Your liberation is about so much more than you.
While you're getting free, your children are too.
Your children are internalising everything you’re doing to liberate yourself.
While you get free, they get free.
Your recovery from colonial patriarchy is about so much more than just you, and finding your role in revolution.
Your recovery breaks the cycle.
It saves your children from a lifetime of unlearning.
Like most of us, I was raised by a deeply colonised mother.
Like most of us, I’ve spent my entire life repairing the wounds in my psyche that her colonised mothering gave me, and unlearning the self-concept I inherited from watching her.
I know that my mum loves me very, very much.
I know none of this injury is her fault, she never got free — she couldn’t have done anything differently.
Being raised by a colonised mother meant that I learned very early that my body was for consumption, exploitation, and performance.
I watched my mum diligently policing her body. I watched her shrink and starve and silence herself.
I watched her fade away to a husk of who she could have been and I learned loud and clear this is what love looks like.
So of course, I shrank, starved, and silenced myself.
By the time I learned that shrinking, starving, silencing, and policing wasn’t the only way I could be, it was too late. It was all I knew how to do.
I watched her live into precisely the role colonial patriarchy needed her to.
I saw her hate herself, shame herself, berate herself for her lack of purity and perfection.
Hate, shame, and supremacist “perfectionism” were my constant companions for years.
She taught me how to bias towards whiteness. I learned that my worth was decided by how much proximity I could get to power, as whiteness defines it.
I learned to orient myself towards colonial accolades and the milestones of capitalism…
…and to suppress anything and everything in myself that made me deficient, deviant, wrong, broken.
I will be forever untangling from this.
The thing is, this worldview I grew up with, it never came from anything she said to me directly.
She never needed to outright say it.
I saw her living into it and I mimicked her perfectly. This is what children do.
Her worldview and relationship to her own humanity was the air that I breathed and by the time I knew different — it was too late.
I was already choking.
I know that I deserved so much better than this. I know that she did too. Oh my god I grieve the woman I know my mum really is. I hope she gets to really meet herself one day.
I know that all children deserve so much better than this.
I know too that all parents deserve so much better than this.
It’s time we break the cycle of colonised mothers raising colonised children.
May we stop condemning our kids to a lifetime of unlearning if they ever want to get a glimpse of their own humanity.
May we show them how to live into it really fucking early on, because we’re living into it so lovingly and deeply ourselves.
I am constantly inspired by the mothers and parents I get to gather with inside REWILDING.
Every time I’m reading through an application that mentions the person’s children, I literally dance with glee.
(This is not a joke, I genuinely squeal and do a little wiggle)
Because these mothers know their children are internalising EVERYTHING they’re doing, and they’re committed to making sure their kids are learning how to be free.
We are breaking fucking harmful + oppressive cycles here people.
We are interrupting conditioning that’s subjugated GENERATIONS of women and femmes before us.
We’re radicalising ourselves so we can raise radical kids.
We’re getting free so that every one of our descendants may be free too.
Right now there are six spots left to join us inside REWILDING.
If you’re a mother, or you’d like to be one at some point down the line, or you’re a carer of children of any kind — I implore you to come and do this work with us.
Because your recovery from colonial patriarchy is about so much more than you…
…your worldview is the air your kids are breathing.
Free yourself to free them.
Click the botton below to apply.
