SOCIETY TALK: When ‘sponsors’ resist defrauding
A Ben 10 caught cheating by mzungu granny was kicked out of her car
1mon agoNABILA HATIMYLifestyle
All over social media, people keep posting about breaking the cycle. This is in reference to how we raise our children according to how we were raised and how our grandparents raised our parents and how their parents raised our grandparents, all the way back to the beginning of the wheel.
There is an obsession with criticising how our parents did things because that is not how we want to do them, instead of simply focusing on the way we want to raise our children.
Last week, I wrote about Mother’s Day and mentioned how I did not grow up celebrating the day or telling my mother I loved her. I am very close to my mother. Even though I live a continent away, I talk to her multiple times a day, more than anyone else. I would be the first to know if something was wrong with her, before any of my siblings who live very near her.
Still, I don’t say, “I love you.” That is just how our relationship is. But does she know I love her? Absolutely! Will I ever say it? Probably not, maybe via text. Still, I don’t have to criticise her way of raising me or be intentional and loud about breaking the cycle so that I can tell my son I love him. I tell my son I love him multiple times a day simply because I want to.
My husband and I raise our children the way we believe is best for them, us and in the environment we are in. Never have we ever referred to our childhood and said, “We don't want to raise our kids like that!” The only frame of reference we need is our capabilities and our children’s needs for us to plan on how to raise our kids.
Just this weekend, I watched as my husband struggled to teach our son some things. A while later, when he was calm, he held our son and spoke to him gently, praising him and telling him all about his potential.
As they hugged, I was in the background, mouthing, “Say I love you!” I mean the moment called for it, and I believed our son would benefit from hearing such words. Even though my husband said it in his own way, I could feel at that moment he was breaking a cycle of men telling other men they loved them in his family. Maybe instead of breaking the cycle, he was starting a new one. Now our son will grow up with a childhood very different from ours.
Breaking the cycle doesn't have to be intentional or borne from contempt. It can simply come from our wish to do better.
