose not to be a second wife. Many years later, Dad would marry another wife out of respect for his father, who wanted to accommodate a distant relation by marrying her, something Mom accepted out of her own volition I want to believe. In contrast, my husband’s parents were not formerly but traditionally educated; his father was a business merchant and a leader in the Muslim community, and his mother was leader within a traditional women’s group. She was one of three wives. His father was killed and corpse mislaid when the rebels captured their home in Monrovia in the 1990s. His mom died in 2017. Despite the differences between our families, our parents were committed to supporting our education and career choices; however, the decision to be in a polygamous marriage or not was left for us to decide. For my husband and me, monogamy is what worked best for us and our growing family.
It is interesting to see how in three generations, the concept of the rite of passage concerning marriage has transformed. Growing up in such a household and seeing my mother navigate the pressure of being a career mother and wife while also standing up to question sexism or challenge people—my dad wasn’t spared either—helped me see feminist parenting as empowering. Even though my mother won’t say she was a feminist then, she sure was a strong woman.
Liberia fought through fourteen years of civil war. Families were divided, killed, and persecuted. My family and my husband’s particularly suffered persecution and oppression. Being a part of the Muslim minority, our families were a target of oppression. My father was a professor and worked in the government. His work exposed him to many people. Because of his surname, religion, and being a man, he was a target for either joining a warring faction or being killed. During the heart of the crisis and the many years we spent displaced in refugee camps, when periods of hostilities broke out, Mom became the man of the house. She left us strapped to one another while she would go looking for food under flying bullets. Dad was not going to risk his life to be in the streets. Mom did though. We did not see this as an issue, even though our society, like many others, pressures men to be the primary care person for the family.
The changing of surnames after marriage has become a controversial subject in recent years. Before colonialism, African women maintained the surnames of their fathers or the location they were from, even in a polygamous union. In Islam, for instance, many women were referred to by the surname of their fathers during the time of the Prophet (PBUH). It was revealed in the Holy Qur’an that people be called by the names of their fathers, as it pleases the Creator.
My husband’s mothers maintained their families’ surnames after their marriage, but my mother took my father’s when it came to legal documentation. However, during the crisis, every time Dad came in close contact with rebel groups or a warring faction, he had to change his surname to that of my mother’s. The Liberian war had many aspects. Ethnicity was key. Mandingoes and Muslims were particularly targeted. My mother is Vai, which is also a Muslim majority tribal group. My dad constantly changed his identity to that of my mother’s for protection.
Upon marrying my husband, I chose to keep my surname, as it is an identity that I cherish and in fulfilment of my religious obligation. This is something that is frowned upon in our society. Women are pressured to change their identity to that of their husband’s upon marriage.
Name changing for conviction or convenience does not seem to change in practice the person you are, and letting people make that choice for themselves is important. I would love my kids to make the choice for themselves. Whether my future sons take on their wife’s name or my daughters maintain their father’s name is a choice that they have to make for themselves, and it is something I would want to leave for them to decide when they are old enough.
Growing up in a religiously conscious household with stricter rules as to when and who we invite in our reproductive space was suffocating but at the same time liberating. It was liberating because we had to wait until marriage to have children with the right person, which gave us more time to focus on other aspects of our lives, including education. It was suffocating because we could not understand why we were held to different standards than those of our relatives or our parents. Before Dad and Mom married, they had kids in their previous relationships. We were probably being prevented from committing the sins of our neighbors, families, or parents, since having kids before marriage was and is still considered a sin. As this is seriously frowned upon, many kids resort to having an illegal abortion. Families pay little attention to reproductive education for their children. That marriage is over romanticized and overrated is something ostensibly perplexing.
I questioned my parents, mostly my mom, on many things that I considered confusing. Many years ago, I remember asking my mom why she always gave my brothers and dad so much more meat than me when she cooked. She said when I grew up, I would understand. I felt that was her way of practicing inequality, so I devised a strategy. When my brothers and dad were not around, I would take portion of their meat and add it to mine in protest of the unequal treatment. Of course, I would be reprimanded again and again.
Having a child for me was something I had planned out. Married or not, I had to be in a place where I was able to cater for my child, but it was not going to stand in the way of my career—a struggle many women, including my friends, go through. Having a family or children should not compromise your career but complement it. It is a difficult decision to decide between family and career for fear of losing one to the other.
I met my now husband a year before graduation. Letting someone for the first time into my personal and reproductive space involved a lot of learning and unlearning. We had Iman, our beautiful cutie, after three years of dating and married three years later. We were not going to let the pressure of our families and friends dictate the course of our relationship.
