Abbie: Hello and welcome to the CosmoParenting Podcast brought to you by the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution. In this space, we invite you to see yourself as someone who is curious about and actively participating in creating your own meaning around parenting.
This is our ‘Validate’ episode, where in the second episode of each month we hear a parenting story, with the hope that sharing the first hand experiences of others who are parenting can make you feel seen and validated in your own experiences. Let’s begin.
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Abbie: Today, I am joined by Aline. Hi, Aline.
Aline: Hi, Abbie.
Abbie: Thank you so much for being a part of this. As you know, this month is our theme around structures, as in what kind of structures are we putting in place in our family life and how do they shape us? So with that in mind, please share your story with us.
Aline: Thank you so much. It's a great honor for me to be part of this conversation. Structuring my life as a mother of the six-year-old, as I would say, in most cases, has been a somersault of experiences and have really made me reflect on what it means to have a structure, but not to have one.
I think family is a structure itself. My son is six. He was born on the 2nd of June, 2018. The time he was born was the last year of my scholarship, my PhD. We didn't plan that he's going to come exactly at the time he came, but he came. And the structure had to change.
I'm talking about the structure in a literal sense, in a sense that at the time I was single, very busy life. My partner was also busy, but we were living in different countries, different continents most times.
When I got pregnant, it was very clear that a lot is about changing my life. And so I decided to take things one thing at a time. And this really introduced a new paradigm to me as far as permanence or impermanence for us in restructuring our lives around circumstances and incidences that shape us in a very positive, but at the same time, challenging manner.
The coming of this child meant I settled somewhere. I decided to settle back in Europe, in Germany, where I was doing my PhD. I decided to take some career break and just take time to understand what it would mean for me to be a mother.
About a year later, I started experiencing losses. So I lost my sister first. And then I lost, not in terms of loss in the same level, because he didn't die, but our relationship died. I lost my partner as well, in that sense, who is also the father to my son.
And so while I was still in the middle of trying to restructure my life, in the middle of all this COVID-19. It was now me having to manage a dying sister at the hospital, not able to give her the medical attention she needed because of the effect of COVID, not being able to travel or to see anybody because of, again, COVID restrictions.
It was just me and him facing life together. And I had to just restructure myself. But then I'm a social agent. I like people. I like to live around people. Everywhere I live, I tend to cook a lot, leave just food in the house.
So this structure was very difficult. And being a mother meant that at some point I had to learn quite a lot. I had to learn how to manage my time. I had to learn how to put a structure around this child. I had to understand that children are about routines and their education, early childhood development heavily depends on those routines you set for them.
I have to pick which of the understanding of being- in the traditional sense- a mother would entail for me and which of the tailoring that would adjust to my own situation. And I remember every time I would look at him and then I would tell him, papa, now it's just the two of us, you know.
He would give me all sort of names from the Paw Patrol characters. If he changes to Ninjago, I would get a new name, any new cartoons he gets. And I tend to really feel like this is the person that I, the company that I need everywhere I go. To an extent that at some point it felt if I don't travel with him, something is missing in me. I couldn't let go because- not that I was the perfect mother near him- but because I centered, and structured my life around him. He became the third suitcase of my trips.
It's interesting because, and I've always been a professional career woman. I am privileged- and have always been very grateful for those privileges- to have a career where I can take my son with me everywhere I go. And that has been easy for me to say, he's not disturbing. If I take him, I pack his Legos and his things, he will be on the side. He will do his things. I'll do my things. When I finish, he'll be like, mommy, that was great.
Abbie: That's so sweet.
Aline: And this is how all my career path until last year, we've been buddies. But this means over time, I started to realize that as much as he is with me, he understands I love him. I have people, I have sisters. My sister decided to drop the university she wanted to drop to come and live with me in Nigeria to support her nephew because I separated from my partner and she was meant to go to university in Europe, but she decided she would come to the university in Nigeria. She was with me. She gave up her entire different life to be a mother with me, to take me and help through this journey.
She's my last born sister. So she's like a daughter to me. She'll go down literally with a very subtle voice and say, Mama Aline, we will be so fine. Don't worry.
Abbie: Such a wonderful story. And I am so thankful for this language you're introducing into this space that we haven't used yet, which is we're talking about structures and you said restructuring. And that feels so important because a larger theme of CosmoParenting, of this podcast, is parenting as improvisation.
So for as much as you can try to create structure, you also have to be flexible and adaptable. That's another one of our themes. And so it feels really important to think about how can you create structure for your child, but also acknowledging the ways that your child has helped create structure in your life. And I think that's really beautiful.
Aline: I think as parents, first thing we have to acknowledge is that bringing a child on earth does not give you ownership of that child. It has taken me time to realize that because I had this son who could not accelerate his reading, his writing in school, could not follow the lessons and the pace that other children are following because every trip I'll carry him with me, he would miss out on those times. He could not establish great relationships with his friends and so on because I will move with him everywhere I go. He could not accelerate in his learning process
But it taught me humbly a lesson that you have to be able to understand that your responsibility has been to bring him here and to provide guidance and pathway through which he would walk and become a responsible citizen or human being, a compassionate one. But also in structuring his environment and restructuring your life to, therefore, adapt to his environment.
And the second thing is about understanding your limit as a parent and put that structure around them so that they can start to relate to, you know, normal common ways of societal activities that also gives them a chance and an opportunity. Because they go through a lot of change processes, to also stand these changes and structure themselves around it. And allow them to start grasping and taking those easy responsibility and understanding the sense of order they want to put around their lives is very useful and important.
Abbie: Thank you so much for sharing your story, Aline.
Aline: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to pause, reflect, and restructure.
Abbie: And to everyone listening, thank you for joining us too. Don't forget to check out www.cosmoactivities.com for our other resources in this series. And be sure to comment on this podcast episode on the CosmoParenting Substack. We're so grateful to be on this journey with you, and we'll see you next week to explore some parenting best practices.
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