I love being a mama. Being a mama woke me all the way the EFF up to my power as a woman in so many surprising ways.⁠
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I didn’t expect this awakening. I didn’t expect this level of fierceness and empowerment to be born within me as I crossed the threshold into motherhood 3.5 years ago. I didn’t expect it because I’ve seen both women and motherhood dismissed and devalued. ⁠
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For me, my inner work and mothering are deeply intertwined.⁠
Doing my inner work supports me in being my most honest, compassionate, and free self with my son. ⁠
It allows me to release patterns, conditioning, learned ways of being that I don’t want to perpetuate. It allows me to honor that within my personal and our collective lineage I want to bring forward and continue.⁠
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I also know this:⁠
My son is learning so much about what to expect from women. ⁠
What equity looks like or doesn’t. ⁠
What harmonious partnership looks like or doesn’t. The creative capacity of women. What self respect in a woman looks like. What self love can look like— he’s learning so much about women from me and how I move through our home and community as one. ⁠
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I am not trying to be perfect. I don’t know what that is anyway. ⁠
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Context matters, and my context is that I am partnered with my son’s father.⁠
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I am deliberate. My husband and I are both deliberate in what we model to our son. In who cooks. In who cleans. In who tends to him. In whose work is prioritized and when. We both know how powerful our model is— even in this wild and often misguided/misogynistic world.⁠
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We ain’t tryna to raise a man who thinks that women have a place and he gets to define or coerce her into it. ⁠
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This is intimate work and also requires potent awareness of how our daily actions affirm or disrupt the status quo + narrative about what being a woman, mothering/parenting – is supposed to look like.⁠
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If I am always the sacrifice, what will my son think equitable accountability and responsibility look like in partnership? or even beyond that?⁠
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How will he trust he can become his fullest self and the range of his humanity, if I am not boldly living into my own wholeness and activating mine?⁠