“Advocate like a mother”? Rethinking theory and practice
On International Women’s Day 2019, I wonder why we are still faced with common tropes of caring for children with special needs that are gendered and overwhelmingly focus on “mothering”. Are there, perhaps other ways to have a conversation about this that do justice to the complexity of trying to strike a balance between our roles in meeting the needs of our own children and fighting to uphold the rights of others, and the inevitable sacrifices and uneasy compromises that this entails?
Last week, I realised that I had only been to my daughter’s school twice during the whole month of February, because the rest of the time I had been away, mostly for work (but also a short half-term break).
Later, I stumbled this article that came up on my feed that critically discusses the difference between that act of parenting a child with special needs and the task of being an advocate:
“”To be an effective advocate, your goals must be bigger than your own child’s future. You must understand how a policy change might impact the whole community. If your goal is to only impact your child, not the broader community, you are not an advocate. You, my friend, are a parent. And that is good. Parenthood is noble. It is vital. It is the most important thing I do each day, but it is not advocacy”
It plunged me into the depths my own, ongoing deliberations of being a mother and working in the field of international child rights advocacy.
Advocacy and mothering : the seeds of empowerment or unrequited love?
As a mother, I often get asked how I manage or even justify working in a job that requires intense periods of travel. Sometimes, I sense that these are out of genuine interest, but I often get an uncomfortable sense of being judged for choosing to prioritise my professional over my personal commitments. Particularly as the parent of a child with a chronic illness, I grapple with the guilt that is unleashed by this questioning. But I also often resent the implicit gendering of caring responsibilities that I sense is thinly-veiled as curiosity, and find myself wondering wonder how frequently men who do similar work to me get asked how they achieve their work-life balance. I suspect that it’s not raised as often.
But by far the most difficult judgement and questions to faced are those asked by my own daughter. As she has grown up, when she sees me packing my suitcase week in and week out, she often asks me accusingly: “Mummy, why are you leaving me to go and take care of children in other places?”
My response, both to my daughter and others, is that I feel, deep down, that my work contributes in some small way to making this world a better place for a generation of children, most of them unlike her, who don’t have the same opportunities and privileges that she has. And that that is why I make the choice I make to work in this role, to travel to different countries at the cost of recuding the time that I spend at home: because I feel that my committments as a mother can only be truly fulfilled if I mantain an outward-looking view about what is important for other children in this world.
This underpinned by a perhaps radical vision of equality and social justice that entails that it’s not just enough to struggle for things to be healthy and happy in my home, in my family, in my neighbourhood, but that we should leverage what we have to seek to make positive changes for others.
And this an ongoing topic of discussion in our home, that we unpack and explore together. Whether we’re going to a local demonstration to protest the closing of our local children’s centres, or reading through books about women who changed the world: the themes of struggle, compassion, justice, solidarity and hope meander through many aspects of our day to day lives.
When my travels take me to a refugee camp or the Palais des Nations in Geneva, I ask my daughter if she is interested in knowing about where I am going and what I will do there, and if so (which, in her boundless curiosity, she usually is), we look at photos online, I ask her questions about what she thinks about the topics I’ll be discussing in a child-friendly way. In doing so, I request her to engage with and become part of my way of making sense of the world and these choices, not to usurp or manipulate her, but to share my conviction that (as my best friend put in her high-school yearbook quote): “No one is free while others are oppressed”.
All of this speaks to why the article above resonated with me, particularly these points:
“Advocacy requires a long view focused on the change you want to create. It requires understanding who to ask and how to ask it. It loves critical thinking and puzzle solving. At the legislative level, it takes understanding the background of why a policy or a law currently exists, and how you want it to look twenty, thirty, or forty years down the road. It anticipates arguments. It explains relevance.
You can be a parent who advocates. I consider myself one. But, parenting and advocating are distinct acts. Both are important. Both require patience and passion, but they are different. And most importantly, if I can do both, I bet you can, too.”
While I feel encouraged by these words, I do think that the article misses out on one fundamental aspect of being “a parent who advocates” entails: the costs. The energy that it takes to sustain the demands of when personal and professional collide. A hectic schedule, juggling jet-lag and fuzzy plane-brain with late nights spent finishing off reports to meet deadlines; then digging deep for energy to go running and cycling in the park to support my daughter’s physiotherapy, but also for my own mental and physical well-being. Keeping track of doctor’s appointments, and then sometimes doing Skypes from hospital rooms. A sense of guilt for putting an extensive burden on my partner when he too tries to balance work and parenting our daughter. Trying to be truly present to make up for so much absence.