I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. Having a strong woman—my mother—in my life has been a blessing, as she has helped me see the world as larger than what society, tradition, and custom taught me. My husband sees himself as a feminist ally and says so publicly because he believes women can better understand how patriarchal structures continue to hold them back. As a man, he can help by publically supporting initiatives that are geared to helping women and girls; he himself personally funds scholarship initiatives for girls. In male-only spaces, he makes his thoughts on women or feminism known.
Feminist parenting takes a lot of learning and unlearning for both of us. My concept of feminist mothering is seeing motherhood from a broad spectrum. By this, I mean incorporating feminist ideals in my everyday parenting, which can include correcting sexist language in everyday conversations, choosing outfits, toys, or other items for Iman, her male and female cousins, and ensuring that our oldest son learns to cook so that he doesn’t assume cooking is a craft only for women. It also means communicating that the role each individual brings to the table is not determined by their sex. For example, my husband can decide to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner while I do the laundry, and that does not make him any less of a man or me any more of a woman. Everyone should contribute in an equal way. Times are different, and helping our children navigate with us through life is never easy. Both of our upbringings were slightly different, but for our family of five, we build our understanding on the power of communication, boundaries, choices, and language; we see them as key to our family’s value.
Communication is important for our family. The power to listen, be heard, feel heard, and be able to express ourselves without being judged is something we constantly value. This includes between us as parents and for all of the kids in our clan, whether biological or adopted. Communication doesn’t have to always be about good grades and expectations. Sometimes it is about their best friends, favorite memories, or deeper issues. Boundaries are also paramount for us. We grew up in a society in which the parent-children relationship was like rulers and the ruled. Sometimes we are tempted to switch to that mode but quickly remind ourselves that we are all human and need a collective approach to the parent-children relationship. We are learning to keep healthy boundaries with our children and our individual selves. We are constantly learning to recognize the other beings in our family and that they too exist and their voices and privacy need be respected. But we do this without giving up our agency as parents.
Choice is a concept that has broadened our family values. Respecting the choice of our kids while differentiating what is a healthy or an unhealthy choice is a struggle we have. Sometimes it takes a lot of negotiating. For instance, sometimes it is a choice between wants and needs, what they can live with or without. Most times, it is a win-lose scenario.
Language and being open minded are also important to us, as is the understanding that people are different and everyone deserves respect, regardless of who they are, where they are from, or what they look like. We teach our kids that being a boy or a girl does not define what a person can and cannot do. We try to decolorize our minds concerning pink vs blue, Barbie doll vs Lego toys, and many others, which has been a tall order especially with influences from friends, families, school, and the media. For our family of five—that is our adopted daughter, Iman, her brother, and my husband and me—it can be a handful sometimes, but we are learning as we progress. We are hopeful yet very far from perfect. Sometimes our policy and practice are in competition with each other, but we are not giving up.
Iman is already in a league of her own in that she has already begun questioning what she thinks is wrong or right, despite being so young. She tells her dad to speak a certain way when he seems angry. For example, when she turned two, a friend got her a Barbie doll and another bought her a set of Lego blocks. She swore she would not take the doll and didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but she sprinted to get the Lego blocks and then started constructing.
My quest for education and to contribute to the world around me takes me away from home a lot. Balancing my career, family, and work is difficult and comes with a price. Missing out on some amazing milestones and conversations especially for Iman, who is the young one, is tough. I tried to make the best out of the physical time we have together when we can. Keeping in touch as much as I can and making up for lost time helps a lot—thanks to technology. My husband is the strong one here. This is the longest I have been away from home, and the struggle is real. I studied in London for a period of two years. He works in Doha, Qatar. We also have an active home in Liberia. Long distance relationships are hard, and a commitment from both partners to step up is very important. This is the toughest test for our relationship. Our commitment to making it work takes plenty of sacrificing and being considerate. Making sure the other partner stays up to date with what’s going on with the family, including the children, is essential, but it is hard to keep up to date on an hour-to-hour basis. It is okay to miss out on some. Not always feeling guilty and forgiving yourself are key. As career-driven mothers, it is instinctive to sometimes feel that we are not giving our best selves to the family; however, sometimes, the men in our lives do not feel as guilty as we do when the table turns. It is important to see the bigger picture. As much as we may want to instill feminist values in our children, there is no perfect way to do it. You learn, unlearn, and relearn as you navigate along. It may turn out that your kids may or may not be feminists.
Although there is no specific way to be a feminist parent, my experience growing up in a polygamous household with many siblings and seeing that my parents did not give any child preferential treatment and disciplined everyone equally made me realize that individuals can decide for themselves what to incorporate in their family values despite what society tells them. As a Muslim couple, we are constantly committed to working with our kids to make it work. My feminism is African, intersectional, Islamic, hijabi, womanist, and humanist.
