When Parenting Choices Make You Feel Like a Stranger in Your Own Family
Marilia Diniz is not a new name in this world of interculturality. But if you are new here, she is a psychologist and one of the specialists whose thinking shaped Parenting Unpacked.
On Thursday she sent me a message while she was finishing the book and I just need to share it with you.
She wrote:
"I am finally finishing the book. I did not read it over the summer because I did not take it to Brazil, and then I was reading other books and wanted to finish those first. But I read this passage and just wanted to contribute that this applies to any motherhood that deviates a little from the family standard. I went through this when Nicole was little and we were still living in Brazil. I practised attachment parenting, we did not give sugar or screens, and our families nearly lost their minds. Reading this passage I realised that I had already started to feel like a stranger within my own family, even though I was living right next to them. I had to listen to a lot of nonsense, and they did everything they could to break my rules when I was not looking. Like giving her a brigadeiro when I was not around and then finding it hilarious. Or putting on Galinha Pintadinha when I had asked them to spend half an hour with her without screens. Anyway, I just wanted to bring this other side of things, that this is about motherhood itself, not so much about migration. And nowadays everyone praises the girls' upbringing and intelligence and says it is because they are growing up here in Germany. But they do not think that this education started early with things the family wanted to sabotage."
The feeling of being a stranger in a place that is supposed to be home is not only about geography. It can happen in your own living room, in your childhood home, around people who have known you your entire life. It can happen when you make a parenting choice that the people around you do not understand or agree with, and they let you know it in the way families do, not dramatically but persistently. A brigadeiro here, a Galinha Pintadinha there, a look across the table that says we think you are making this harder than it needs to be.
This is Marilia Diniz!
And eventually you start wondering why something as simple as deciding how to raise your own child has made you feel like an outsider in your own family. That is a form of loss of felt competence in a room where you should feel most competent.
How many mothers carried a parenting decision that nobody supported at the time, held the line when it was hard while everyone else thought they were being difficult, and then watched the village that questioned every choice celebrate the harvest?
Marilia said it truthfully. And the brigadeiro thing. Honestly. Families.
Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever made a parenting choice that made you feel like a stranger in a room full of people who have known you your whole life? I would love to hear about it in the comments because I think Marialia just opened a conversation that deserves to keep going.
And if you want to read the passage that started all of this, it lives in Parenting Unpacked where the first forty pages are free. 💛
Jessica Gabrielzyk