But also missing out on important moments, like school plays, or friend’s birthday parties. Or just knowing that you’re cutting back on the everyday, mundane moments of pure, boundless joy unleashed by watching and listening as your child unravels into a fit of giggles, or stares wide-eyed in wonder at learning something new that pushes the boundaries of her knowledge and comprehension. I find it easier to reconcile myself with exhaustion than with missing the micro-moments of sublime love scattered across each day.
If I was making t-shirt slogans…
For all that the important discussions generated first by the t-shirt and then through unpacking of the slogan, I think I differ from the author of the article above in one significant way: even though I’m a mother who advocates, I’d never wear a t-shirt with that slogan. Instead of directly dissecting the reasons why, I thought it’d be better to suggest three ways that I’d re-work the slogan to make it capture the things that it currently doesn’t quite grasp about my aspirations for how to move forward the discussion on parenting and advocacy.
1) “Advocate like family” : there is no need to glorify mothers over fathers, or even parents over other carers. It’s true that, in most social and economic systems, the burden of childcare is borne by women, by mothers, however when we talk about fighting for one’s child and one’s beliefs, instead of just being descriptive and bound by the status quo, why don’t we dare to be prescriptive and look towards the important roles of father, grandparents, and other carers do play and deserve recognition for?
2) “Advocate like a phoenix” : it’s important to capture the tendency of advocacy work to be all-consuming, and to warn ourselves of the real danger of burn-out. Self-care and nurturing are crucial to being able to sustain acts of parenting and acts of advocacy, but doing both side-by-side may leave little room to consider our own wellness. What we get to the point of flaming, due to anger or frustration at not having achieved our goal, or out of elation because we have finally achieved the breakthrough that we’ve been working for, let’s remember that we must allow ourselves to settle and rest, to that we allow the best conditions to perpetually renew the fires inside and rise again.
3) “Advocate in solidarity” : none of our work, as parents or activists, will ever be successful in isolation. Friends, neighbours, wider communities around us are important parts of how we cope with adversity and relationships where we create and construct common visions for eachother’s well-being. Caring and compassion are essential in thinking beyond our own individual struggles or personal priorities, in order to build a wider foundation that enables others to find strength to deal with their own struggles in parenting, relationships or work, and to open spaces where we can bond with eachother to consolidate efforts and take on the more structural injustices that impact on our collective well-being.
Post-script
Next week, my daughter turns five! And I’ll spend the last week of her four-year old self several hundred kilometers away from her, as an “important” workshop… I’ll be working on how to meaningfully include the voices of children deprived of liberty into international research and advocacy. So, while I’m being an advocate for other kids, who are far more vulnerable than my daughter, I’ll miss her last days as a four-year old. I’ll never get those days back. I still wonder if I’m making the right choice…
But, at the same time, I feel immensely privileged to look back at the first five years of her life and think about how parenting her has made me a better person.
I am seriously astonished at how fast that time, a whole half-decade, has flown by. But I am even more amazed at how much this incredible little human has taught me as I’ve witnessed her strength and her passion for life, but also as I’ve felt the enormous burden of responsibility at having to be accountable to her for the choices that I make about my life, our family life, our priorities, our principles. She has taught me in a profoundly experiential and visceral way that no work of philosophy or fiction has ever come close to.
And my amazement continues to grow as she takes me back on journeys through my own childhood, forced me to remember what it was like to believe in magic and fantasy, and how those feelings become transposed through adult tropes onto hopes and dreams, perhaps more tangible and earthly, but sometimes no less lofty, about the future of our world.
Most recently, that journey has been back into the magical world of Star Wars, and we’re planning a Star Wars birthday party. We even have a ‘real’ stormtrooper who will attend!! (Who is more excited: me or her?). While planning the party, she did agree to an idea that I threw out that it would be good to make use of her party to fundraise for a cause that she thinks is important, in place of receiving presents. After looking at different charities, she an international non-governmental organisation whose work I respect. She chose them because, in her words:
“I want to give money to children, mummies and daddies in different countries who are poor and sick. It is important to help them because I want them to get better and play and be happy.”
So I guess this is where it comes full circle: allowing advocacy to flow into parenting and parenting to flow into advocacy. It’s not easy, but I am confident it is right way of being for us at this moment in time. And that will change, based on how my daughter changes as she grows up. But, for this particular moment in time, I’m so proud to celebrate her being so full of life and so full of motivation to spread peace and justice across the galaxy.
