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.
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.
Defining Boundaries: Overcoming Social Norms and Imaginations of Self and Family
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.
Affirming Feminist Principles in Life and in Parenting as a Single Mother
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.
Thinking and Practicing Feminist Parenting: A Few Lessons Learned
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.
