I Listen to a baby crying in my sleep. My mother handes it over to me. I sit for breastfeeding without opening my eyes and then I returned it. I know that when I am ready to get out of bed will be fruit and DenseAll the fat meat, with the meat of the plant, could wait for my mother to wait for her mother. Or I can choose to have a porridge. This is to do Failure (New Mom) is not available at home and all day hot porridge flask. Failure … The curriculum is gradually pronounced, and the word has to remove your language from surprise to a woman who goes through a remarkable test of life.
When I moved from Uganda to Switzerland in May last year, playing my new mother’s experience became my favorite entertainment. I went with my husband and two children, who is six and 12 years old, because I got my dream job in health advocacy. I was not ready for a parent’s terrible dream that came with him. When I lived in Europe before, including my 20s in the UK, I had never had to stay out of Uganda with my family. Without an extended family to help you take care of you, I have not prepared anything for the mother’s reality, and with the instability with which the Western world treats mothers.
When I reached the staircase without steping on the toys car, I was not happy. When I managed to arrange my six -year -old son to sit on an hour, the audience remained silent. In Uganda, any of the MetatoOr a joint taxi, maybe at least one definition of praise: “What do you have a disciplinary child!”
Even they may have offered to carry it so that I do not have to pay for two.
African maternity statements often reflect the life of labor and poverty, because in most cases the woman tries to raise more and more children together. But nothing is said about the systems that are ready to enable women to compete in different ellipts of African society.
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You never hear the story that it is normal for a mother to leave her five children at a neighbor’s house all day without notice when she goes to her hair or market. No one explains that growing, such as title Nakavir And the care of a new mother for a year after birth, the recognition and reward of the society of women’s careless care.
When we settled in Switzerland, it was terrifying for my husband and me to realize that we were not just parents. We had to become a teacher, to work with formal and informal education. There were no elderly cousins ​​to help homework or aunties who could distribute moral lessons folk tales. This system requires parents to become everything for their children, and still maintains a symbol of a sensible life and career.
Uganda’s primary school curriculum, which was inherited decades ago from British colonies and never corrected, teaches that the nuclear family is an ideal model. When I thought about raising children in the West, I used to photograph happy families in which more than two children were surrounded by beautiful things sitting at the dinner table. Not worried about malaria, well distance or smoke from wood and cooking stoves.
Now I see the women who have to raise their children in the Western world with fresh eyes in a nuclear family setting. How did they manage for so long? We know that even when men are taking more steps to help care for their families, most of the burden of physical and mental care is on women. Globally, women Do 76 % Unpaid care work. In 2019, Oxfam’s The analysis appeared This care work paid by women all over the world is worth 10.8tn (8.8tn).
Me and my husband had to admit that we were not just equipped to take care of our children. It felt unnatural. We were tired all the time and our house was breaking. We remembered our home manager, Irin, and pledged to further appreciate it, knowing what would cost us to help care for children in Switzerland.
Unlike Switzerland, where helping with care is the protection of the wealthy, the average Uganda family can afford to rent someone to help someone run a home. Even where a family cannot have money, they take care of each other’s children or to work on a busy day such as funerals and weddings, or when hosting guests, or collectively to work Take it and pay it.
My husband and kids have returned to Uganda, and I will try to stay between Uganda and Switzerland. Our children will be close to their grandmother and cousins.
And when we sit in our Uganda room, watching the perfect nuclear family on the TV, we will know the exhaustion that comes with telling children to keep their toys 20 times a day and 20 times a day. Is We will remember the dates that we did not go out, because without your people, parents have a special slavery.
