IWD you say…

Reflections on International Women’s Day.

I think it’s an opportunity to reflect on how far we still have to go. 

For me, motherhood has been the most incredible and suffocating experience of my life. How can something you love so much, both give so much and take so much. Giving you life in reason and purpose, love and joy & simultaneously suck every last ounce of energy and attention, involving so many sacrifices with the power to stifle you and rewire your entire brain. But a huge part of this is about the intersections of motherhood, patriarchy and colonialism. 

I will never forget when the secretary in my PhD program was helping me prep the room for my defense, and I was saying I don’t think we will have enough chairs for the guests, she turned, with no malice, just genuinely problematic and unconscious bias, “Are you the first person in your family to get a PhD?”. I heard, “For you ‘people’, that must be a really big deal”. Yes. Yes ma’am. It is a big deal. A huge deal. The biggest deal ever. You see I come from a fractured home, riddled with immense violence, precarity and sacrifice. Where the lineages of colonial dislocation and impoverishment pushed my family into situations of immense precarity. Where the best chance was to come to the metropole, to escape the ruins of what your ancestors stole, disfigured or destroyed. Still, I was raised by the fiercest, most incredibly determined women this earth has seen. Resourceful, confident, full of fire and passion to succeed, never allowing the patriarchy to silence her voice or tame her spirit, building a life, not just ‘on her own’, but amidst immense violence. You ever had to fake labour to save your baby and yourself? Ever have to pack up your kids in the middle of a cold winter night to escape? Ever have to drop your babies off 11,625 kms away to come back and try and rebuild your life, only to have one of them not come to you when you came back for them, or never go back to take care of your own mother because you were hustling to strive. The ‘problem’ is, she did not only survive, she sought to thrive, but this journey involved many sacrifices, too many to ever fully comprehend. Suffice to say. Yes, indeed, a PhD is a big deal. And not because we are incapable. But because your opportunities were afforded to you, your parents, and your parent’s parents directly because of the immiseration your lineage wrought on our communities. And still today, you continue to profit off of our misery in your ivory towers. 

But then, here I am. Lucky to have been guided by incredible women of colour who mentored me and supported me and believed in me. And to have made friends who loved me, laughed and cried with me. But then, I as many women do, finished school at the same time that I was ready to have children. No one warned me about how hard it would be. No one advised me to wait or to plan ahead. Except for one encounter with a male would be committee member, who asked me my plans for after I finished, to which I remarked, “I think I would like to focus on my family for a bit”. He scoffed with a look of utter disgust and said, “Oh… Well… Too bad. The first few years after you finish are critical to your career”. Suffice to say, he never invited me to any other special department events.

I was PISSED. But he wasn’t lying. He was actually telling me the truth. Maybe he was warning me. But I was too pissed at the patriarchy seeping through this remarks that I couldn’t see anything beyond red. Years later I find it almost impossible to mother and accomplish any academic work. I am capable but the work demands of me things that I can not offer right now, and that I often question if I will ever be able to give. And because this equal playing field is fair and doesn’t offer any exceptions to the rules…HA! JUST KIDDING. Exceptions are feeling entitled to opportunities and jobs, to walking into rooms and never having your knowledge or experience questioned, never having to take extended breaks or sacrifice your body to create and nurture life, never having to come face to face with haunting traumas with the power to destroy further generations, never having your mind fall beyond your grasp directly because of the pressures and triggers that emerge in the post-partum period, or never having to miss a deadline or opportunity because of the demands of mothering. But that aside, there is no acceptance or understanding of these ‘extended’ breaks. There is no support for those of us who, for various historically implicated reasons, cannot or are unwilling to sacrifice our mothering, our time or our energies in favour of our would be academic work.

I remember once my mama said to me, “I want you to work because you want to, not because you have no choice”. So, do you understand how it feels to have grown up with the sacrifices of a single mother who had no choice but to NOT be there? And why one might favour this as a privilege not found in the survival strategies from where we emerged. Something we fiercely protect and are committed to. There is often no space for us to have both. We have to choose one or the other, but never both. And God help us if we choose both. We will continue to be penalized and asked why we have fewer publications, fewer conferences, fewer awards and accolades. But never will we be seen for what we were able to accomplish amidst the impossible work of mothering and healing intergenerational trauma. Never will the sacred work of healing this pain in hopes that it will not be inherited by the next generation in the same way be seen or appreciated for its impossible level of sacrifice and hardship. Never will mothering amidst considerable hardship and ongoing violence and trauma be understood for its level of courage and commitment. But why wait for a system built on our exclusion to accept us, I suppose. Except that, for many of us, that piece of us is missing and without doing the work, we will always feel the weight of what needs to be done. Because it is important and necessary work. I have had to also shift my perspective in the last few years, to see my mothering as apart of my activism, and to accept our survival as revolutionary in an of itself. 

For me, genealogies of colonialism are imbedded in the intergenerational traumas which we inherit. More specifically, motherhood for me, has come with immense challenges. It has pushed my mental health to new and terrifying places, and the colonial genealogies haunting my family have surfaced in dramatic twists. Not to mention, I graduated in the middle of all of this survival work that I needed to do and heal from, to hopefully avoid passing on these traumas. Although sadly some of this I already know has seeped through to them. So, finishing the PhD with two toddlers by the side, caring for my aging alcoholic father, experiencing a traumatic childbirth followed by immensely painful post partum anxiety, having to heal to survive amidst this difficulty, only to graduate with immense honours, only to almost simultaneously grieve the sudden, inevitable death of said father, whose care I neglected in favour of my own graduation and survival. 

All of this to say, I am deserving and capable but that the institutions surrounding us do not support these realities which we may face. They are patriarchal in their operations and gendered in their exclusions. Being the first one to graduate with a PhD is a great accomplishment for the entire family, and a testament to that mother, before me, who sacrificed so many of her own dreams to pave the way for mine. But it also reminds us of the problematic nature of these exclusions, the histories of why we may find ourselves in these positions, and how the colonial inheritances we face shape the possibilities for us to succeed without substantial changes to address these imbalances, and in particular, the gendered nature of these exclusions and how they may disproportionately impact women, and mothers more specifically. 

I see you. 

MORE LIFE mamas.